In Danny Wind’s Let’s Kill All the Belgians: A Child’s Guide to Genocide, the author and illustrator warns that Belgians are out to take over the world, kill your puppies and force you to eat waffles three times a day. The only remedy, the book explains, is to behead the marauding Belgians, set them on fire or stab them with a sharpened crucifix. In the end, the US government needs to drop nuclear bombs on Belgium – before moving on to deal with the threat from Sweden.

Wind, who also writes for a number of comedy websites, drew his lurid cartoons with crayon. “If there’s any purpose to the book at all, it’s as a parody of a strain in American politics that tends to demonise certain groups (Muslims, Mexican immigrants) without actually knowing anything about them,” he explained in an email to Flanders Today. “I picked Belgium because it was about the most inoffensive country I could think of. I thought that would make the joke obvious, since who could actually hate the Belgians?”

Lulu, which prints and sells self-published books, pulled the book from its website after an apparently large number of complaints from Belgians. The company, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, did not respond to questions from Flanders Today. On the book’s page, however, one poster wrote: “Even if this is supposed to be funny, I can’t fathom what sick urge prompted you to commit such a book. Yes I’m Belgian, as you probably guessed by now, and damn proud of it. And you, sir, are a sick bastard.”

Wind says he is “quite surprised” by the attention the book has gotten “since I wrote it mostly for my friends, who I thought would enjoy it and get the joke. It had only sold 19 copies before the Belgian media picked it up. I’m quite sorry to have upset so many people.” The book has since been restored to Lulu.com, where it can be bought for €9.94.

www.lulu.com