Shocking Video Shows 'Antifa' Militants Bursting Into Belgian Classroom And Branding Nuclear Expert A 'Fascist Collaborator' For Working With Defence Giant Thales

A respected Belgian professor was left dripping in cream and fearing for his life after a gang of masked militants stormed his lecture theatre and pelted him with pies in a cowardly classroom ambush.

The shocking footage, filmed by the attackers themselves, shows a group of young people wearing Santa hats and fake beards bursting into Professor Damien Ernst's energy markets class at the University of Liège. They scream "facho" and "collabo Thales" before hurling tart after tart at the 50-year-old academic as stunned students look on.

Ernst, one of Belgium's best-known energy experts and a prominent defender of nuclear power, can be seen flinching as the pies explode across his face, glasses and checked shirt. Cream splatters the desks, the floor and the projector screen. At one point he raises his arms in a futile attempt to shield himself.

"I first thought it was a student prank," the professor later said. "But when they came at me and threw those pies they did it with real violence. It was a physical assault. I thought I was going to be killed."

The raid lasted barely 30 seconds. The attackers then fled, leaving Ernst to abort his first lecture of the academic year in front of around 15 engineering students.

The group calling itself the "True (Popular) Ethics Committee of ULiège" claimed the stunt and boasted they had "taken a lot of pleasure" in it. Their video was quickly shared by the local anti-militarist collective FLAM and Liège's antifascist front.

Their grievance? Ernst leads university research in partnership with French defence contractor Thales on artificial intelligence systems designed to improve the accuracy of next-generation munitions. Thales supplies equipment to the Belgian armed forces. The militants accuse the professor of "collusion with the arms industry" and even of being an "auxiliary of genocide."

University rector Anne-Sophie Nyssen condemned the attack in unusually strong terms, calling it "the exact opposite of the pluralism and mutual respect that ULiège is committed to embodying." She said such an act "expresses no idea and reduces reflection to primitive instincts." Police are investigating.

This was no harmless student jape in the tradition of Belgium's late pie-thrower Noël Godin. Ernst has previously required police protection after earlier protests over the same defence collaboration. He now describes Thursday's raid as "highly intrusive" because it targeted him inside a classroom rather than at a public event.

Belgian politicians on the centre-right have been scathing. Defence minister Theo Francken pointed out that similar "small" acts of left-wing intimidation have historically escalated, recalling the pieing of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn shortly before his murder. A petition supporting Ernst and academic freedom is already circulating.

The episode lays bare a growing pattern: Europe's universities, once citadels of open inquiry, now host activists who treat defence research as a moral crime and its practitioners as legitimate targets for humiliation. Cream pies today. What tomorrow?

Ernst, still visibly shaken, has made clear he will not be silenced. Whether the university and Belgian authorities treat this as the serious intimidation it was remains to be seen.