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Why? Shouldn’t we encourage more Holocaust commemoration and education programs? Doesn’t the creation of a day set aside by the world for remembering the slaughter of 6 million Jews give this event the recognition it deserves, as well as making it less likely that the horror of the Shoah will be repeated?
As it turns out, the resounding answer is an emphatic “no.”
Empty words …
The leaders of the same international community that reacted with indifference, if not support, for the mass murder and atrocities committed against Jews during the border infiltration and ensuing murderous assault on southern Israel by Hamas terrorists and other Palestinians on Oct. 7, 2023, will dutifully line up on Jan. 27 to take part in these commemorations. They will say how horrible the Holocaust was. Some of them will use the familiar refrain of “never again.” In doing so, they will count themselves as the sort of responsible, compassionate and high-minded people who deserve not only to control powerful international institutions like the United Nations and its manifold agencies but also to tell the rest of us how to think and live.
This is just another example of how much of the world likes dead Jews but is utterly intolerant of live ones, who are prepared to fight for their rights and their existence.
As proof of that, in many of these ceremonies, there will be not a word said about the Nazis of our own day who wish to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s goal of the genocide of the Jews. And by that, I don’t mean the hateful though small, isolated and politically powerless neo-Nazis that dwell in the fever swamps of the far right in Western societies.
Instead, I’m referring to Hamas and other Islamist terror groups that have as their goal the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet and the genocide of the more than 7 million Jews who live there. Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7 were part of an attempt to realize that genocidal goal.
But rather than standing alone, they are reinforced by a powerful, widely supported international anti-Zionist movement. That movement is deeply integrated into the same institutions, like the United Nations, that use Jan. 27—the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945—to conduct ceremonies about the Holocaust that make a mockery of the memory of the victims and the fight against antisemitism.
This is the same international movement that has spent the last 15 months drumming up hatred for Jews and Israel. More than that, they have, with the assistance of a small minority of Jews who are estranged from any sense of Jewish peoplehood or their ancestral faith, attempted to flip the script of the Holocaust to falsely portray Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas as a “genocide” of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Indoctrinated in the false leftist doctrines of critical race theory and intersectionality, they have accused Israel of being a “settler-colonialist” and “apartheid” state. In their view, it logically follows that all Jews and Israelis are guilty of being “white” oppressors who must be stripped of power. Against them, we are told by these supposedly enlightened intellectuals that every form of “resistance,” such as the barbaric orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that took place on the morning of Oct. 7, is not only justifiable but laudable.
Oct. 7 changed everything
Prior to the existential war for Israel’s existence that began on that Black Shabbat, it might have been possible to make a coherent argument in favor of cooperating with and using the Jan. 27 ceremonies as a way to promote awareness of global antisemitism. But these commemorations are not assisting in educating the world about where tolerance of Jew-hatred leads. To the contrary, it must now be acknowledged that their primary purpose is to provide cover to those who wish to make a distinction between the mass slaughter of Jews in the last century and those who are attempting it in the present one.
In the eight decades since the Holocaust, the growing trend toward the universalization of the Holocaust has long since gotten out of hand. Scholars, self-styled “human rights” organizations and others eager to make use of the historical suffering of the Jewish people for their own purposes have seized on the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews as an all-purpose metaphor for what they deemed to be bad behavior.
Those who promote such universalization claim to do so out of good motives. They desire to use the Holocaust as an example of how to combat hatred so as not to isolate it as a distinct event in history that can’t be applied as a lesson to other conflicts. In doing so, they deliberately misunderstand the nature of antisemitism. It is not garden-variety bigotry or unpleasantness directed at people who worship differently but hatred, coupled with a political program, employed to empower those who despise Jews. Other examples of real genocide exist, such as the mass killings in Cambodia in the 1970s by the Communists or the slaughter of the Tutsi tribe by Rwanda’s Hutus—and even one now being perpetuated against Uyghur Muslims in China—but these tend to fall by the wayside in contemporary discussions on the subject.
The Holocaust, however, is unique. It was the culmination of 2,000 years of antisemitism—a virus of hatred that unfortunately did not die out when the Allies entered the death camps, and then defeated the German Nazis and their collaborators. It lives on in groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and all those who echo their genocidal goals on American college campuses with chants like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.”
Contemporary antisemites don’t merely engage in slandering Jews and spreading lies about their actions and intentions, such as those uttered about Israel. They seek to delegitimize Jews in ways that are not dissimilar to those of the Nazis, who preached about a powerful Jewish cabal that engaged in conspiracies to undermine and harm non-Jews.
That is why Israel is the object of such hatred and a worldwide movement that not only treats its supposed offenses as the worst on the planet but also as a uniquely evil entity. They also claim that Jews wrongly “weaponize” antisemitism and even the Holocaust to attract sympathy and whitewash their crimes. That is exactly the sort of tactic that Nazi ideologues used to justify their actions.
After Oct. 7, the attempt to make a distinction between the current war on Israel and the Jews, and what happened during the Holocaust is not only outdated but intellectually and morally bankrupt.
Doing more harm than good
Suffice it to say that any commemoration of the Shoah, whenever it is held, must take into account the fact that Israel is currently fighting an existential war to prevent another Holocaust. Any event that purports to commemorate the slain 6 million men, women and children, and the fight against the Nazis, without doing so is a fraud.
Like other forms of Holocaust education that universalize the memory of Nazi Germany’s effort to wipe out the Jews, International Holocaust Remembrance Day may now be doing more harm than good.
The United Nations is an institution that has been a cesspool of antisemitism for decades. But we are now at the point when its agencies like UNRWA have not only helped perpetuate the war against Israel but allowed its employees to take part in the Oct. 7 atrocities and its facilities to be used to imprison Israeli hostages.
You cannot be against the Nazis and also morally neutral about Hamas, and the war against Israel and the Jews. Anyone who tries to play that game should be exposed as an ally of those who seek Jewish genocide or one of their useful idiots. There should be zero tolerance for Holocaust commemorations that do not acknowledge that a genocidal war continues in our own day and that those who falsely accuse Israel of genocide to justify that war have no place at such ceremonies.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
