Monday, November 4, 2013

Holocaust Remebrance as a Vehicle for Zionhass

I've been saying for years that rather that inoculating the world against a repetition of the Shoah, Holocaust remembrance has the potential to be used against today's living Jews. How so? By establishing a false dichotomy between those dead European Jews--who are seen as being manifestly good--and "Zionists," Jews in Israel and the diaspora who support a Jewish Israel--who are seen as being very bad indeed; indeed, who are said to be the worst people in the whole world. Guess what? I was right:
Anti-Semitism has now become mainstream not just in France, as Guy Millière wrote on the Gatestone website last week, but all over Western Europe. One shocking aspect of the new wave of anti-Semitism is that the remembrance of the Holocaust is being abused to propagate anti-Semitism and feelings of hatred against Israel -- the state that the Jewish people established in order to protect themselves against future holocausts. 
A September 2013 article on the Gatestone website explained how history lessons and so-called remembrance education about the Holocaust in Belgian schools are being used to infuse school children with hatred against Israel. The historical existence of the Holocaust and the Nazi extermination camps is not denied, as some anti-Semites try to do, but the reality of the Holocaust and the extermination of the Jews is trivialized -- especially by equating the current treatment of the Palestinians by Israel with the Nazis' treatment of the Jews...
I'm not saying that we should do away with Holocaust education. I'm only saying that we should not--we must not--depend on it to be the cure-all for the sort of Jew-hate that gave rise to the Holocaust.

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