Antisemitic incidents are at a 10-year high, according to an annual report by the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization published ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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This should not take the place of our mourning over the fate of our loved ones who were deported, tortured, and killed in the Nazi genocide of the Jews during World War II. It does, however, warrant reiterating in their memory that to ensure we keep our "Never Again" promise, we must first and foremost fight antisemitism.
This, however, is the one thing that seems to have been forgotten over the decades. Indeed, violence against Jews comprised almost a third of last year's antisemitic incidents, with at least 10 per day on average. Among these incidents were hate-filled graffiti, the desecration of property, the aggressive removal of Star of David pendants and skull caps from Jews.
The online storm is also unprecedented. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the phrase "Hitler was right" was posted on social media 17,000 times in a single week in May alone, and vows to exterminate the Jews are daily fare. "Today's world needs Hitler," tweeted CNN freelance contributor Adeel Raja, for example, which many followers "liked" and "shared."
At anti-Israel demonstrations everywhere, epithets such as "damn Jews" were commonly chanted. Jewish institutions, restaurants, and stores were attacked. Nearly half of these incidents took place in Europe. The rest occurred in the US and elsewhere.
The phenomenon exists across the political spectrum, on both the Right and the Left, and in most of the Islamic world. Even worse, its conformist echo reverberates in the international media and in both governmental and non-governmental institutions. Politicians and performing artists do not hesitate to repeat slanderous accusations about the Jews and Israel or support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.
The UN Human Rights Commission set up an ad hoc permanent committee, with a $1 billion budget and 29 employees, devoted solely to "monitoring any suspected human-rights violations by Israel." Not by Syria, not by Iran, and not by China.
It is precisely this double standard that defines antisemitism. Yet the world simply looks on and nods.
While 4,500 missiles rained down on Israel from the Gaza Strip, for no good reason, during Operation Guardian of the Walls last May, the international community shouted about "human rights for the Palestinians" but not the right of Jews to defend themselves.
When such an attitude is exalted, stores are smashed in Los Angeles and New York, turning the ancient blood libel that Jews love to kill children into a contemporary one. The trope that Jews dominate the world is transformed into an accusation that Israel is guilty of "ethnic cleansing" and colonialism.
This is an evil narrative that distorts episodes such as the eviction of Arab squatters from a house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem. This is a narrative that journalists embrace, ignoring history and the urban-planning regulations applied equally in the Jewish state to both Jews and Arabs. It is a narrative that disregards the benevolence Israel's Supreme Court has shown toward Arabs.
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Today's antisemitism is cloaked in "anti-apartheid," "anti-racist," and "anti-colonialist" rhetoric. Anti-vaxxers suggest that they are suffering a Holocaust because Jews not only spread COVID-19 but have profited handsomely from the pandemic.
Moreover, antisemitism has even managed to attach itself to the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. According to the latter, Jews are "white supremacists." Ironically, it is the Jews who have become the object of Islamist attacks in American synagogues, where they had already been targeted by actual white supremacists. In other words, antisemitism is now universal.
All studies on the German cruelty that led to the genocide of the Jews highlight the crucial role played by incitement mythology. Henry Kopel's important book, "War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom," points to the way in which Jews were referred to by the masses as insects and beasts; exploitative capitalists; and traitorous, parasitic, inhuman communists, and dedicated to what Adolf Hitler claimed was the aim of "exterminating" Germans.
In a similar vein, Jews today are said to want to "exterminate the Palestinians."
The Germans called the Jews "perpetrators of atrocities" and a "deadly plague," as Iran currently defines Israel. Today, the Jews and Israel are accused of being "colonialists" and "racists."
There is no longer any shame associated with applying the same kind of language and imagery that set the stage for the Holocaust. Nor can any veil conceal Islamist incitement against Jews.
As Kopel explains in his book, you did not have to be an avid Nazi to participate in the massacres of innocent Jews, including children [38,000 killed in one year; 45,000 rounded up and sent to extermination camps]. You were simply "an ordinary German, without any special propensity for violence," and if you were a leader, you had a "medium to high intellectual level, free of pathologies."
Incitement was the vessel – the "flying carpet" – resulting in a massacre. And that is the case with every act of genocide and for each and every terrorist.
In his recently published book, "Mai più! ["Never Again!"], Italian historian and philosopher Giorgio Volli tells us that "Never Again" is the sole recurring theme in the many documents connected to International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Still, incitement toward the murder of Jews is allowed to continue today unrestrained. The Islamic Republic of Iran considers it a foremost task, enshrined in law, which it pursues through war and its ability to acquire a nuclear weapon. The terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah see it as a religious duty.
The Nuremberg trials of 1946-1949, and subsequently that of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, were overshadowed by the incredulity that European culture could have given birth to so much evil.
Volli describes this well. The interpretation of "absolute evil," together with what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil" – of hiding behind Hitler and his cohorts' "madness," "perversion" or "paranoia" and refusing to see that very large numbers of Mozart-loving Germans killed Jewish children – lull us into believing that it won't happen again. Yet it has already happened, albeit in more minor ways.
Volli notes that many of the documents establishing International Holocaust Remembrance Day are reductive. The German one, for example, doesn't include the word "Jews." That of the Council of Europe even calls the Holocaust "paradigmatic" among crimes against humanity.
Few dare to blame the Germans as a nation. Nearly everyone prefers to call the killers "Nazis," while the European Union speaks of a general attack on minority groups, racism, and xenophobia. Nobody remembers that it's antisemitism we're speaking about!
But the fundamental tendency of International Holocaust Remembrance Day toward general "humanitarianism" is clear. The advice to all those involved in the commemorations is to cite in their speeches all forms of discrimination, including Islamophobia, in their speeches and to use the lessons of the Holocaust to present a universalist message.
Certainly, as Kopel points out, between 1952 and 2001, there were 37 genocides in the world, from Cambodia to the Balkans and from the Uighurs to the Kurds. Of course, all human suffering is identical: Nothing differentiates a Jewish child killed by the Germans from an Armenian child killed by the Turks.
Yet denying the particularity of the Holocaust not only trivializes it; it risks reinforcing antisemitism. The extermination of the Jews, industrially planned at the Wannsee Conference 80 years ago, was masterminded, as former US President George H.W. Bush said, "by men who considered themselves intellectuals."
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, therefore, has plenty of good reasons to be committed to the war against antisemitism and the ongoing attempt to destroy the Jewish people. When the Holocaust is treated like a "universal" event, the Palestinians take the opportunity to invert victim and persecutor in their propaganda campaign, so as to make the Jews the new Nazis. It's what the late, great historian Robert Wistrich aptly called the "Nazification" of the Jews and Israel through accusations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and racism – the main leitmotif of contemporary antisemitism.
The return of murderous antisemitism after the Holocaust is a serious impediment to ensuring such acts never happen again. The Jan. 17 hostage crisis at the Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas – carried out by a well-known antisemite – was not immediately classified as an antisemitic act. Ditto for the case of Ilan Halimi, who was slowly killed in Paris in 2006, after being kidnapped by a gang who tortured him while reading the Quran. The French police refused to see the antisemitic character of the crime.
Such incidents remind us that commemorating evil does not exempt us from continuing to fight it. With our hearts filled today with the memory and suffering of our grandparents, aunts, and uncles, we nevertheless cannot abandon the battlefield if we truly mean it when we say, "Never Again."
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
