Hate at Yad Vashem

After New Year’s Eve, when extreme Charedi Jews took to the streets dressed as concentration camp inmates, we thought it couldn’t get worse. In fact we even blogged about it under the title “The misappropriation of the Holocaust is complete“. Sadly this proved too optimistic a view.

On Monday this week, hateful and racist graffiti appeared on the walls of Yad Vashem. The slogans, written in Hebrew, included, “Hitler, thank you for the Holocaust,” “If Hitler did not exist, the Zionists would have invented him,” and “The war of the Zionist regime is not the war of the Jewish people”.

The desecration is being attributed to the fringe extremist right, who are opposed to the State of Israel. Considering, however, that the State of Israel was only founded after the Holocaust, it remains unclear to any logical person what that has to do with the destruction of European Jewry. Fine, you don’t support the State of Israel, you’re entitled to your point of view (although it begs the question, why do you live there?).

But why usurp a collective — and horrific — Jewish event for your ideology? What does the “Zionist” regime have to do with Yad Vashem, an institution dedicated to preserving the memory of the murdered. Presumably, these nutjobs want us to believe that Israel was only founded as a response to the Holocaust and that in a perverse way, Zionists are in fact grateful for the course of historical events.

The perpetrators of this crime are cut from the same cloth as those who donned concentration camp uniforms on New Year’s Eve or the Neturei Karta members who joined Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust-denying conference. They’re ideology is so warped, they hate Israel so deeply, that nothing is sacred, not even the memories of those who perished in the Holocaust. What makes this all the more disturbing, is that many of the people involved in these fringe groups are actually descended from Holocaust victims.

It truly boggles the mind.