Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Now I know how the Holocaust happened

Of course I don’t know how the Holocaust happened. No one will ever fully understand mass, mechanized murder, still less in the most cultured society in Europe.

But I have hints. I do have some knowledge.
I wish I didn’t.

For starters: Look at the Russian carnage in Ukraine. Russia bombs hospitals, destroys apartment buildings for no reason — total indifference to human life (including that of Russian soldiers). The pictures of the carnage makes one scream. Stop this! Stop the insanity! Stop the cruelty!

It doesn’t help. Nothing stops it. Every humanitarian impulse means nothing.

So it was during the Holocaust for those who paid attention. How did the Holocaust happen? Outrage could not stop it, just like the outrage over what is happening in Ukraine today stops nothing.

One cannot make a difference in Ukraine. This is a brutal, but very realistic, realization. People couldn’t make a difference during the Holocaust — the outrage stopped nothing (save for a bit, and only at the end of the war, with the War Refugee Board).

So in this sense I know how the Holocaust happened.

I know in another sense, too. It happened because the totally irrational hatred of Jews captured the rational mind of countless Germans and German collaborators. Jewish control. Jewish disease. Jewish subhumans.

Irrationality overcame the rational mind. I see it today. Who could miss it? This week alone, I read news clips and learn —

• in Australia, a student writes in a school newspaper that Israel should be annihilated, and the school? No action taken.

• in France, a Jew is murdered for being a Jew — again. When this happened to Dr. Halimi, tossed out of her window by a professed anti-Semite, no action was taken.

• in New York City, Jews are attacked on the streets. Here, action is taken by the police, but it doesn’t stop the attacks. They just keep coming.

• in Washington, a Proud Boy is convicted of, among other things, rushing “one of our national leaders” (Chuck Schumer). The convict rushed Schumer not just because he was a Democrat, but because he was a Jew. The convict regularly posted anti-Semitic statements.

• in California, a banner was hung over a highway overpass that said, “The Holocaust is an anti-white lie.”

This was condemned by the Davis campus and police. Good. But a similar incident also happened the week before. And anti-Semitic fliers were distributed three years before. In 2015, a Jewish fraternity was spray-painted with swastikas. There is a pattern here.

About any single one of these incidents, one could say: Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill. One incident a plague does not make. One could say: Society isn’t perfect. Don’t exaggerate.

But . . . it’s not a single incident. It’s all over. Please recall: The incidents above are only from this week. Anti-Semitism is popping up around the world, every week, such as Abbas’ “50 Holocausts.”

Morever, anti-Semitism has acquired the 21st-century version of Nazism’s glue. What stuck for Nazism was the vermin charge: Jews are subhuman. It’s irrational, it’s ridiculous, but it stuck.
Precisely that structural parallel has reemerged today. The “vermin” of then is the “anti-Zionism” of today. Anti-Zionism has become just as irrational, transcending ideology.

Israel’s errors are inflated to absurd proportions, while its worldwide contributions to humanity are treated precisely as the world-changing contributions of Germany’s Jewish scientists were treated. Einstein and the rest of them, including Jewish doctors, were kicked out.

Rendered invisible.

Israel provides dramatic medical cures and technological advances around the world. In the irrational anti-Zionist mind of today, they too are rendered invisible. Anti-Zionism sticks.

It’s the perverse heroism. Nazis regarded themselves as heroes for ridding the world of its vermin. Anti-Zionists regard themselves as heroes for working to rid the world of its chief injustice.

It’s irrational. Whatever Israel’s errors, they are not ideological. They are in response to threatened genocide.

Whatever Israel’s errors, do they match the millions of innocents murdered in the Congo? Do they match the oppression in Iran? Who, indeed, is the chief embodiment of injustice today? Don’t ask. Because it is the Jew in the form of the Zionist who again has become the object of irrational hatred. It sticks.

Bottom line: In part, I know how the Holocaust happened. I see similar would be precursors all around me.

There is this critical difference: It is not too late to counter the irrationality of reflexive anti-Zionism. Many are working hard trying to do so. The great majority of leaders in democracies still see straight. We are engaged in a battle we can win — yet, how depressing to be engaged in the battle once again.

Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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