The really scary part of White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s defense of President Trump’s omission of Jews from his statement on Holocaust remembrance is that no offense was intended. Trump’s otherwise powerful and appropriate statement was not anti-Semitism, not even Holocaust denial. It was worse: a harbinger of things to come. Not specifically from the Trump administration, but from the world at large. As the Holocaust recedes in time, so does its specificity.
Spicer said: “To suggest that remembering the Holocaust and acknowledging all of the people — Jewish, gypsies, priests, disabled, gays and lesbians — I mean it is pathetic that people are picking on a statement.”
Pathetic? Picking on?
Mr. Spicer, truth counts. Many types of people were murdered by the Nazis and every last victim deserves to be remembered. But in both dimension and idea, the Holocaust was about Jews. Elie Wiesel summed up: “Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.” A local Holocaust survivor, the late Fred Englard, summed up: “The Nazis killed others for doing. The Nazis killed the Jews for being.”
Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Preibus, defended the statement on the grounds that it is better to be “inclusive” than to single out the Jews. Inclusive? Fine, but not at the expense of the truth. Mention every Nazi victim, but not at the expense of the historical record, which is utterly clear.
The minute one robs the Holocaust of its intended and implemented specificity, all manner of historical lying become possible. The very same day that Trump officials were robbing the Holocaust of its meaning, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of Jerusalem Affairs, Adnan al-Husseini, was criticizing UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for saying: It is “completely clear that the Temple that the Romans destroyed in Jerusalem was a Jewish temple.”
The Palestinian minister responded: Guterres “violated all legal, diplomatic and humanitarian customs and overstepped his role as secretary general . . . and must issue an apology to the Palestinian people.”
In effect, Trump, his advisers and defenders said: The Nazis robbed the Jews of their lives. We shall rob them of their memory.
There is a lot of educating to do. A good place to begin: Lucy S. Dawidiwicz’s The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
