A few years ago, at the height of a war in Gaza, the American writer Cynthia Ozick asked Europe to eliminate the day of remembrance for the Holocaust. It had become a hypocritical event for anti-Jewish passions. She was right. This year, the anniversary of the Night of the Crystals, commemorating the Nazi pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, became a stage to demonize Israel.

In Sweden, the day of remembrance was organized without inviting the victims: the Jews. Carrine Sjöberg, head of a local Jewish community, was shocked to learn that the Jews were not invited. The main organizer, Jan Hägglund of the Socialist Party Arbetarpartiet, said that “over the years there have been Palestinian flags and banners where the Israeli flag was identified with a swastika. The Jewish community was not invited because we thought that could be uncomfortable”. Very honest of him.

In Amsterdam, the day of the anniversary of  Kristallnacht, organized by the leftist platform “Stop Racism” that called for these commemorations since 1992, invited the Israeli Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, who said in a false and Orwellian speech: “I am honored to speak on behalf of the victims of Kristallnacht, and on behalf of all victims of racism and oppression. During Kristallnacht, thousands of businesses and hundreds of synagogues were ruined and burned down by German brown shirts. Perhaps the majority of Germans did not approve, but they kept quiet." 

“When in Israel two churches and tens of mosques are burned; and hundreds of Israeli supporters of Beitar shout ‘death to the Arabs’ after each soccer match; when a family is burned to death; when a 15-year-old boy is burned to death, the majority keeps quiet, although they are perhaps shocked”.

Zoabi slandered the Jewish people and the memory of the Shoah in a country where ordinary Dutch collaborated with the Nazi deportation. And no protest came from the current Dutch authorities.

But the most serious case took place in Munich, where the municipality granted a hall to celebrate the Kristallnacht along with the boycott of Israel. The Social Democrat mayor, Dieter Reiter, granted the conference hall Gasteig to the boycott, while Ilse Aigner, minister Economy of Bavaria, was flying to Tehran to open an office for trade interchange with the Iranian ayatollahs. Charlotte Knobloch, survivor of the Holocaust and head of the Jewish community, said: “It’s the Nazi motto upgraded to ‘do not buy from the Jewish state’”.

A few years ago, the city of Frankfurt invited Alfred Grosser for the Kristallnacht event, where he compared Israel to Nazism.

It is an ideology well expressed by the best selling writer Luis Sepúlveda: “Yesterday and today we hated the Nazis for what they did to the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, dissidents. Today, tomorrow, will Jews be hated for what Ariel Sharon did to the Palestinians? Auschwitz and Mauthausen, Sabra, Shatila and Gaza, Nazism and Zionism join hands”.

It is the Nazification of the Jewish state, the victims who become executioners, the Palestinians become the “new Jews” and the Israelis who lose all moral and political legitimacy. It is a demonizing vision culminating in the equation between Hitler and Israel, in the transformation of the Hebrew state into an “imperialist base” and the Arab cause surrealistically  identified with freedom, justice and progress.

It’s the new European evil and hypocrisy of using the memory of the dead Jews as an excuse and a travesty to attack the living Jews and to destroy the remnants of the Holocaust: the State of Israel. It is the return of the 1939’s fog.