Jews are hated up to a point. Past this point, they are more than tolerated, they are venerated. To memorialize dead Jews – the more the better – your antisemite will go the extra mile. Satellites of the United Nations are populated with the conflicted type. Clashing instincts indeed are in job specs for the Human Rights Commission or the High Commissioner for Refugees.
This pro-Hamas type is exemplified in Navi Pillay. What do you know – when the time comes the High Commissioner for Refugees observes the Holocaust with appropriate solemnity. Pillay held a seminar on Holocaust victims. She eulogised a Prague boy named Petr Ginz who was crammed into a gas chamber. In the august forum of the Human Rights Commission, Pillay held up his photo. She bowed her head for the silent minute. Pillay is no Holocaust denier, she’s a Holocaust affirmer.
And that is one more reason for not burying capital in Holocaust centres and education. It creates jobs. And Jew-hate carries on in its time-honoured indomitable manner.
Is it virtue signalling? Or is there a deep psychosis at play? Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of a wartime friend who had no problem with Nazi death camps yet he displayed on his sideboard a photo of a Jewish friend shot by the Gestapo.
Antisemitism, Sartre wrote in his 1944 classic, “Anti-Semite and Jew” is not a bad opinion of Jews. It’s a warped personality. The anti-Semite sees nothing amiss in combining hatred for the living Jew with reverence for the dead. Today we’d qualify it by...‘unless the dead Jews were killed by Palestinian Arabs. Then reverence evaporates like mist when the sun comes up. More than evaporates. A blatant smugness takes over. As if to say, ‘The Israelis got their just desserts.’ The media catchphrases, ‘escalation’ and ‘cycle of violence’ are psychosis-laden: ‘They got what was coming to them.’
For all that, Jews must confront their own genie. The Holocaust has taken an all-consuming hold on the Jewish world. There are times when truth is unpalatable. The Holocaust is sometimes milked, not because it may be hard to let go but because it may be costly to let go.
Norman Finklestein leaves a bad taste in the mouth, yet his books on the “Holocaust Industry” are not without grains of truth. There is no denying that the Holocaust is big business. There is hardly a capital city without a Holocaust Centre. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in this regard has gone overboard. The monolith which had the great survivor’s blessing but not his involvement, is a multinational business. The Forward once ranked Rabbi Marvin Hier, the original head of the Centre, as Jewry’s highest paid ‘non-profit’ executive. He and family members got six-figure salaries for making sure that the world would never forget the Holocaust.
For all we know Holocaust centres may do some good. Out of control antisemitism since Oct 7 does not however make a strong case. And there are Holocaust experts who make careers from genocide. There must be something wrong when hundreds of Holocaust survivors are institutionalized and charity dependent.
Up to what point should evil be commemorated? How many parents bequeath a Judaism that leave children more familiar with the names of concentration camps than the names of Yeshivas? How many are more familiar with the Warsaw uprising than with the Mir Yeshiva’s miraculous escape through Shanghai?
Auschwitz has become almost a generic name, an “all-purpose symbol of human cruelty. It has become Disneyfied, transformed into a gruesome theme park for those looking for an easy moral message. To participate in the annual “March of the Living” is a bucket list item for some.
...And an ideal occasion for ‘Pro-Palestine’ protests for others. The May 2024 remembrance event at Auschwitz was invaded to make a statement about Gaza under ‘Israel’s boot.’ Keffiyeh-clad rowdies waved Palestinian flags and chanted ‘Stop genocide’.
Commemorating evil seems to magnetize evil.
Steve Apfel is a combat veteran in the war against antisemitism. Apart from being a prolific author, since 2002 he has singlehandedly exposed and put paid to antisemites in the media, academia, government and the church. Follow Steve at https://steveapfel.substack.com/