Part I Antisemitism erased:
Earlier this month, a number of major media outlets published their annual “year in photos" feature.
Time magazine presented 100 photographs about the year 2025. The New York Times featured 97. ABC-News published a similar story, using 45 photos.
The idea was to summarize the most important events of 2025-wars, political upheavals, athletic milestones, natural disasters.
Apparently, the editors at all three agencies agreed that antisemitism was not very important, even though this past year saw a record number of antisemitic incidents around the world. Not only swastika daubings and cemetery desecrations, but numerous murders and attempted murders.
Antisemites gunned down two attendees at a Jewish Museum event in Washington, DC; set Jews on fire in Boulder, Colorado; ran over and stabbed worshippers at a British synagogue on Yom Kippur; attempted to burn to death the governor of Pennsylvania and his family on Passover; and massacred fifteen Jews on a beach in Australia.
Neither Time nor ABC-News thought any of those developments was sufficiently important to be part of their photo spreads.
The New York Times was only slightly better. It did include one photo of a memorial at the site in Australia where Jews were massacred. The caption, however, did not include the words “Jews" or “antisemitic."
Yes, that was implied-the Times noted that the victims were “there to celebrate Hanukkah" and the attackers were “gunmen motivated by Islamic State ideology." But why not just say outright that the victims were Jews and the perpetrators were antisemitic terrorists?
It gets worse. Time, the New York Times and ABC all included multiple scenes of destruction in Gaza. Yet none of them showed the terrorists in Gaza who were embedded in the damaged residential areas.
Nor did they show the antisemitic rallies on college campuses and elsewhere, in which participants openly called for the mass murder of millions of Israeli Jews, and celebrated the antisemitic slaughter perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.
The New York Times did not ignore the campus turmoil entirely, however. Its “Year in Photos" included a sympathetic photo of a Columbia University alumna, dressed in cap and gown, in handcuffs. She was “arrested during pro-Palestinian demonstrations," the caption explained.
In reality, of course, she was not arrested for being “pro-Palestinian" (as if cheering for the murderous fascist Hamas regime is “pro-Palestinian"). Those who were arrested were setting documents on fire--an obvious public hazard--and engaging in other disruptions.
The Times also printed a touching photo of Mahmoud Khalil with his wife and newborn son, after he was, as the Times put it, “detained for his role in protests" at Columbia. There was no mention that Khalil and his comrades were “protesting" in support of antisemitic mass murderers and gang-rapists. Apparently that information was not fit to print.
Part I was written by Dr. Rafael Medoff,director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in Washington DC, and author of more than 20 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history. His latest book is The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust, published by the Jewish Publication Society/University of Nebraska Press.
Part II - The Holocaust wiithout Jews:
US Vice President J.D. Vance did not mention Jews in his Holocaust statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, saying only: “Today we remember the millions of lives lost during the Holocaust, the millions of stories of individual bravery and heroism, and one of the enduring lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history: that while humans create beautiful things and are full of compassion, we’re also capable of unspeakable brutality. And we promise never again to go down the darkest path."
Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro commented: “It is not a surprise to me,... given the way in which he has openly supported the AfD party, given the way he openly embraces neo-Nazis and neo-Nazi political parties, given the way in which he has offered comfort, really, to the antisemites on the right who are infecting the Republican Party, so it’s not a shock to me that he would omit that, but it’s a sad day that the vice president of the United States on Holocaust Awareness Day couldn’t address that."
The BBC has apologized for omitting mention of Jews in its Holocaust Awareness Day coverage, as if its 1.1 billion viewers will notice that apology As Stephen Pollard, former ediitor of the UK's Jewish Chronicle, wrote in an artticle titled Why the BBC is one of the most dangerously antisemitic organisations in the West:
"The sheer audacity of its blatant, calculated, deliberate decision to make its own contribution to wiping Jewish suffering from history - one of the foundations of the contemporary revival in Jew hate - yesterday’s BBC reporting of Holocaust Memorial Day surely tops everything.
"As the Campaign for Media Standards highlighted with clips on social media, much of the BBC’s coverage omitted any mention of Jews from the Holocaust. Both the BBC1 breakfast programme and the news bulletins on the Radio 4 Today programme referred to 'six million people' being murdered - a formulation then repeated throughout the day, which was clearly a deliberately constructed form of words to be used to reference the Holocaust.
It seems that, unless they can be falsely villified as they are in coverage of the war in the Gaza Strip, Jews are being erased from history, including their own.
Note: Part II was added by Rochel Sylvetsky.