The United Nations chose Jan. 27-the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration/death camp-to commemorate the Holocaust, the term that developed specifically to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
Yet the message the United Nations posted on X on Tuesday omitted any mention of the Jews. It said: “The genocide started with apathy & silence in the face of injustice, and with the corrosive dehumanization of the other. Today and always, we need to remember this. And we must stand up for our shared humanity."
The post was quoting from a statement issued by the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, who also said that “a group of deluded killers inflicted unspeakable atrocities on millions of Jews and members of other minorities."
As reflected in the U.N.’s abbreviated version of this statement on X, Türk universalized the Holocaust and thus blurred its real significance. But at least he mentioned the Jews. Others, shockingly, did not.
Throughout the day, the BBC’s news bulletins and presenters made no reference at all to the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Instead, they referred to the “6 million people murdered by the Nazi regime."
But the Nazis murdered many more people than that. Six million was the specific number of Jews who were exterminated, larger than any other group that suffered.
Later on Tuesday, after a storm of criticism, the BBC apologized for failing to mention the Jewish victims. But just think about the implications of that omission.
The BBC had in its collective head the universally known figure of 6 million, but nevertheless erased their Jewish identity. That isn’t just a careless mistake. It suggests something pathological and very dark indeed is at work in the BBC psyche.
And it was far from alone. A deeply disturbing example was the statement made on the day by U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
He said: “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."
Given his position, Vance will have crafted that statement with extreme care. Yet he carefully omitted any mention at all of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, let alone their centrality to it.
And so, another baleful milestone has been reached. We’ve previously seen antisemitism and gaslighting of the Jews through Holocaust revisionism and Holocaust denial. Now we are seeing the erasure of the Jews themselves from the Holocaust, and therefore from both their own history and their presence in that episode in the history of the world.
That world clearly hasn’t learned [or is purposely ignoring] the key point about the Holocaust-that it was a uniquely monstrous crime aimed specifically at the extermination of the Jewish people. Instead, the world learned something very different-that it demonstrated man’s general inhumanity to man.
Of course, many others perished in the Holocaust, including Poles, disabled people, gay people, Roma and Sinti. It’s right that their persecution should be commemorated, too. Nazism was a fanatical imperialist ideology that aimed to conquer and subjugate the whole of Europe and regarded various groups as subhuman.
But the driving force of the Holocaust was the Nazis’ obsessional and deranged intention to eradicate the Jewish people alone from the face of the earth. To that terrible end, it established an industrialized system of mass murder for the Jews.
It did not do that for any other people. The Final Solution was intended for the Jews alone. That’s what made the Holocaust of the Jews unique.
Yet those who established Holocaust education and memorialization have increasingly blurred this essential message, choosing instead to universalize it and thus obscure the singular victimization of the Jews.
The resulting message from much of this memorialization has been that anyone can be a Nazi. It was but a short step from there-for those intent upon exterminating the collective Jew in the State of Israel-to start calling Israelis “Nazis," and to accuse Israel of perpetrating a “holocaust" or “genocide" of the Palestinian Arabs.
Mass murder is an evil wherever it takes place. The murder of tens of thousands of Iranians who have been rising up against their tyrannical regime is unconscionable.
But it’s not genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion or race. That’s what the Iranian regime threatens against the Jews.
The modern world, however, does not accept that this is a distinction of any value. With moral responsibility and duty having been trumped by individual rights, dominant Western secular thinking has erased the significance of intention altogether, focusing instead on consequences.
One reason why Westerners argue so preposterously that Israel’s war of self-defense against genocide is itself genocide is that they’ve redefined the word as meaning merely “a lot of people who’ve been killed"-and necessarily of the kind of whom they approve or, at least, don’t disapprove, as with the Palestinian Arabs.
This has fed into the madness about Gaza, in which the serial lies about Israeli starvation, war crimes and the wanton killing of the innocent have become established as incontrovertible facts even though they are demonstrably the very opposite of the truth.
This madness has been further fueled by an unholy alliance between intersectional identity politics, liberal universalism, Islamist holy war and lightly buried Christian theological Jew-hatred.
In Britain, the number of schools commemorating International Holocaust Memorial Day has more than halved since Oct. 7 in the face of opposition from parents and pupils-many of these Muslims, but non-Muslims, too.
And it’s the madness over Gaza that not only ensured the Jews would be wiped out of statements made on this day, but has actually turned the Holocaust against them by accusing them of perpetrating a “holocaust" of the Palestinian Arabs.
In British Columbia, Canada, parliamentarian Yuen Pau Woo posted on X: “On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us pledge that ‘never again’ means ‘never again,’ even when Israel is the perpetrator #Gaza."
In Britain, Dov Forman, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, found himself asked on BBC Radio’s flagship “Today" show what he’d say to the argument that, if we continue to talk about the Holocaust, “we need to talk about Gaza." The interviewer went on: “What is the universal message you want to be heard on this Holocaust Memorial Day?"
Bad enough that this morally degraded equation puts the genocide of the Jews on the same level as Israel’s attempt to prevent another genocide of the Jews. Worse, Gaza is being used to wipe out the particularity to the Jews of the Final Solution.
Underlying all this erasure is the unmistakable, if incredible, belief that the Jews have no right to their claim of victimhood-because their tormentors view the memory of the Holocaust as a moral bludgeon that the Jews wield to gain special privileges, such as avoiding “legitimate criticism" over the “crimes" of Israel.
Accepting that the Jews are the world’s greatest and most enduring historic victims gets in the way of the only permitted narratives.
-Arab Palestinianism erases the Jews from their own history in their ancestral homeland. -Universalism erases them from their history as victims in Europe. ------Anti-Zionism, which separates the Jewish people from the land that’s central to their ancient faith, erases Judaism altogether.
Erasing Jewish victimization is part of a global agenda by such people to erase the Jews-from their mind, from their conscience and from their world.
They won’t succeed. The Jewish Diaspora will need to change in the face of this onslaught, but Israel will emerge stronger than ever.
The more the West tries to erase the Jews, the clearer its suicide note becomes for the erasure of its own civilization.