The Warped Mirror: Hate on Holocaust Memorial Day

It is utterly depressing to see how quickly a well-intentioned and well-written article about Holocaust Memorial Day will attract anonymous talkbacks that eagerly insinuate that Gaza is Warsaw, that the Palestinians are the Jews, and that the Israelis are the Nazis. Take as just one example Karen Pollock's "Confronting our past" that was published on the Guardian's website last week. Pollock who is chief executive of the British Holocaust Educational Trust tried to explain that even though more than 60 years had passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, it would be wrong to "simply consign the terror of the Holocaust to our history books"; instead, she argued, everyone still had "a duty to learn from the past and apply those lessons today". But among the first dozen readers to respond to her article, quite a few were all too sure that they had learned whatever was to learn and that they were thus ready to "apply those lessons today".

The very first talkback read: "Pity that on Sunday [i.e. Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27] the Palestinians will still be off their own land and barricaded in ghettos. Tantamount to ethnic cleansing." Talkback number 5 asserted: "What relevance does the Holocaust have for modern Britain? None." Another talkback read: "This week hundreds of thousands of Palestininans starving and dying in a ghetto closed off to the outside world (Warsaw redux) blasted thru a wall into Egypt in order to get basic goods like medicines, food, mattresses [...] Israel slowly starves and kills a powerless, impoverished people to death because they did not have the privilege of being born Jewish. [...] 60 years ago it was perfectly ok to starve Jews to death because they didn't matter as human beings to an anti-semitic world. Decades later it's perfectly ok to starve Arabs to death for the same reason." Or, another variation on the same theme: "What a pity that the memory of the Holocaust is invoked as justification for the persecution of others that continues to this day."

Talkbacks like these are commonplace sixty-three years after Auschwitz was liberated. Sixty-three years after one-third of the Jewish people were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators all over Europe, quite a few educated Europeans can't tell the difference between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza. To them, the star of David looks like a swastika. And don't you dare to call that anti-Semitism - it's progressive, politically correct, and above all, pro-Palestinian.

One can only wonder then what to make of this statement from another article on Holocaust Memorial Day also published in the Guardian: "If the people of Weimar Germany had fundamental respect for the 'other', they would not have voted for the Nazis." It is debatable whether this assertion makes any sense in historical terms, but if the issue of political movements and their "respect for the 'other'" is brought up, one would obviously have to think about it in the context of our own times: so what "fundamental respect for the 'other'" is reflected in the Hamas charter? And what does it mean then that Palestinians voted for Hamas?

To be sure, trading this kind of "lessons" from the past won't make for a constructive debate. But there is likewise little chance for any constructive debate on the basis of denying reality such as the fact that the Hamas charter states in its opening paragraph: "Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors."

If there is indeed "a duty to learn from the past and apply those lessons today”" there is one unequivocal lesson to be learned from the past: those who talked about "eliminating" the people of Israel always meant what they said.