The deniers and the forgetters
While Muslims deny Holocaust, delusional Left uses it to criticize Israel
The memory of the Holocaust is not diminishing, despite efforts by its deniers and forgetters. The Holocaust deniers were seen, until recently, as an anomalous gang of anti-Semites, secretly or openly, digging through the dumpsters of historical study.
One can argue whether it is appropriate or not that they stand trial for spreading lies, but their activity never caused much damage. On the contrary: The historical truth of the Holocaust was strengthened and solidified by the “professional” Holocaust deniers, who are a fading spectacle.
Another vocal - and much more dangerous - group is taking their place: the Muslim Holocaust deniers, whose goals are political and ideological.
Most Muslims are convinced that the murder of six million Jews during World War II did not happen at all, or that its dimensions have been blown out of proportion in a Jewish-Western conspiracy (as Hamas claims, for example), with the goal of using it as a justification for Zionism.
Anti-Zionist campaign
When the words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who links his denial of the Holocaust with calls for the destruction of Israel, fall on this fertile earth, they are well absorbed in the social consciousness and quickly take root in daily conversation.
In the Muslim world it is not a disgrace to deny the Holocaust. It is even a right: One can yell out in public that the Jews faked history and invented the horrors of the Holocaust to steal Arab land.
The delusional Left even uses the Holocaust nowadays to criticize Israel; esteemed Portuguese author Jose Saramago compared Ramallah during the intifada to Auschwitz.
This is another cycle of the anti-Zionist campaign that was common in the past in the Soviet bloc: Even thought the communists of that time didn’t dare deny the dimensions of the murder of the Jewish people, they denied its uniqueness and its racist motives, and tried to portray the Jewish Holocaust victims as yet more “victims of Nazi imperialism.”
Their goal was political – to deprive the remainder of the Jews of their nationalism and present them as a cultural minority alone.
Historical lie
Today, political aims guide not only Holocaust deniers, but also those that would rather the Holocaust be forgotten. The latter are much more ubiquitous, and much slyer. To them, the genocide of the Jewish people was just a passing deviation from the enlightened European path.
They present the Holocaust as an anomalous and fleeting event, that doesn’t fit in with the clean and cultured essence of Europe and the West. Therefore, it is permissible – and even obligatory – to forget it.
This is a crude historical lie. The Holocaust is an inseparable part of 20th century European civilization. Europe’s citizens carried it out remarkably: Regular German citizens, not genetically engineered, not clinically insane. Germans that loved music, nature and domestic animals, killed millions – not to earn money or serve money-hungry capitalists, but simple because they hated the Jew for what he was.
They weren’t influenced by television or the hi-tech industry; they just listened to the calls of their leaders to purify Europe from Jews and crown it with the Aryan race.
Change Auschwitz camp's name
In this regard it is necessary that the Israeli government fully support Poland’s request from UNESCO to change the name of the Auschwitz death camp to “the Nazi German death camp,” because that is exactly what it was: A Nazi German camp where more than one million Jews were murdered along with 100,000 others.
Many Israeli youths, some of them very young, travel to Poland to meet the memory of the Holocaust face to face. In doing so, most of them end up merging in their minds the geographical place where the Holocaust occurred and the people that made it happen. This merger is a forgetting of the truth about the Holocaust and its horrors.
The Holocaust is not fictional horror literature, nor is it a cosmic event. It happened not long ago, just 65 years ago, and very close to here. The people that lived through it are still with us, still walking, straight-shouldered but often penniless, among us. We will help them live out the remainder of their lives with great respect; this is how we will fight back against the deniers and the forgetters.
