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End Holocaust memorials

Op-ed: Shoah tributes desensitize West, make us indifferent to current-day genocide of Jews

It’s always a day of relief when an Holocaust enabler is found guilty, even if he is a 91-years-old man like John Demjanjuk, the retired auto worker from Cleveland who has just been convicted of helping to murder 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor death camp.

 

The sentence has symbolically come a few days after Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the sirens that were sounded, in the tears that have dried up, and in the thinning crowds at the memorials lies a most urgent question: What’s happening to the Holocaust memory? Or to use the title of Alvin Rosenfeld’s new book is this “The End of the Holocaust?”

 

It would be easy to dismiss as irrational madness Shoah denial by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, but his radical, theological fury is finding fertile ground in the West every day, like a niggle in the back of the European conscience.

 

For the Arab street, the Holocaust is merely a fabricated story that enabled the Zionists to subjugate the rest of the world. In the maelstrom of sand and lies that is the Islamic world, even the “moderate” Abbas is an admirer of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and has graduated with a thesis on the “role” of Zionists in the Shoah.

 

The West tried to entrench the Holocaust in the consciousness of mankind and certainly all our museums and memorials have educated people who otherwise might not have realized the enormity of the genocide. But the further the Holocaust recedes into time, the more detrimental our Western memorials and plastics have become.

 

In “The Holocaust and Collective Memory” Peter Novick writes: “Probably the Holocaust both sensitizes and desensitizes, and there’s no way to draw up a balance sheet.”

 

Shoah now used against Israel

Today, Holocaust memorials dot the Western landscape, dozens of Holocaust “artifacts” have been developed by museum planners, schools regularly use the Holocaust to teach tolerance, Hollywood directors make Holocaust movies for popular entertainment and the usual cast of characters treks from one Holocaust “event” to another.

 

Through books, museums, memorials and cinema the Shoah has become the global metaphor of victimization, invoked by everyone from African-American activists (who define slavery as the “real holocaust”) to vegetarians talking about a “chicken holocaust” and by homosexual activists referring to AIDS as a “gay holocaust.”

 

Yasser Arafat visited the Anne Frank Museum in 1998 and today we are memorializing even “Anne’s love for nature and trees.” The result is that the public is now completely desensitized to the unique catastrophe that was the destruction of European Jewry. The memory gets muddled, the facts become factoids and then falsified. The result is that the Shoah is now used against the State of Israel, the living inheritance of the survivors and their descendants.

 

During the 2009 Gaza war, the great American writer Cynthia Ozick proposed to abolish the memorial days in Europe, as the West is perverting the Shoah. At Holocaust ceremonies we often find speakers who demonize the Jewish State. On January 27th, 2009, the United Nations held its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony. General Assembly president Miguel d’Escoco Brockmann, who is also a Catholic priest, perverted the Holocaust by describing the situation in Gaza as “genocide.”

 

In Holland, Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the former president of the European Central Bank and a leading figure of pro-Arab militancy, said that she would like to collect “six million signatures against Israel.” Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago compared Auschwitz to Ramallah, a very frequent example of the trivialization of the Shoah. Nobel Peace laureates Desmond Tutu and Mairead Maguire compared Israel’s nuclear arsenal to the gas chambers.

 

From dream to amnesia

Never before has knowledge of the Holocaust been disseminated all over the West as it is today. Amazon stocks hundreds of Holocaust memoirs and Holocaust-related volumes are weighing down library shelves. Holocaust curricula are mandated in universities and schools; type the word “Holocaust” on Google and you’ll get about 26 million hits.

 

Yet never before has the anti-Jewish venom and the monstrification of Israelis spread like a virus as it is today. Norwegian daily Dagbladet carried a drawing showing former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as Amon Göth, the commander of a Nazi death camp depicted in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, compared Gaza to a Nazi lager: If the Strip is “a concentration camp” and therefore on par with Treblinka and Chelmno, Israel has no right to exist.

 

Reviewing the PLO charter, Hamas’ manifesto and a selection from Iranian speeches might help us recall why it is not a good idea to allow the memory to deteriorate into “pop history.” The problem lies in the pedagogy of the Holocaust, the dictatorship of a fetishizied, abstract and stereotyped memory.

 

The Holocaust is going to be consigned to “the last century” due to the natural death of the last survivors and Demjanjuks. It will be the first step from history to story, from story to myth, from myth to dream and from dream to amnesia.

 

We’ve made a mockery of memory and all our staid vigilance of the dead Jews is rendering all of us indifferent to the genocidal violence against the living Jews. Call it “Eurauschwitz.” In recent years we have seen plenty of saccharine movies about Jewish children in the concentration camps in their pajamas, but the same public opinion reacted with total indifference to the story of Moshe Holtzberg, the baby who was found in a pool of blood beside the corpses of his parents, a young rabbi and his pregnant wife, slaughtered in the massacre atthe Jewish Chabad House in Mumbai.

 

And what about the 12-year-old Tamar, eight-year-old Ro’ie and two-year-old Shai, the young Fogels who survived the pogrom in Itamar? The sad smile of Moshe and the three Fogels are much more inspiring than all our phony, serial ceremonies. End the Shoah memorials, end the plastic Holocaust.

 

Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 05.14.11, 14:44
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