People love to bemoan the fate of dead Jews who were unable to defend themselves. They’re not too crazy about the living ones who do.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel entered Rafa in Gaza to clear out remnants of a modern-day Nazi organization that’s embedded itself among women and children. Joe Biden, who is giving a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance ceremony in Washington today, tried to stop them.
Holocaust remembrances can often be little more than empty virtue signaling. It takes no moral courage to condemn crimes of the past if you’re not willing to stop the crimes of today. Save your sympathy.
Indeed, perhaps the most self-destructive myth within the modern Jewish American community is that the best way to temper hate is to fund more Holocaust education. It probably causes the opposite reaction. If the Holocaust taught us anything, it’s that Jews can’t wait for others — not even the most educated people in the world — to protect them. As Jeff Jacoby notes, “Israel doesn’t exist because there was a Holocaust. There was a Holocaust because Israel didn’t exist.”
And if keffiyeh-wearing Hamas cheerleaders weren’t moved by Oct. 7 videos of Jewish women being sexually tortured and slain, they sure aren’t going to be shocked into decency by 80-year-old grainy black and white pictures of bodies piled in pits. Do we really believe the Hamas apologists on major newspaper editorial boards, in the State Department, on Ivy League campuses, and in Congress don’t know this history? Of course they do. They often appropriate this past Jewish suffering by risibly accusing Israel of Nazi war crimes.
For the left, even minor political setbacks can be likened to Nazi Germany—but don’t you dare point out that cosplay revolutionaries on campus are trying to reenact Kristallnacht. Oh, it’s not about the Jews? Where are the “peace” protesters when Syria deploys chemical warfare against civilians? Or when the Chicoms open internment camps for Uyghurs? Or when the mullahs crack down on Iranian women? On foreign policy, the social justice warrior has an exceptionally narrow focus. It is not happenstance.
Perhaps it’s because Jews are too “white.” Maybe it’s because Jews have been successful and capitalistic and thrive in meritocratic Western nations. Perhaps it’s because the alleged victims of fictitious Jewish “colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” are brown and poor and Muslims.
Or perhaps it’s because Israel is more powerful than its enemies. This, of course, is due to the Jewish state having to fight and win wars instigated by its foes. Every time Israel repels new aggression, as it has for seven decades, the would-be invaders demand everyone rewind history to a time more convenient to their cause. In this one case, Westerners always seem to oblige.
Whatever drives the hate, it speaks to the violent stupidity and immorality of contemporary identitarian beliefs.
Moreover, right now a nuclear Iran and its terror proxies in the Middle East are a bigger threat to Jews than the bumbling Nazis who marched in the Beer Hall Putsch were in 1923. The Hamas sympathizers protesting across the United States, and their fellow travelers in the media, government, and academia, are more organized and popular than the German-American Bund was in the 1930s, which at its height perhaps reached 25,000 members in the entire country. Only a (dead) fool waits for his enemies to catch up.
Speaking of which, even as the president offers perfunctory remarks at the Holocaust Museum, the administration will be both-siding the domestic Hamas-Israel debate, threatening to pull Israeli aid, appeasing Jew haters in Michigan for votes, and pressuring Israel to hand a Holocaust denier a brand new state right next door.
No, I’m not talking about Hamas, though it would likely take over any independent Palestinian state at some point. I’m talking about Mahmoud Abbas, who runs a Fatah kleptocracy in the West Bank. Abbas was one of the leading minds behind anti-Jewish terrorism of the 1970s and ’80s. Among other events, he was one of the planners of the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972.
In his 1982 dissertation, written in the Soviet Union, Abbas claimed the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to spur more Jewish immigration to the Middle East. Abbas argues that perhaps fewer than one million Jews were killed, rather than six million. Soviet Zionology, not incidentally, sounds a lot like progressive pro-Palestinian rhetoric.
Only last year, in a speech to the “Fatah Revolutionary Council, Abbas claimed Adolf Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was not an act of antisemitism but prompted by “social functions” that were “related to money, and usury.” From “Hitler’s point of view,” Abbas explained, Jews “were sabotaging, and therefore he hated them.”
Boy, those Jewish kids herded into gas chambers must have been charging Germans some crazy interest rates, right?
Biden spoke to Abbas a month after this speech and, as far as we can tell, didn’t bother mentioning those comments.
Now, we should concede that Abbas probably understands Hitler’s “point of view” better than most, as it has been ingrained in Palestinian political and societal culture. The Palestinian leader is an intellectual and spiritual progeny of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, an ally of the Nazis before any “occupation.”
Husseini met with Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. On Berlin radio, he implored European Muslims to “kill the Jews wherever you find them—this pleases God, history, and religion,” while recruiting thousands of Bosnian Muslims into the SS. His picture hangs on walls across the Palestinian territories.
The Nazis are dead now. Fatah, which rewards the families of “martyrs,” is around. The sadistic murderers and rapists of Hamas are also here (hopefully not for long). The people who cheer on and justify their actions are also among us. These are the enemies of the Jewish people.
