It’s the Holocaust, stupid!

The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz!

Zvi Rex, Israeli psychiatrist

On 5 July 2024, King Charles III approved the appointment of Rt Hon Keir Starmer as UK Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.  Rt Hon David Lammy was appointed as Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs.

On 14 July, the latter announced that the UK would “restart funding to UNRWA in order to get aid as quickly as possible to those who need it in Gaza”.  The funding had been stopped when some UNRWA ‘humanitarian workers’ were found to have taken active part in the 7 October attack and massacres.  But the new government declared that it was

“confident that UNRWA is taking action to ensure it meets the highest standards of neutrality”.

“Is taking action” is an interesting way to put it: it clearly refers to something that may bear fruit in the (undefined) future; but the funding resumed with immediate effect.

On 25 July, the UK Labour government announced that it would withdraw the objections (submitted by the previous administration) to the issuance, by the International Criminal Court, of arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence.

On 2 September, the UK government banned the export of certain weapons to Israel.  The announcement explained:

“On day one in office, the Foreign Secretary commissioned a thorough review into Israel’s compliance with International Humanitarian Law, and has travelled to Israel twice since being appointed to the role to understand the situation on the ground.”

“On day one in office” would seem to indicate a huge sense of urgency.  These three measures – all taken within 60 days of its appointment – were by far the most prominent foreign affairs decisions taken by the new government; and, in fact, arguably the most forceful decisions it took in any area.  It seems that the Jewish state and its behaviour is – for some reason – the new UK government’s top concern.

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On the other hand, the Labour government also did something else, though perhaps not “[o]n day one in office”: it commissioned a review of the national curriculum for schools in England.  Of course, the matter of what British children are taught in British schools is not quite as burning as whatever happens in Gaza; so the curriculum review will take at least a year, not a fortnight.  It is scheduled to report sometime in autumn 2025.

Well, I suppose education reforms can wait; but some things clearly cannot.  Thus, already on 16 September this year, Prime Minister Starmer announced that, as part of the review to be completed in a year’s time, he was making “Holocaust education” a mandatory topic of study in every school in England.  Of course, the national curriculum – which is followed by the vast majority of schools in England – already includes “Holocaust education”.  And Mr. Starmer’s decision won’t be applied with immediate effect anyway – but only “when the new curriculum comes in” – i.e. after the review is completed, hopefully in autumn 2025.  So why did he announce it already – and with such fanfare?

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Clearly, Rt Hon Starmer needed to balance his government’s slew of hostile measures against the Jewish state with ‘doing something good for the Jews’.  But why “Holocaust education”?  Sure, the memory of the Shoah is a very important part of contemporary Jewish identity.  But, when it comes to their expectations from the government, British Jews have many pressing concerns: “Preserve the memory of the Holocaust” was #8 on the list of ‘Ten Commandments’ included in ‘The Jewish Manifesto for the General Election 2024’ published by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.  (Interestingly, the cover of that brochure boasted a picture of Jews holding up photos of Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas…)

So why bring up the Holocaust?  Jews have been accused of being obsessed with the Shoah.  But it seems many Gentiles are fascinated by it, too; only in different ways.

Let us remember: in the ‘enlightened’ 20^th century, the world attempted to murder its Jews and wipe out their memory.  I say ‘the world’ advisedly: while it was Nazi Germany that led that ‘effort,’ members of many other nations lent ‘a helping hand’.  From Ukrainian guards to Polish peasants, from Vichy government officials to Norwegian collaborators – they all played an active role in the Shoah.  Fortunately, the Nazis never conquered the isle of Britain; but even there there were those only too eager to take part in ‘freeing the world from Jewish domination’.

Of those who did not murder Jews themselves (or delivered them to be slaughtered), many were guilty by omission: the vast majority of countries refused to accept Jewish refugees fleeing unimaginable threats and persecution; the British government of the time even callously banned Jews from fleeing to the ‘Jewish Home’ they were supposed to establish.  As for the United States, it responded to European Jews’ desperate need for a safe haven by… further reducing immigration quotas – in particular (and purely coincidentally, of course!) from Germany and Poland.

Ultimately, of course, nations went to war against the Axis; soldiers spilled their blood to defeat it.  But no country fought to save the Jews – they did so to defend their own interests.  The enormity of what was being done to the Jews eventually became known to the Allies, not in the least because so many trains were crisscrossing Europe to deliver raw material to the Nazi death factories.  But, if Hitler hated Jews enough to take those trains away from the Nazi war effort and employ them as vehicles of murder – the Allies didn’t love Jews that much; otherwise, they might’ve used their clear air superiority to destroy those railways.

No wonder that, when finally the war ended and the horrors became widely known, many felt – deep in their hearts – a sense of guilt.  No, not because they felt they contributed to those horrors themselves – the perpetrators were soon declared to be just the Germans and, even among them, only a small circle of Nazis, most of whom were by then conveniently dead.  No, the reason many people secretly felt guilty was that, looking candidly into their souls, they discovered (shhhh, don’t tell anyone!) some of the same feelings that the Nazis harboured.  After all, the latter did not invent antisemitism; the Holocaust was but the culmination of many centuries of hatred, persecution and massacres.

Guilt – as any good Jew or Catholic will tell you – is a very oppressive feeling.  And so, the ovens of Majdanek had barely cooled down, when denial started.  Already by 1948, a French ‘intellectual’ and journalist was publishing a book ‘demonstrating’ that the Shoah was a false narrative.  Other ‘intellectuals’ and ‘academics’ followed suit.

The problem with Holocaust denial is, however – from the point of view of its promoters – that it’s too easily debunked.  Too many people were involved; in too many places; there were too many surviving witnesses; and, despite Nazi efforts, there was also physical evidence.  If – as the deniers claim – the gas chambers were only used to de-lice clothes, it is rather difficult to explain what happened to the people who wore those thousands of shoes left in a dusty warehouse.  The denial approach is still alive and kicking of course – massively in Muslim countries and occasionally in Europe, N. America and elsewhere.  But it struggled to attract a mass following – not in the least because its promoters tended to be obviously unsavoury characters: Islamists and neo-Nazis.

Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone (right) ‘resigned’ from the Labour Party. Former Vice-Chair of Momentum Jackie Walker (left) was expelled. Both are notorious for having made ‘controversial’ statements involving Jews and the Holocaust. {public domain}

A more appealing way to deal with the guilt is Holocaust trivialisation – promoted primarily by ‘progressives’ like Jeremy Corbyn or Jackie Walkers.  The Holocaust – proclaim supporters of this particular brand of deniers – indeed happened.  But… it didn’t happen only to Jews, it affected many other categories of victims (Communists, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, disabled people).  And ‘the Holocaust’ was really just ‘one Holocaust’ among many; perhaps not quite as horrific as the transatlantic slave trade – to cite a favourite item on that list.

But if the Holocaust never happened; or if it happened as just one such event among many others; then what explains the widespread belief in the contrary (i.e., that it did happen and was an extraordinary, exceptional event)?  If the deniers are really truth-tellers, then there’s a conspiracy to be found in the opposite camp.

And who are more credibly accused of conspiracy than the Jews?  Of course, blaming ‘the Jews’ as such has become a little unfashionable.  But hey, there is by now a Jewish state.  From the point of view of the deniers (of all tinges and methodologies), Israel is an ideal scapegoat: on one hand, it’s mostly Jewish – so mostly suspect; but on the other hand, one can attack that ‘mostly’ by referring to them as ‘Israelis’, thus avoiding the potential pitfall of bashing ‘the Jews’ – like a certain fellow with a funny moustache!

By the mid-1950s, all references to Jews as its main victims have been ‘expunged’ from the ‘history’ of the Holocaust – as told by the Soviet Union and by many ‘progressive’ circles in the West. By mid-1970s Israel was commonly accused – in the same circles – of ‘weaponising’ the Shoah to ‘justify the crimes against the Palestinian people’.  Eventually, someone (a renegade Jew, just like in the times of inquisitorial trials) came up with the term ‘Holocaust industry’; a term invented to describe not the industrialised murder of Jews – but the Jewish ‘exaggerate’ propensity to ‘over-memorialise’ and ‘exploit’ it.

This form of denial is, it seems, much easier for people to ‘buy’ into.  A 2017 survey found that just 2% of the population strongly agreed/tended to agree with the proposition ‘The Holocaust is a myth’.  ‘The Holocaust has been exaggerated’ gained the agreement of 4%.  But no less than 10% agreed that ‘Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes’.  (‘No less’ is not a figure of speech: this particular question elicited a lot of ‘Neither agree nor disagree’ responses (19%), as well as ‘Don’t know/Refuse to respond’ (15%).  So, in addition to the 10% that agreed, 34% of respondents abstained – for some reason – from providing a clear answer to that question.)

But ‘merely’ accusing Jews of nefariously ‘exploiting Holocaust victimhood’ doesn’t go far enough in terms of relieving the guilt.  Because the implication is that, whether ‘exploiting’ or not, they were victims.

How about accusing the Jews themselves of somehow bringing that catastrophe upon themselves?  Of course, accusing an entire population of ‘deserving’ to be massacred is a bit problematic in ‘progressive’ circles.  And before 1948 there was no Jewish state to blame.  But, conveniently, there was a movement aiming to establish one; a movement that, for some reason, was desperate to save Jews from the claws of the Nazis – especially by bringing them to Palestine Mandate.  By 1982, the Institute of Oriental Studies (no, not SOAS; this was IOS, affiliated with the Soviet Academy of Sciences!) was awarding a PhD to a certain PLO leader called Mahmoud Abbas – upon the successful defence of his thesis “The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945”.  Few people read this piece of original research, but the theme itself is still popular among hard-leftists – see comments made by former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone in 2016.

For some, however, such theories still don’t go far enough.  After all, even if one were to believe that ‘Zionists’ collaborated with the Nazis (or, in Livingstone’s version, that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’), those Zionists would have been no worse than so many others on the European continent.  And the victims were still Jews!

No, the ultimate guilt-relieving medicine is Holocaust inversion.  If one can persuade oneself that the Jews (or the Jewish state, as the guilt-free euphemism for ‘the Jews’) perpetrate ‘a Holocaust’ themselves – then one can finally hate with no niggling unease.  One can even proffer one’s hatred as a noble endeavour, a kind of belatedly-found and cost-free anti-Nazism.  What better way of bearing the Mark of Cain, than wearing it as badge of honour?

It’s not easy, but with persistence everything is possible.  The Naqba can be narrated as ‘a Holocaust’; Gaza Strip can be equated to ‘a concentration camp’; and bombing Israel with thousands of rockets can be likened to ‘the Revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto’.

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The intention was clear.  Of course, one can believe – especially if one is so inclined – that Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians is bad, bad, bad.  But there is ‘bad’ (and there’s no penury of bad behaviour in the world) – and then there is ‘Nazi’.  Others are occasionally accused of Nazi-like behaviour; when it comes to Israel, such ‘metaphors’ abound.  There’s an overwhelming propensity to cast Jews (and only Jews) in the role of Nazis.  Can you name one symbol – other than the Star of David – that is so often paired with the Swastika?

In fact, some people found creative ways to claim that Jews are actually worse than Nazis.  After all, unlike the original Nazis, Jews have been themselves victims of the Holocaust; so, as an Honourable Member of the House of Commons once said, they should know better, shouldn’t they??

A 1998 article (published by two ‘researchers’ holding academic positions in London and Paris) stated:

“[T]he Holocaust does not free the Jewish state or the Jews of accountability.  On the contrary, the Nazi crime compounds their moral responsibility and exposes them to greater answerability.  They are the ones who have escaped the ugliest crime in history, and now they are perpetrating reprehensible deeds against another people.”

Ah, but there was still something missing: after all, “reprehensible deeds” is rather weak – if you are to accuse somebody of perpetrating ‘a Holocaust’.  The Holocaust was more than displacement, ghettos and concentration camps; it was history’s largest and most obvious genocide.  Indeed, in most people’s minds, it is synonymous with ‘genocide’.

So, when a truly genocidal attack by Hamas triggered a harsh Israeli response; and when that response resulted (if we are to believe Hamas) in more than 40,000 Palestinian deaths; that’s when the final component fell in place.

40,000 is a large number, but hardly an unusual one.  According to a 2021 UN Development Programme report, the Saudi-led war in Yemen (prosecuted among others with British weapons) caused some 377,000 fatalities – around 150,000 from the fighting itself and the rest from lack of safe water, food and medical care.  The Saudis, by the way, did what Israel arguably should have done: they did not wait for the Houthis to attack them, but hit them first – on the assumption that an Iranian-sponsored terror group on the border is enough of a casus belli.  They also imposed a comprehensive blockade on Yemen, which according to the UN resulted in 3.5 million cases of acute malnutrition and 131,000 deaths between 2015 and 2020.

But all that’s irrelevant, ain’t it?  Saudi Arabia has not been accused of genocide; it hasn’t been dragged before an international court.  Its leaders aren’t going to be indicted for committing ‘the crime of extermination’.

In short, the Saudis aren’t Jews.  There’s no specific interest – and certainly no morbid satisfaction – in accusing them of perpetrating a new Holocaust.  When Saudis kill children, it’s bad luck; when Jews do it, it’s – for some reason – fascinating.

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Night is the new day, folks!  Haniyeh’s a moderate, Netanyahu the devil incarnate.  Hamas is progressive, the PLO moderate, Isreal is a racist state.  Hizb’ullah are brave and noble warriors, the J… err… Zionists are the new Nazis.  Palestinians are the new Jews, and the old ones – having failed to internalise the valuable lessons of the Shoah – are holocausting them poor bastards!  They need to be stopped!  Otherwise, what’s the point of getting all that “Holocaust Education”??  What better way to honour all those dead Jews than prevent the ones alive from doing to others what’s been done to them?  It’s time to finally apply the ‘Never again!’ injunction and all the international treaties that – as we all know – have been put in place precisely with this in mind.  The way to ensure this never happens again is to immediately restore the ceasefire that was in place before 7/10.  The way to preserve peace in the Middle East is to deny Israel weapons.  And put them nasty Isrealis in the dock, not in the Hague, but at Nuremberg – now that’s an idea!

After all, we live in a just, fair and delightful world, governed by the International Humanitarian Law.  Enjoy!!!