Auschwitz was only one event in a week that gave us a global travesty of a memorial

Photo: AP Images

IF lack of self-awareness were an Olympic sport, gold would go to the world leaders who assembled this week in Auschwitz while supporting the kangaroo court that made sure Israel’s leader faced arrest for attending the same event.

Was nobody disturbed by the travesty of commemorating 80 years since Auschwitz’s liberation with the world’s only Jewish state singled out once again for special treatment?

Were Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau not a teensy-weensy bit uncomfortable marking Nazi Jew-hatred while today’s Jews find themselves accused of genocide?

Seemingly not — a fact that tells you a lot about the pious declarations of “Never Again” that mark these events.

Auschwitz was only one event in a week that gave us a global travesty of a memorial. We saw Jewish suffering belittled, the Holocaust hijacked and bigwigs pontificating about anti-Semitism past while ignoring Jew hatred in the present.

The most abject of the pack was Irish President Michael Higgins, who has emerged since October 7 as a bona fide anti-Semite. Under his leadership Ireland recently joined South Africa in charging Israel with genocide at The Hague.

Revoltingly, Higgins used his Holocaust Memorial Day speech in Dublin on Sunday to draw moral equivalence between the victims of the Holocaust and Gazan suffering — ignoring Hamas’s role as the aggressor.

Revulsion apart, how did a day to remember the incomparable crime against the Jewish people become a day to inveigh against everything else? The very fact that the speech had any coherence in the Irish president’s mind at all is testament to the perversion of Holocaust memory across much of the liberal world.

Higgins’s diatribe has its roots in the universalization of the Holocaust. At memorials over the years, we’ve seen this mission-creep, as anti-Semitism was lumped together with racism and other hatred. With every additional instance of racism condemned under the Holocaust umbrella, the day itself became de-Judaized.

Without diminishing the fact that hatred of all sorts is alive and disturbingly well, the universalization of Holocaust remembrance is sometimes far from accidental or benign. In some hands, it serves as a tool to expropriate the suffering of Jews, strip it of its original purpose — and then level the charge of genocide against the Jews themselves.

Most Western leaders, of course, reject the type of extremism which Higgins spouts, but when it comes to the Holocaust many suffer from a strange myopia. They’re so dazzled by the glare of 20th century anti-Semitism that they can’t spot its 21st century equivalent.

Take London’s massive pro-Hamas demonstrations that have cowed the Jewish community since the beginning of the war. Last week, Sir Mark Rowley, the head of the capital’s Metropolitan Police, said that the chant “From the river to the sea” that rings out across his city weekly isn’t classified as a hate crime.

Rowley went on to criticize the current law as unfit for purpose. But whether or not he’s right that he has no latitude to stop the protests, the reality is that the refusal to police an open call for genocide is disturbingly inconsistent.

It’s not as if British authorities don’t know how to act against hate speech. In November, prominent Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was investigated by police after being accused of a “racist and inflammatory” social media post. The crime? Reportedly, a (swiftly deleted) tweet that identified a group of men posing with police while holding a flag as Hamas supporters, when in fact they were holding the symbol of a Pakistani political party.

The result: swift police investigation.

What happened to the judicious hair-splitting that — as Rowley himself admitted — allows the pro-Hamas mob to make minute changes to their flags and parade their hate unchecked?

Whither Britain’s hallowed traditions of free speech?

The shameful reality is that there’s political will and judicial muscle in spades to tackle all manner of hate crimes — provided they tick the right boxes. But in today’s Britain, the torrents of hate directed at the Jewish community just don’t make the cut.

For some people, anyway, the whole Holocaust memory thing is getting a bit much, and they wish we’d just move on already.

Elon Musk made that clear this week in a remote speech to a conference of Germany’s anti-immigrant AfD, a rising populist party some of whose members have unsavory pasts on the far-right.

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” he said, referring to Germany’s Holocaust education system. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.”

It’s perfectly possible to make Musk’s main point — that multiculturalism has failed in Germany and much of Europe — without dismissing Holocaust memory as an archaic guilt complex.

What the world’s richest man has used his social media foghorn to disseminate is plain wrong. It’s true that German kids do not personally bear responsibility for what their great-grandparents did — but it doesn’t mean that the country as a whole can just move on.

Musk’s idea that the Holocaust was somehow just one aspect of a glorious millennium of German history is plain wrong. It ignores the fact that Nazism was built on a thousand years of Jew-hate in German-speaking lands.

The slaughter of the Rhineland Jews in the Crusades; the punitive taxation of Jews from the 11th century on; the periodic torture, massacre, and expulsions as Jews were accused of desecrating Christian symbols; the burning at the stake by the Catholics which was succeeded by Lutheran anti-Semitism; the Hep Hep riots of 1819 even after Germany began to modernize.

All these prove that anti-Semitism was the rule of German history, not the exception.

So if you want to talk about the glories of Beethoven and German culture, recognize the direct line from that culture to the gas chambers.

In a wider sense, Elon Musk is wrong in his view of German historic guilt, because — like it not — history shapes who we are for good and ill.

Funnily enough, I don’t hear Germans wanting to slough off their grandparents’ legacy of precision engineering and auto manufacture, or divest themselves of the world-beating industries that their ancestors bequeathed to them.

If Germany takes pride in Mercedes and Siemens, it must acknowledge the more shameful part of its past as well.

Taken together, it’s been a bad week for Holocaust memorial, one in which the memory of the victims has been decontextualized to the point of irrelevance.

So on the off chance that Musk picks up a copy of Mishpacha left by some Orthodox White House staffer, I want to pass on something for him to share with other world leaders.

Marking the 80th anniversary of their liberation, the diminishing number of Auschwitz survivors request a slight tweak to next year’s program.

They’d prefer that you spend less time on Holocaust memorial ceremony, and more on making sure that their grandchildren actually live in a world safe from the oldest hatred.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1047)