https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/10/06/britains-academic-left-expuThe late Lucy Dawidowicz once referred, decades ago in a letter to me, to the widespread practice of stealing the Holocaust from its European Jewish victims by a host of groups who not only hate but also envy Jews for having been destroyed.
“How dare the Jews,” she seemed to hear them complaining, “monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering which other aggrieved groups would very much like to share, ex post facto, with them.”
We still hear that envious voice in the bitter pronouncements of “The Squad” in the Democratic Party.
Stealing the Holocaust from its Jewish victims began with small acts of relatively innocent distortion. We all remember the inflamed rhetoric of the civil rights movement of the sixties, calling curtailment of free-lunch programs in Harlem genocide, or describing Watts as a concentration camp. But why fuss about precision of language or intellectual delicacy when the exigencies of radical politics make it convenient to reduce persecuted Jews from the status of human beings to that of metaphors for other people’s suffering?
But this was an amateurish rehearsal for what was still to come. The most determined, sustained, and dangerous attempt to steal the Holocaust from its Jewish victims was begun by the Soviet Union and the Arab world after the 1967 war, and soon became, as it remains today, one of the most lethal weapons deployed against the land of Israel and the people Israel.