GIULIO MEOTTI: NEW SOFT-CORE VERSION OF HOLOCAUST DENIAL
The New Softcore Version of Holocaust Denial
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/10738
Far more problematic than “hardcore” Holocaust deniers, relegated to the extremist neo-nazi fringes, this new perversion of the Holocaust is a kind of “softcore” denial – but it has lasting and spreading effect.
In a time when there is an ever-growing river of books, essays, museums, symposia and movies about the Holocaust, it’s very easy to dismiss as madness Shoah denial by Iranian President Ahmadinejad.
But his fury about the supreme tragic event of modern times has found fertile ground in the West.
Ten years ago Roger Garaudy, the French philosopher whose book “Les Mythes Fondateurs de la Politique Israelienne” [The Founding Myths of israeli Politics, ed.] calls into question the very nature of the gas chambers, was honoured only by Arab governments and intellectuals – both Christian and Muslim.
Garaudy’s denial then spread all over the Muslim world (last month a leader of Egypt’s most influential secular party dismissed the Holocaust as a “lie”).
Portraying Jews as Nazis, Israeli politicians as Hitler and the Star of David as equal to the Swastika is now a routine in the Islamic world.
The Holocaust inversion has now also made major inroads in Europe.
Zygmunt Bauman, who has long been regarded as one of the world’s most influential sociologists, in an interview to the Polish weekly Politika, declared that Israel is “taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts” and he compared the Israeli anti-terror fence to the Warsaw Ghetto, from whence 400.000 innocent, peaceful Jews were deported to the Treblinka’s gas chambers.
Far more problematic than “hardcore” Holocaust deniers, relegated to the extremist neo-nazi fringes, this new perversion of the Holocaust is a kind of “softcore” denial.
Many in Israel have attempted to minimize the seriousness of such deeds and words. But Bauman’s ideas are not an isolated case.
In 2007 a German delegation of Catholic bishops already compared the Israeli fence to the Warsaw Ghetto. Fully aware of the potency of the terms they employ, the bishops tried to seek to garner political and rhetorical gains against the Jews by turning the former victims of the Holocaust into a reincarnation or a transmutation of the Nazis.
Since the 1980s several high level European politicians also made radical Holocaust-manipulating declarations. Greek socialist prime minister Andreas Papandreou compared Israelis to Nazis.
Norbert Blum, a former German Christian Democrat minister of labor, referred to Israel’s “Vernichtungskrieg” against the Palestinians, a Nazi expression for “war of extermination”.
Last month, in an interview with CNN, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan derided what he called Israel’s “obsession” with the Holocaust, accusing it of using the genocide to paint Israel as a “victim”.
Holocaust’s deniers are also trying to “relativize” the Jewish catastrophe by a new semantics. In France a governmental circular for the scholastic year of 2011 required the textbooks to delete and avoid the use of Jewish expressions for the extermination of six million Jews in Europe. No more “Holocaust” or “Shoah”, but the aseptic and beaurocratic “anéantissement”, a French word that merely means annihilation.
The governmental circular, published in the Official Gazette No. 7 September 2010, emphasizes the need to remove the word “Shoah” from the textbooks.
Dominique Borne, the French historian who wrote the rules at the Education’s Ministry, declared that he is “uncomfortable” with a “foreign word” like Shoah, yet somehow the Palestinian “Nakhba” is acceptable and does in fact appear in the textbooks.
The German Nobel prize winner for literature, Günther Grass, who has been strongly criticized for his long-belated confession that he served in the notorious Waffen-SS during World War II, just compared the Holocaust to the sufferings of the German soldiers during the war: “Of eight million German soldiers who were captured by the Russians, perhaps two million survived and all the rest were liquidated”, Grass said. “I am not saying this to diminish the gravity of the crime against the Jews, but the Holocaust was not the only crime”.
Elsewhere, Nobel laureate, lifelong communist and literary luminary, José Saramago compared realities in the Palestinian territories with Auschwitz.
The instrumentalization of the Holocaust and the terminology associated with it obscures the real issues and ramifications of the mass murder, it desecrates the memory of the victims and trivializes the crimes of the perpetrators.
The German historian Ernst Nolte, during a lecture at the Italian Congress, declared that “the only difference between Israel and the Third Reich is Auschwitz” and that “the liking for the Palestinians is more widespread than that one for the Holocaust’s victims”.
Last year, then-German president Horst Kohler issued the Federal Merit Cross, one of the country’s most important awards, to the lawyer Felicia Langer, who has equated Israel with Nazi Germany.
When the largest Spanish daily, El Monde, includes Holocaust denier David Irving among its list of “experts” to be interviewed to mark 70 years since the start of World War II, it means that European conscience is rotten about the Shoah.
The Greek daily Ethnos, close to the Socialist Party, depicted two Israeli soldiers (with stars of David on their helmets) dressed as Nazis stabbing helpless Arabs. The caption: “Do not feel guilty, my brother. We were not in Auschwitz and Dachau to suffer, but to learn”.
In 2006, the Norwegian daily Dagbladet carried a drawing showing Ehud Olmert as SS Major Amon Goeth, the commander of a death camp depicted in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”.
The former French diplomat Stéphane Hessel, author of the commercial success of “Indignezvous!” (Cry Out!), accused Israel of behaving like the Nazis (“alas, the past offers few examples of people learning lessons from their own history”).
Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the first president of the European Central Bank and a friend of the Queen of the Netherlands, declared that “Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby is playing on the country’s sense of guilt over the Holocaust”.
Last spring the city of Frankfurt invited Alfred Grosser to deliver a speech at commemoration of Kristallnacht. Grosser has compared his treatment by the Nazis in the early 1930s with Israel’s policies toward the Arabs.
During the Cast Lead Operation, which Israel fought to attempt to stop the thousands of rockets being launched against its citizens from Gaza after several years of suffering without reacting, the Italian Bishop Luigi Bettazzi declared: “To the Israeli friends I say: be aware that one day it will be said that the Nazis have been exceeded, that they killed ten for one of them and you killed a hundred”.
When in Europe people begin to pervert the Holocaust, there are just two possible reactions: being concerned or complacent. As it happened seventy years ago, that’s the only moral distinction by which ordinary people and famous intellectuals will be judged.
A sour and poisonous rain is now falling once again on our heads.
Comments are closed.
