OPINION: The pressing new challenge facing Holocaust educators
Marc Cave of the National Holocaust Centre calls for anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists, rather than Jews, to face cross-examination
One year ago I wrote about the next Jewish genocide. Today, we are one year closer to it.
It is not being organised on the far Right. It is not sponsored as in previous centuries by Western states. In fact it’s part of a movement against the Western system: an alliance between radical political Islamists and Leftists.
It is chilling that today’s far Left regurgitates Nazi ideology. It promotes the same anti-Jewish money, blood & power libels. Its Self is defined by demonising the same Jewish ‘Other’. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the Marxist, non-Jewish academic Dr Camilla Bassi in her 2023 book ‘Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination’:
“‘…’the Jewish question’ [is] the idea that something must be done with the harmful Jewish collective. Laid bare, ‘the Jewish question’ is antisemitism: the world is imagined to be run by Jewish elites, who operate on a supra-national scale, through an invisible reality behind a visible reality, managing the fate of not just Palestinians, but all humankind”.
‘The Jewish question’?! The question that triggered Hitler’s Final Solution was identically worded. So I am at pains to stress this article is not about the Hamas-Israel war but about the bigger anti-Jewish race war it foreshadows. For what it’s worth, my stomach churns at the bloodshed on both sides of the Middle East conflict. But we must recognise the ‘final solution’ coded in the slogan ‘From the river to sea Palestine will be free’. Like most ordinary Jews everywhere, I’d like to see two states not one. More a case of ‘From the sea to the river, both shawarma and chopped liver’.
The Leftists say they have no issue with “Jews as Jews” — how kind — and yet the thugs among them have demonstrated a belief that the best way to “Free Palestine” is to smash up a menorah in Willesden Green or beat a Jewish woman unconscious in Stamford Hill. Consider too the banners depicting Israel’s flag being put into a dustbin with the words “Keep the world clean”. It is straight out of the Nazis’ racial hygiene textbook.
Then there is the gentrification of this hate by the heads of Ivy League schools. What other genocide might be ok ‘depending on the context’?#
For radical Islamists, violently replacing the world’s only Jewish country with a 49th Muslim one is but a stepping stone to a global caliphate. For the far Left, it is to strike the head of the Western serpent. Through a tragic massaging of history to suit its monomania, Israel is the ultimate embodiment of Western capitalism, imperialism and so-called elitism. And for one reason only. Because it is Jewish.
What can we do about all this? Very simply, help the public and our civic institutions to decode what seem like attractive slogans. They might want to do more to prevent the next Jewish genocide than they did the last one: it’s a declaration of war against their own way of life.
This means helping the public to re-learn the critical thinking skills abolished by the great dictator of the post-Truth age: The Algorithm. People like to be able to see through BS — it flatters the ego. But we need to be more innovative. To deny something is to reinforce it. To campaign is merely to complain. It needs a counter-narrative. Let us cross-examine not Jews but anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists. Let us expose the beliefs that today’s so-called peace protesters share with the Nazis. This is a crucial new role for Holocaust education.
Let us also offer counter-evidence which shows how silly they can be. We, the National Holocaust Museum, are currently touring a pop-up exhibition called ‘I Say British, You Say Jewish’. The racist imagination has long been unable to grasp dual identity — think of the National Front marcher who thought that to be Black meant you could not be ‘properly British’. The anti-Jewish leftist is of course subtler. Their snide expression “The Zionist Lobby” is, once again, code. It means ‘The Jews’. Its definite pronoun says all Jews are the same. It is why Professor David Miller hysterically accused his Jewish students at Bristol University of being fifth columnists for Israel. All of them. This is a puerile loyalty libel echoing the Nazi one about the networked Jewish ‘cabal’. (And how ironic when we remember that the Leftist poster boy Jeremy Corbyn, when Leader of the Opposition, was deemed a threat to national security and denied access to intelligence, as would normally be granted to the holder of that office).
‘I Say British, You Say Jewish’ celebrates the reality of Jews playing an enthusiastic part in British culture whilst maintaining Jewish culture. Take the kippot on display in football club colours. Blow me down. Who knew you could both be Jewish AND an Arsenal fan? May nuance reign. And may difference be celebrated, especially when it is shared – be it the beigel or the bhaji.
Meanwhile – our civic institutions are largely onlookers in the current culture war. Yet they are the apparatus of the very state that the extreme Islamist-Leftist alliance despises. Our new Racism Response Unit is here to empower the staff of our universities, schools, councils, media outlets, unions and police forces. Where they struggle to recognise what ‘antisemitism’ (an awful obscure word) is, we show how it is anti-Jewish racism, like any other racism. When that anti-Jewish racism comes in code, we will help them decode it. When it presents as attractive ‘human rights campaigning’, we will help them uncover the exterminatory agenda behind it. We have trialled this training for a year with 400 staff at the University of Nottingham. Scales fell from their eyes.
Israel reinforces – not creates – what the extreme Leftist-Islamist alliance believes about Jews. For them, to eliminate Israel is to reduce ‘global Jewish power’. To reduce ‘global Jewish power’ is to overthrow the West. So their coded call for a new Jewish extermination is a threat to us all.
On Holocaust Memorial Day, we pledge to combat the same old theories that led to the Shoah but now being wielded by a new group of anti-Jewish racists.
The 2024 HMD theme is the Fragility of Freedom. Many Jews certainly know how fragile their freedoms are right now. The freedom to wear a Star of David on campus. The freedom from a beating in Stamford Hill. The freedom from abuse and death threats online. But let none of us forget the fragility of Western democracy itself.
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