Chutzpadik Haters

During the recent conflict in Gaza, anti-Israel rallies were held worldwide. They were noted for their sheer ferocity and aggressiveness. During these rallies, slogans such as "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas" and "Burn Jews as fossil fuel" were chanted. Another feature of these rallies were signs comparing Israel to the Nazis. A favourite tactic of Israel-bashers is to make comparisons between the IDF and the Nazis, thereby delegitimizing the State of Israel. Israel is demonized as apartheid and racist, guilty of the original sin of being in existence. By claiming such a state is the epitome of racist evil, Israel's foes legitimize her destruction.

Close to 70 years ago, one third of world Jewry were brutally murdered in the greatest crime ever committed in human history. The Jews of Europe were dehumanized, forced into ghettos, chocked and gassed, and then burnt in ovens and crematorium, while the world stood by silently. Once the war came to an end, the world realized the depths of depravity and evil to which it had sunk and resolved never to repeat the horrors of the Shoah. Today, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the wicked Nazis who wantonly spilled Jewish blood are leading the campaign against the Jewish state. Instead of regretting their crimes, they have been denying and minimizing the Holocaust. Racked with guilt over their grandparents complicity to murder, they have decided to downplay and belittle the Final Solution with cynical and obscene comparisons between Israel and the Nazis. As witnesses to the Holocaust are dying out and becoming ever more rare, such historical revisionism cannot go unchallenged, especially as anti-semitism continues to rise in Europe and America. For the Jewish people, it seems to be 1939 all over again.

The German National Democratic neo-Nazi party announced that it will be holding a solemn vigil in downtown Berlin for the victims of 'the Gaza holocaust'. The NPD has seats in the national parliament, and has gained significant support both at the local and federal levels. "Joint hatred of everything Jewish is unifying neo-Nazis and Islamists... German-Palestinians protestors unashamedly admitted that they would vote for the NPD during the next election," Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, warned in her speech at a pro-Israel rally earlier this month in Munich. In a similar vein, the Spanish government has cancelled its Holocaust memorial ceremony in protest of the supposed 'genocide' in Gaza. Marking the Jewish Holocaust while a Palestinian Holocaust is taking place is not right," a local City official told Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper. Other European countries have taken to Holocaust references. A Norwegian diplomat stationed in Saudi Arabia sent a mass-distributed email stating that "the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are doing the same thing to the Palestinians, as the Nazis did to their grandparents," using her official Norwegian Foreign Ministry address.

This abuse of history is so sick and twisted. Whatever one's opinion on the Gaza conflict, there is no comparison between the systematic campaign and extermination and annihilation waged by the Nazis against the Jews and a military struggle between a sovereign nation and terrorists. It is an insult to the victims of the Holocaust to equate them with civilians killed unintentionally in the cross-fires of battle. Apparently, anti-semitism and Holocaust denial allows history and events to be perverted. The same countries that happily delivered up their Jews for destruction are denying the grossness of their crimes, and allowing such a travesty to occur again.

Since the beginning of the Israeli operation in Gaza a few weeks ago, anti-semitism has flared up worldwide. Jews in Europe and North America have suffered the worst wave of anti-semitism since the Second World War. In Britain, there have been over 220 anti-semitic incidents, including bombings and vandalization of synagogues, Jewish institutions and kosher restaurants. Jews have been beaten up on the streets. In France, dozens of synagogues have been bombed as well as Jews threatened. Over Shabbat in Chicago, 5 synagogues were defaced. A homemade bomb was found outside of a Chabad House in Florence. In Rome, a trade union has proposed and put forth legislation to identify and boycott Jewish-owned businesses. Protesters have marched violently through Jewish areas in Antwerp and Paris and Italian police had to prevent protesters from entering Venice's historical ghetto area.

The hateful and ridiculous comparisons between Israel and the Nazis have made Jews targets once again. While any person has the prerogative to disagree with the specific policies of the State of Israel, accusing Israel of 'genocide' in Gaza is akin to blood libel. Those who besmirch Israel attempt to demonstrate the state as so evil that the only solution to the conflict is a Final one. According to their logic, such an apartheid racist state must be dismantled and destroyed. All decent and moral people must renounce their moral inversion and recognize that this is a conflict between terrorists and a democratic state. There are no similarities between those who shoved Jewish children into gas chambers, and Israeli soldiers trying to prevent jihadi rockets from falling on civilian targets. Those who are condemning Israel for defending itself are of the same stock as those who sat by while the Jews of Europe were being murdered. It appears that the world never learns.