It’s not just Trump, Europe forgets the Holocaust’s Jewish victims

When a big public controversy erupts, the temptation to personalize is great, as when President Trump — and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau in 2016 — issued a Holocaust Day Remembrance statement that did not explicitly mention 6 million Jewish victims, including 1.5 million children who were the primary targets and victims of the Nazi’s WWII genocide.

The suggestion that these world leaders are anti-Semites is ludicrous. They are not.  However, their omissions constitute a missed opportunity for the world to accept its real responsibility on January 27th: To remember the full enormity of the Holocaust, the power of hate and anti-Semitism and to teach our children why “never again” is still so relevant to the 21st  Century world.

{mosads}If you are going to personalize about the Holocaust, there is no better example than the life of Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish architect who, together with his wife, lost 89 relatives to Nazi mass murder.

After WWII, he emerged as the conscience of the postwar world, becoming the unofficial ambassador of 6 million ghosts as the legendary “Nazi hunter.”

Wiesenthal was often criticized, even by fellow Holocaust survivors, for emphasizing that there were millions of non-Jewish Nazi victims who also deserved to be remembered. He insisted that his namesake institution, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, also memorialize the Roma, gays, Slavs and the disabled.

But Wiesenthal also insisted that the central focus remain on the destruction of two thirds of European Jewry, and one third of the total world Jewish population, doomed by the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”

It was at the 1942 Wannsee Conference where soulless German bureaucrats — many with doctorates — along with their efficient military collaborators plotted the cheapest, most efficient way to mass murder an entire people with the least public notoriety.

Holocaust museum releases statement after White House defends Trump’s Remembrance Day statement https://t.co/2nhwMhRzkP pic.twitter.com/Ui8ehOgvWz

— The Hill (@thehill) January 31, 2017

In the 21st Century, Holocaust education — a cornerstone of learning civic consciousness and conscience across Europe and especially in Germany — is now being challenged as never before. A German school has just given students of Muslim faith a pass from studying the Holocaust so as not to offend their religious “sensitivities.”

How ironic. Who more than these young people need to learn the lessons of German history, not only to become good citizens in their new country, but to acknowledge and discard the legacy of Jew-hatred that is still rife and toxic in the Muslim societies from which they fled.

Educators, civic leaders and yes, heads of state, must not be afraid to push back against political correctness run amok that mocks genocide’s warnings and renders nameless the victims of the Holocaust.

Tragically, we are already witness to Holocaust commemorations sans Jews. In the Swedish city of Umea, Kristallnacht — the November 1938 pogroms throughout Germany during which 267 synagogues were destroyed and 30,000 Jews were interned — was commemorated.  But the local branch of the Arbetarpartiet, or Workers Party, failed to invite any Jews to attend or address the gathering.

Carrine Sjöberg, head of the city’s organized Jewish community, said she was shocked to learn that the reason she was not contacted was because organizers believes that “Jewish people will be scared to come” because often Israeli flags are displayed with swastikas daubed across them.

Nobody believes this excuse.

As James Kirchick writes in Tablet magazine:

“Imagine a remembrance of slavery that did not acknowledge the suffering of African Americans — or a commemoration of the AIDS epidemic omitting the experiences of gay men. Such acts of dissociation would be inconceivable, the subjects of rightful denunciations and outraged protests.

“Yet in recent years, that is precisely what has been going on with regard to the Holocaust and its chief victims, the Jews. Last month, Britain’s National Union of Students (NUS) — which claims to represent some 7 million students across 600 campuses — debated whether it should even commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day… ‘Of course there shouldn’t be anti-Semitism’, said a student speaking against the measure, … ‘But it’s not about one set of people’.”

The worst possible outcome of International Holocaust Memorial Day is to make the greatest victims the “Unknown Soldiers” of Genocide— “remembering” the Holocaust but forgetting its Jewish victims.

Going forward, we can drop any pretense of caring about past and present manifestations of history’s oldest hate, or we can create a great teaching moment for rededicating the great truths of the Holocaust at a time when anti-Semitism is resurgent everywhere.

This is a time for presidents and prime ministers to lead.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian, is a consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.