A week meant to commemorate and pay homage to the victims of the greatest catastrophe of human history has been marred this Monday in Poland by anti-Semitism.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on an interview from the Catholic Web site Pontifex.com, in which polish Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek claimed, “Jews had expropriated the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon.”
According to the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Pieronek went further stating, “the Jews, enjoy good press because they have powerful financial means behind them, enormous power and the unconditional backing of the United States and this favors a certain arrogance that I find unbearable.”
Upon publication of the interview, the Bishop denied that he gave permission for the interviews publications and claimed that his remarks were manipulated.
Couple this with the anti-Semitic remarks made by Bishop Richard Williamson, widely regarded as examples of blatant Holocaust denial, and the Catholic Church’s recent track record for rooting out and fighting anti-Semitism does not fare too well.
Beyond the simply bungling of the higher-ups in the Vatican to clamp down on this, the situation in Poland reflects a wider problem with which the world is faced; that is, the growing specter of a new breed of anti-Semitism.
How truly unthinkable is it that on a day commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, the entire lesson learned from the Holocaust comes into question?
Former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Israel Meir Lau, perhaps put it best in a speech regarding the lessons derived from the Holocaust at Yad VaShem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum: “It’s not only for the past, for the glory of the victims. It’s at least at the same level for our present and for our future ... Go back tell the story, in order to promise that such a story will never reappear again in any place in the world.”
Rather than stick to the old methods of Holocaust denial, simply denying that the Holocaust occurred or calling into question the magnitude in a fundamental way, revisionists today focus on the approach that Jews somehow draw benefit from the Holocaust.
Think about that for a moment. Six million people were murdered, 1.5 million of whom were children; how can the Jewish people derive benefit from the extermination of European Jewry?
This new form of anti-Semitism is in response to the perceived ubiquitous nature of the Holocaust in the world media, as it should be. Jews are relentless in promotion of Holocaust education for the very same reasons that were elucidated by Lau.
Jews feel there is a moral imperative to prevent genocide at all costs; the words “Never Again” hold tangible meaning and the failures in Rwanda and Darfur, for example, weigh heavily within the context of Holocaust remembrance.
Jews have not expropriated the Holocaust; Jews are constantly teaching the world the relevant lessons of the Holocaust. Deniers and revisionists will likely never go away, but sadly it seems as though they have expropriated Holocaust commemoration and education as a tool of anti-Semitism.
Max may be reached at maximilian.feldhake@asu.edu
