Wissenschaft und Publizistik als Kritik

Schlagwort: genocide

Chicago’s mayor goes Pro-Hamas: ‘Ceasefire now’

The Times of Israel (TOI), Blogs

By Dr. Clemens Heni

On January 31, 2024, a symbolic resolution for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip was adopted by the Chicago City Parliament in the US with the decisive vote of the mayor. The vote itself had been 23 to 23, meaning that half of the elected representatives had rejected the antisemitic resolution, which had been promoted for weeks, while the other half had approved it.

Many dozens of antisemitic Palestinians and their friends had previously shouted around in parliament and were then banned from the chamber by their buddy, the mayor of Chicago, after some time. But dozens were allowed to continue shouting their antisemitic hate speech loudly behind glass windows in a kind of VIP lounge and display their antisemitic clothing such as the PLO scarf or keffiya.

Earlier, before being ejected from the meeting hall, Chicago’s only Jewish congresswoman Debra Silverstein had been antisemiticaly insulted and a typical antisemitic conspiracy myth intoned that she would use her “Zionist money” to “wipe crime off her desk”.

The modern form of Holocaust denial also comes to the fore here, the unspeakable crimes of Hamas are negated or celebrated and Israel is accused, just as the antisemitic government from South Africa is doing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The perpetrator-victim reversal is a very typical pattern of antisemitism, as research has shown in recent decades.

In her speech, Silverstein emphasized that it was intolerable to call for a ceasefire and not the complete destruction of Hamas.

The Palestinian organization had massacred over 1200 Jews in southern Israel in a genocidal frenzy on October 7, 2023 and kidnapped over 240, of which about 130 remain held hostage to this day.

Chicago Congressman Byron Sigcho-Lopez had brought fliers and in his speech accused the New York Times of documenting without evidence the genocidal pogroms of Hamas, including the unspeakable rapes of Jewish women by Muslim and Palestinian butchers. Sigcho-Lopez then celebrated the victory against Israel with antisemitic buddies, even if it was only symbolic – Chicago, however, is the third largest city in the USA after New York City and Los Angeles.

Public school students were given extra time off to participate in demonstrations in support of a permanent ceasefire and thus in support of the genocidal, Islamist-terrorist organization Hamas, according to the Wall Street Journal:

In the Windy City, the resolution was helped along by the Chicago Public Schools system, which offered students grace time to join Tuesday walk-outs supporting the ceasefire. Mr. Johnson said he was ‘incredibly proud’ of students for ‘exercising their constitutional rights’ and ‘speak(ing) up for righteousness.’

At these hate demonstrations against Israel on Tuesday, January 30, 2024, hundreds of students from high schools and other schools demonstrated for the antisemitic terror gang Hamas, for Palestine and against Israel.

The mayor was mighty proud of the young people who are standing up for Hamas and a permanent ceasefire, i.e. for the preservation of Hamas and against the complete disarmament of these Nazi-like monsters.

Here you can see the antisemites cheering after the decisive vote for a permanent ceasefire and thus for Hamas by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Chicago has the largest Palestinian community in the US. The 82-year-old “civil rights activist” Jesse Jackson received enthusiastic applause for his mere presence and support of the anti-Israel resolution.

At least two antisemites carried a Palestinian flag with a picture of the Hamas spokesman in Chicago yesterday, according to the Times of Israel (TOI).

So they are fans of the Muslim-Nazis of Hamas and are obviously allowed to walk around freely in the US and spread antisemitic propaganda. People with flags like the one in Chicago should be charged with supporting terrorism and genocide, just like neo-Nazis who deny or celebrate the Holocaust.

Members of the “democratic socialists” in Chicago campaigned for and supported Johnson in 2023, as Politico magazine reports. Reactionary, antisemitic, but in the woke language of the mainstream called “progressives”, anti-Zionist employees of the City of Chicago have been agitating for a permanent ceasefire since the fall of 2023, analogous to employees in the White House of Joe Biden, who is a Zionist and close friend of the only Jewish state.

After the worst mass murder of Jews since the Shoah on 7 October 2023, the antisemitic organization “Democratic Socialists of America” is engaging in a typical perpetrator-victim reversal and is calling for no military aid for Israel from the USA and an end to the “massacres”, by which it means Israel’s self-defense.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented and criticized several examples of antisemitism by the “Democratic Socialists of America”. In Salt Lake City, for example, the group incites against the “settler-colonialist apartheid” of Israel, in San Francisco it talks about the “decolonization of Palestine” and calls for further mass murder of Jews with the slogan “from the river to the sea”, i.e. the destruction of the Jewish and democratic state of Israel. Only a few days after October 7, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in Denver, Colorado, calls for the complete destruction of Israel – “from the river to the sea“, as the ADL notes. For antisemites like these anti-democratic “socialists” and “democrats”, Israel is the perpetrator and not the victim of genocidal Muslim and Palestinian violence.

At any rate, this is also the milieu that supported the mayor of Chicago in the election campaign. It is therefore his “thanks” to these antisemitic agitators of all genders that he has now intolerably given his decisive vote to the anti-Israel resolution.

The New Yorker and Jacobin magazines, and of course the Young Democratic Socialists of America, were all excited in 2023 about ‘their’ new Mayor Johnson in Chicago, who could be a role model for major cities and other communities across America. What will they say now that their hero has helped an antisemitic resolution to pass with his vote?

America, and therefore the West, is teetering on the brink. In view of Brandon Johnson’s sensational election victory as mayor of Chicago in the spring of 2023, the US Democratic Party has decided to hold the party convention for the 2024 presidential election in Chicago of all places. This will be the most difficult battle for the pro-Israeli Joe Biden, because the extreme opposition to his pro-Israel policy comes from within his own party.

America, and therefore the West, is teetering on the brink. In view of Brandon Johnson’s sensational election victory as mayor of Chicago in the spring of 2023, the US Democratic Party has decided to hold the party convention for the 2024 presidential election in Chicago of all places. This will be the most difficult battle for the pro-Israeli Joe Biden, because the extreme opposition to his pro-Israel policy comes from within his own party. Added to this is the new right-wing agitator and populist Donald Trump, who has still not conceded his 2020 election defeat. Trump’s isolationism and complete arbitrariness could have dramatic consequences for Israel. Trump’s antisemitic and conspiracy-mythic voter base complements the antisemitic and conspiracy-mythic voter base of parts of the Democrats, i.e. the part that is aggressively pro-Palestine.

Immediately after the genocidal massacre by Hamas, Johnson failed politically. A few days after October 7, 2023, he remained equidistant. However, his parliamentary group leader in the Chicago parliament, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, re-tweeted a tweet by the notorious Ilhan Omar, Democrat member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota, in which the antisemitic classic of Jews and Israel as “child murderers” in Gaza and Palestine is rehashed. Ramirez-Rosa himself supports the antisemitic BDS movement, which is why he was dropped as a candidate for the position of lieutenant governor by Daniel Biss in September 2017. However, this did not hinder the career of Ramirez-Rosa, who openly appears as a Palestine supporter on his X profile.

He only had to resign from his position as leader of the Democrats in the Chicago City Council in November 2023 because he apparently has a violence problem – he had put his body in the way of a female colleague and prevented her from entering the meeting room.

The misery doesn’t just consist of people like this “Carlos”. The misery lies in the fact that everywhere, from Berlin to Chicago, San Francisco, Paris or London, those who supposedly stand up for diversity, tolerance and diversity are the exact same people who abandon or hate Jews and Israel and aggressively fight against them.

They are the very people who quite rightly oppose Trump or the AfD and recognize and criticize conspiracy myths, but as soon as a conspiracy myth or an antisemitic lie and perpetrator-victim reversal such as the fantasized “genocide” in Gaza come into play, the “do-gooders” remain silent. This currently affects millions of people in Germany who have taken to the streets and are against right-wing extremism in recent days and weeks – but these people remain silent about hatred of Jews because it comes from Muslims, Palestinians, left-wingers or oh so “progressive” people.

Those who see climate change as a huge threat are often those who see no problem in antisemitism and are antisemitic themselves, see Greta Thunberg. Conservatives, on the other hand, who deny man-made climate change, are sometimes more open to criticism of antisemitism, although this is often accompanied by the note that it is simply against left-wingers or migrants. But leftists and migrants, on the other hand, feel completely immune to criticism, as they are by definition immune to criticism. But today’s antisemitism of the 21st century comes primarily from Muslims and Islam, keyword Iran. Even otherwise secular leftists have been joining the chorus of anti-Zionists and Islamists for decades.

That was the biggest shock for Jews in Germany, the USA and worldwide, that they were left completely alone after the most terrible massacre, which definitely had a genocidal character, on October 7, 2023, and experienced antisemitic demonstrations, rallies and actions of varying intensity in the USA, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, England and everywhere else.

It was quite typical that the newly elected president of Harvard University had to resign after her refusal to categorize the call for genocide against Jews – “Palestine from the river to the sea” is a genocidal battle cry – as worth fighting and intolerable (which was also because she did unscientific and plagiaristic work). But it was a symbol worldwide of the so-called woke milieu, where it is always about diversity, equality and inclusion, that diversity, equality and inclusion does not mean Jews. Women’s groups refuse to call the documented rapes of Jewish women by Muslim men intolerable and repugnant, just as any rape is intolerable and repugnant. Even genocide researchers are stunned by the unbelievable brutality and sadism of Muslim men and Palestinians. Black Lives matter – but what about when it comes to Jewish lives? Black people in particular are at the forefront of defaming Israel, celebrating Hamas and wishing death on Jews. This was demonstrated when BLM Chicago posted a paraglider with a Palestinian flag. 90,000 people viewed it on X, which did not immediately delete this form of antisemitism and celebration of a genocidal massacre and blocked the account.

The core of the antisemitism problem in Chicago, however, is Brandon Johnson. From cooperating with a BDS supporter, to taking an equidistant stance after the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah, to openly supporting Hamas with yesterday’s decision for a full ceasefire without fully disarming the Muslim-Nazis, Johnson shows which side he is on. He has given the antisemites in Chicago a field day with his vote, leaving behind a deeply divided city parliament and a massively shaken Democratic Party.

The Jewish Union Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League Midwest criticize the anti-Israel resolution of the city of Chicago and emphasize that in recent weeks Jewish life there is no longer safe. Jews are being insulted, stores are being graffitied and pro-Palestinian propaganda is being spread. The perpetrators – Muslims and Palestinians – are being victimized. The old antisemitic game of perpetrator-victim reversal – only it hasn’t happened on this scale since the Holocaust and all Israelis and Zionist Jews also thought that after Auschwitz and Babi Yar there could never be anything like it again. But Israel, for many reasons that are still being worked through, completely failed to protect its own people on October 7, 2023.

The US Democratic Party, however, will be pro-Israeli or it will not be. The election for American president in 2024 will be dramatic in every respect. The antisemite and sexist Trump must not win. But Joe Biden, who is also completely unqualified for the presidency because of his age, will face a massive antisemitic campaign from his own people.

Chicago is a beacon, contrary to any beacon of hope. The city is an antisemitic beacon. Democrats and the left must finally stand up against all forms of antisemitism, mainstream as well as right-wing, anti-Zionist and Holocaust trivializing antisemitism, but also and especially, because it is much more widespread, the anti-Jewish genocide celebrating, Hamas protecting, Muslim, Palestinian and left-wing antisemitism.

Am Israel Chai!

About the Author
Dr Clemens Heni is director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

StandWithUs to distort history?

This article was first published with the Times of Israel on 26 April, 2016

The pro-Israel NGO StandWithUs is an important voice in the anti-BDS camp. They are doing Israel advocacy and criticize anti-Zionist anti-Semitism. On 24 April, 2015, StandWithUs published a pictogram on Facebook that equates the horrible events of 1915 during the First World War, the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire (the Young Turks), to Nazi Germany. They equate the Young Turks to Hitler and 1915 to 1939, as if the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and Hitler came to power in 1939.

StandWithUspictogram 24 April 2016 on Facebook

September 1, 1939, the Second World War begun, but the picture by StandWithUs deliberately uses a pictogram of Hitler and his rise to power has nothing to do with 1939, but with 1933.

But there is much more behind this campaign by StandWithUs. To acknowledge the Armenian tragedy as genocide has been an international topic for decades now. Many equate genocide to the Shoah. The Holocaust is portrayed as just a genocide among others. That is a very common but dangerous trope.

In particular, post-colonial studies are eager to deny the unprecedented character of the Shoah. Take British-Nigerian broadcast of the BBC, David Olusoga’s and his Danish colleague Casper Erichsen’s 2010 book “Kaiser’s Holocaust” as an example. They make an analogy of the German massacre in South-West Africa in the early 20th century to the Holocaust. They claim the Shoah was a form of “social Darwinism.” No, the Holocaust was not a form of social Darwinism, nor were the Jews seen as the “weak.” Contrary to that, Germans saw Jews as superior, dangerous, and as preparing a world conspiracy. That is the very essence of anti-Semitism.

Post-colonial scholarship as well as post-Orientalist and genocide studies fail to understand the specificity of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism imagined the Jews behind all evil, as being behind capitalism in the United States and communism and the Soviet Union. There is no connection between the “People without Space,” as one chapter in Kaiser’s Holocaust reads, and the Shoah, because anti-Semitism and the Shoah had nothing to do with land gain, imperialism or any other form of political, territorial, economic, cultural, social etc. purpose. The authors simply ignore the entire scholarship on the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

German historian Jürgen Zimmerer is a leading voice in comparing and equating German colonialism to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In 2003, he published an article wherein he stated that “genocides in the colonies” are in the same “category” as “National Socialist murder policies.” In 2011, Zimmerer published a collection of his essays on colonialism and the Holocaust, entitled From Windhuk to Auschwitz? He insists that as early as 1947 American civil rights activist and historian W.E.B. Dubois (1868–1963) said:

There was no Nazi atrocity — concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood — which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.

Zimmerer emphasizes that another author posited comparable arguments. This is the old superstar of post-colonialism-studies, Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), who wrote in 1950 that the crime of the Holocaust is (supposedly) seen as horrible not because of

the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he [Hitler] applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs, of Algeria, the colonies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

The city of Paris dedicated a big street at the Seine, close to the Louvre, to the memory of Césaire, “Quai Aimé Césaire.”

20160318_142415

Then, StandWithUs should look at Yale University. The most recent example of equating the fate of the Armenians to the Holocaust and to distort anti-Semitism and the Shoah comes from Yale University’s political scientist professor Seyla Benhabib.

In a recent article in the mainstream Journal of Genocide Research (Vol. 17, No. 3, 2015), she compares the mass-murder of Armenians by the Turkish in the First World War to the Jews and the Shoah. She urges US Congress and others to call the Armenian tragedy a “genocide.” She takes aim at American and Israeli politicians who reject to frame the mass-murder a genocide. She is not a historian of the Shoah, to be sure. But her approach is very much representing vast parts of the humanities and social sciences when it comes to reject the uniqueness of the Shoah. The case of the mass-murder of the Armenians is just used by Benhabib to bolster her anti-Zionist agenda. She writes:

At a deeper level, both Zionism and Kemalism are state-building and nation-crafting ideologies and the old elites of these movements understood one another very well. David Ben-Gurion had studied law in the Ottoman Empire, and to this day Israeli law contains many elements of Ottoman law. Just as Armenian people refer to the events of 1915 as their Holocaust, with the founding of the State of Israel, it is now Palestinians who refer to that event as their ‘naqbah’. In other words, the Israelis are no longer like the Armenians, a diasporic people, spread among the nations, but a people with a modern mighty nation-state, just as modern Turkey itself is.

Benhabib and her allies, like editor Dirk A. Moses — she thanks him “for encouraging me to publish it in this form” — equate the Holocaust to completely distinct events in history like the mass-murder of the Armenian people in 1915, which was not at all the same as the industrial eradication of European Jewry by the Germans.

Benhabib’s editor and ally, historian Dirk A. Moses from Australia, professor of history at the University of Sydney, sets American slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust, the fate of blacks and Jews in one historical line. In 2002, he published an article about the “racial century (1850–1950).” He accuses the Western world and Europe for “Eurocentrism” when the Holocaust is seen as unique. Moses is applying the language, for example, of German right-wing extremists who make fun of Jewish survivors and he accuses Jewish survivors of taking the Holocaust as something “sacred.”

Moses is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. He claims that “colonialism and the Holocaust are linked,” and that there is a close connection between “colonial rule and anti-Semitism.” For him, the “Holocaust” was the result “of a frustrated imperial nation.” Moses promotes the controversial approaches of scholars like Césaire or Zimmerer. Hamburg University’s historian Jürgen Zimmerer is Chair Person of the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Genocide Research and its former editor from 2005–2011.

Post-colonial or pre-colonial violence, though, are not topics of scholars like Moses as it looks like. Western scholarship does not deny the huge crimes of colonialism, and imperialism, including slavery, massacres, forced land dispossession, mass rape of women, sexual abuse and so on. As long post-colonial scholars, however, are not focusing on Arab and Muslim slavery in the Middle Ages and the modern times, as well as the ongoing Islamic jihad and anti-Western propaganda, one cannot take them too seriously as scholars who really care about violence in history and our contemporary world. Is it possible that violence just counts for them when the perpetrator is white and European, Australian, Canadian or American, Christian or Zionist, but never Muslim or “native,” for example?

Mose’s ally Benhabib misses the point, that Jews and Israel are threatened today by world-wide anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, while there is no international movement to “wipe Armenians of the map,”, for example. Benhabib’s use of the term Holocaust for the history of the Armenians as well as her analogy of Arab-Palestinian history is very troubling, too. She wants to equate Jews to Armenians and the Palestinians to Jews with the pure intention to portray both Armenians and Palestinians as still victims of history, while the Jews succeeded to get their own state (Armenians, too).

She does not even discuss that many in Europa and the US want Turkey to recognize the Armenian “genocide” — that is the topic of her article — because they are anti-Islam. There is of course also a serious awareness of Turkish crimes against the Armenians by scholars and the public who are not driven by anti-Muslim feelings. But many of that kind of people seem to be driven by Holocaust distortion. Benhabib accuses Israel and the US of “ugly geopolitical games.”  Perhaps one could take her approach more seriously, if she wouldn’t compare and even equate the Holocaust to the Armenian tragedy. But the downplaying or rejection of the uniqueness of the Shoah is the condition sine qua non of many parts of genocide research.

It is important to remember the Armenian tragedy, of course. But it is a distortion of history and a denial (!) of the unprecedented character of the Shoah to claim that without 1915 Hitler and the Nazis wouldn’t have come to power. This is a distortion of history and a denial of anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with Ottoman or Armenian history. German anti-Semitism goes way back and was not inspired by the horrible events during the First World War in the Ottoman Empire.

It is shocking, though, to see an American NGO — StandWithUs — promoting these historical distortions, including the obfuscation of the long history of German anti-Semitism up until eliminationist anti-Semitism during Nazi Germany.

You can and should remember what happened to the Armenians. But never ever as analogy to anti-Semitism, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party and the Shoah. Instead, this campaign by StandWithUs speaks volumes about the knowledge of some of the smartest pro-Israel advocates in the US when it comes to the specificity of anti-Semitism, German history, and the rise of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and Hitler to power in 1933, not in 1939.

I’d suggest to read Bernard-Henri Lévy’s 2008 study “Left in Dark Times. A Stand against the New Barbarism,” and his take on the uniqueness of the Shoah and the Armenian tragedy:

And you could take the time, with those who wonder, sometimes in good faith, about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, you could take the time to explain that this uniqueness has nothing to do with body count but with a whole range of characteristics that, strange as it may seem, coincide nowhere else in all the crimes human memory recalls.

The industrialization of death is one such: the gas chamber. The irrationality, the absolute madness of the project, is the second: the Turks had the feeling, well founded or not, and mostly, of course, unfounded, that they were killing, in the Armenians, a fifth column that was weakening them in their war against the Russians — there was no point in killing the Jews; none of the Nazis took the trouble to claim that there was any point to it at all;

and such was the irrationality, I almost said gratuitousness, of the process that when, by chance, the need to exterminate coincided with another imperative that actually did have a point, when, in the last months of the war, when all the railways had been bombed by the Allies, the Nazis could choose between letting through a train full of fresh troops for the eastern front or a trainload of Jews bound to be trans-formed into Polish smoke in Auschwitz, it was the second train that had priority, since nothing was more absurd or more urgent, crazier or more vital, than killing the greatest number of Jews.

And the third characteristic that, finally, makes the Holocaust unique: the project of killing the Jews down to the last one, to wipe out any trace of them on this earth where they had made the mistake of being born, to proceed to an extermination that left no survivors. A Cambodian could, theoretically at least, flee Cambodia; a Tutsi could flee Rwanda, and outside Rwanda, at least ideally, would be out of range of the machetes; the Armenians who managed to escape the forces of the Young Turk government were only rarely chased all the way to Paris, Budapest, Rome, or Warsaw (…).

It is tremendously important to fight Islamism and the current Erdogan regime in Turkey, including their denial of the Armenian tragedy. But there is a huge gap between denial and equation of that history to the Holocaust! It was not a forerunner of the industrial murder of Jews by Germans during the Second World War and National Socialism.

Israeli historian at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yitzhak Kerem, writes the following about the Armenian tragedy:

In 1915, it’s more of a conflict. Turks will exaggerate and say that more Turks were killed in the fighting from 1915 to 1923 than Armenians. They do have responsibilities towards the Armenians, but to pattern itself as a Jewish holocaust which [some Armenians] have done, they were pushed by British intelligence, is a distortion of history.

“My point is, and this is what the Armenians don’t like, is that more Kurds killed Armenians than Turks. The Turks did terrible things to the Armenians. They butchered people right and left. They raped and pillaged, but it wasn’t an organized act by the regime. It was a byproduct of hate. The Turks did terrible things to the Greek Orthodox, especially in Izmir. To call that a holocaust and a genocide when you are equating that with the Jewish holocaust is a distortion.

This, at least, should be a point of departure for a discussion. Not denial of the Armenian tragedy as Erdogan and his regime prefer. And not exaggeration and equation with the Holocaust either.

This recent campaign of StandWithUs might be considered as a symbol of contemporary activism as well as scholarship in genocide research and post-colonial studies. Holocaust distortion is not seen as a topic from that point of view. The inflation of genocide and the rejection of the unprecedented character of Auschwitz has become mainstream even in some pro-Israel circles.

I just read the other day an old critique by English Studies professor Edward Alexander about Shulamit Aloni (1928–2014), a former Israeli minister of education, leader of the Meretz Party, Israel-Prize winner and human rights activist. Her focus on the Palestinians and how they are treated has for sure some merits, as long as we ignore her blind-eye on Palestinian terrorism, both secular and Islamist, and anti-semitism. Alexander focused on Aloni’s contribution to Holocaust distortion. In my view, his criticism fits very well to the recent StandWithUs campaign and to post-colonial studies and genocide studies. In his article “What the Holocaust Does Not Teach” (1993, republished in his “Jews against Themselves,” 2015) Alexander wrote:

But Mrs. Aloni, the Israeli, the Israeli version of what East European Jews used to call ‘a cossack in a sukkah,’ has deplored the stress upon the Holocaust as regressive and nationalistic. ‘I do not take pictures of the backside of history,’ she declared on Israeli Radio. ‘The Ministry of Education must be concerned with the future.’ Even before her elevation of office, Aloni frequently denounced Holocaust education in Israel because it taught children that ‘the Nazis did this to the Jews instead of the message that people did this to people.’

Aloni’s approach might fit American inclusiveness but fails to understand anti-Semitism, let alone the Shoah.

Holocaust distortion by Seyla Benhabib and the Journal of Genocide Research when it comes to the Armenian tragedy should be a warning to pro-Israel groups like StandWithUs in the future.

Finally, there seems to be a need, even an obsession, to reject the uniqueness of the Shoah. Germans need to obfuscate German crimes and project their guilt onto Jews or the allies. That has been analyzed as early as 1960 by Peter Schönbach, a co-worker of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.

Be it the fantasy of a Palestinian “Naqba” being equal to the Holocaust, be it the supposedly “Kaiser’s Holocaust” in German South-West Africa (1904–1907), be it the allegedly intentional “Ukrainian Holocaust” in 1932 or be it the propagated analogy of 1915 and 1933/39, Armenians and Jews, Turks and Nazis or Germany. This is how the Holocaust distortion movement works.

Today, we see this need to “steal the Holocaust,” as it is called, even among pro-Israel groups. StandWithUs is a case in point.

The author, Dr. Clemens Heni, is Director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

 

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