Antisemites like Ken Roth, ‘as-a-Jews’ like Jonathan Glazer, and even non-antisemites like US President Joe Biden are lecturing Israel on the lessons Israel should learn from the Holocaust and the Second World War, but their ‘lessons’ would have prolonged the war, left Hitler in power, and led to more Jews being murdered in gas chambers.
There’s a lot that can be learned from the Holocaust and World War II as a whole. There are lessons in the bravery of some and the cowardice of others. There is so much to be learned from how Hitler was allowed to start another World War and commit a crime so great a new word had to be developed to describe it, "genocide", as well as how he was finally defeated.
People seem to love to try to apply these lessons to Jews and the Jewish State, Israel, especially in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of October 7, the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But the lessons they want Israel to learn would not have stopped World War II or saved a single one of the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
On Sunday, during the Academy Awards, Writer/director Jonathan Glazer used his acceptance speech for Best International Picture to attack Israel using the supposed “lessons” of the Holocaust and even “renounced” his Jewishness.
“Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst,” Glazer said. “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims, this humanization, how do we resist?”
How fitting that the film for which Glazer won his award, “Zone of Interest,” is a Holocaust film in which the actual victims of the Holocaust, the Jews, never appear. He has joined the ranks of the ‘as-a-Jews,’ those supposedly Jewish people for whom Judaism is nothing more than a means to attack or erase the 99% of the Jewish people who don’t think Jews should let themselves be slaughtered.
Former Human Rights Watch Director Ken Roth, the man who almost single-handedly transformed that NGO from a respected defender of human rights into an antisemitic cesspool obsessed with denying Israel’s right to not let its civilians be murdered, invoked the Holocaust on Sunday while criticizing Israel’s left-wing president.
“The Holocaust teaches no one's rights are secure unless everyone's are, but Israeli Pres. Herzog faces protests today for spreading the opposite message by saying there are no "uninvolved civilians" in Gaza, suggesting Palestinian rights are dispensable,” Roth wrote on X.
It is no secret that Roth believes that Israeli and Jewish lives are dispensable, just as so many did before and during World War II.
For a known antisemite like Roth, attempts to use the Holocaust against the Jewish people and protect those who seek to finish the job Hitler started are par for the course. Perhaps more disturbing is when the President of the United States starts doing the same thing.
In a recent interview published in The New Yorker, US President Joe Biden stated that when he spoke to Israeli officials about showing restraint following the Hamas massacre, he was met with the argument that “America carpet-bombed Germany in the Second World War”. Biden said that he responded, “That’s why we ended up with the United Nations and all these rules about not doing that again.”
He continued, “I understand the anger and the rage sparked by October 7th, but you can’t let the rage consume you to the point where you lose the moral high ground.”
Could you imagine if such advice was followed by the Allies during World War II? The war would certainly have lasted much longer, leading to greater overall loss of life and extending the Holocaust. The world would have been a worse place.
The Jews always seem to be expected to learn to be ‘better’ from the Holocaust, but never any lessons that would have saved Jewish lives then or now.
The lessons on hate are always universalized, such as when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year, “Let us speak out for human rights and the dignity of all. Let us never lose sight of each other’s humanity, and never let down our guard.”
It would be more constructive if the lessons learned from the Holocaust included “believe antisemites when they say they want to wipe out the Jewish people.”
That lesson would prove to be very useful if applied to Hamas, whose spokesman Ghazi Hamad said in October, "We will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated."
It would be more constructive if the lessons learned from the Holocaust included not believing false accusations against Jews. As Tablet Magazine proved in a recent report, Hamas is certainly faking the casualty figures for women and children in Gaza. The casualties increase by just about the same amount every day, regardless of the decrease in the intensity of the fighting. This is a virtual impossibility in any war, but Hamas’ lies are taken as gospel truth and used to fuel anti-Israel rallies and riots across the world and to force Israel into a premature ceasefire.
Hundreds of thousands of people, including the government of South Africa, would find much better things to do with their time if this lesson was learned, and there would be far less pressure on Israel to allow Hamas to repeat October 7 as Hamas vowed to do.
It would be more constructive if the lessons learned from the Holocaust included not tolerating violent and virulent antisemitism, especially since the growth of antisemitism often signals the spread of rot and decay in any given society.
British MPs would not be forced to resign and receive 31 million pounds in extra security had this lesson been learned, nor would the Biden Administration be attempting to appease Hamas-supporter Rashida Tlaib for fear of losing Michigan. No one would be rushing to give the Holocaust denier and excuser, that terrorist financier and inciter Mahmoud Abbas, his own state if the lessons about the danger of antisemitism that should have been learned from the Holocaust were actually learned.
It would be more constructive if the dangers of appeasing brutal dictators with dreams of regional or global domination and a genocidal drive were learned. Then the appeasement of Iran would end and true opposition to its illegal nuclear weapons program as well as its control of terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East could begin.
There were many mistakes made before and during World War II. From the Munich Accords to the global refusal to allow the Jews of Europe any place of refuge from Hitler to the refusal to bomb the train tracks leading to Auschwitz. It can be argued that the use of the atomic bombs on Japan was another mistake.
But one thing the Allies got absolutely right, and which seems to have been forgotten, was the need to achieve absolute victory over Germany and Japan and to accept nothing short of absolute surrender. This is what allowed for the destruction of those evil regimes and the rebuilding of both countries as members of the civilized world. This is something the free world once knew, and seems to need to learn again.
When facing an enemy that loves Hitler and Mein Kampf and seeks the exact same goal as Hitler, the lessons taken from the battle against Hitler should not be ones that would have left Hitler in power, prolonged the war, and ensured the success of the Holocaust, but those that would have stopped Hitler sooner and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of the Jews Hitler murdered.
Instead of lecturing the descendants of the victims of the greatest crime in human history, those who want to use the Holocaust as a weapon against Israel should learn the real lessons themselves.
Gary Willig is a member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.
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