Holocaust Remembrance Day: Few people know the consequences of anti-Semitism
By Julio Severo
A new survey claims Americans are
forgetting the Holocaust and the consequences of anti-Semitism.
The report asked the question: “Are those
who underestimate the death toll simply uninformed, or are they Holocaust
deniers — people with anti-Semitic views who ‘claim that the Holocaust was
invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish
interests?’”
International
Holocaust Remembrance Day is the anniversary of the date when the Red Army of
the Soviet Union liberated the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz on January
27, 1945. Auschwitz, which is in current Poland, was the most notorious in a
system of death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany operated on territory
it occupied across Europe. In all, 1.1 million people were killed there, most
of them Jews from across the European continent.
World leaders on January 23, 2020
denounced the rising threat of anti-Semitism and vowed never to forget the
lessons of the Holocaust at a solemn ceremony in Israel marking the 75th
anniversary of the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz death camp.
The
World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, the largest-ever summit of its kind, drew
more than 45 world leaders, including German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier
and Russian President Vladimir Putin. U.S. President Donald Trump did not
attend, but he sent his vice-president, Mike Pence. Brazilian President Jair
Bolsonaro was invited, but he did not attend and he did not send his
vice-president. In 2019, when visiting the Holocaust Museum in
Jerusalem Bolsonaro was corrected by its director after claiming that Nazism
was a left-wing movement.
Among the speakers was Steinmeier and
Putin.
Steinmeier said he stood before the
audience “laden with the heavy, historical burden of guilt.”
“Germans deported them. Germans burned
numbers on their forearms. Germans tried to dehumanize them, to reduce them to
numbers, to erase all memory of them in the extermination camps. They did not
succeed,” he said.
Nazi extermination of the Jews would never
have succeeded if there were not centuries of widespread anti-Semitism in
Europe. This anti-Semitism was essentially Catholic and its most prominent
symbol of strength is the Inquisition, which tortured and murdered multitudes
of Jews for centuries. Both the Holocaust and the Inquisition have their equal
shares of deniers today.
The
first threat is Islamic anti-Semitism, which is very present in Islamic nations,
and it is a consequence of the huge wave of Muslim immigrants invading Europe.
These immigrants bring with them the same cultural and religious baggage of
anti-Semitism they had in their original nations. It is, by far, the most
aggressive and expansionist anti-Semitism today in Europe. They are deniers of
the Holocaust.
The
third threat is Catholic traditionalism or nationalism. It is impossible to
separate anti-Semitism from the centuries-old Catholic political and legal
culture in Europe.
A survey of 14 European countries undertaken
in 2019 found a quarter of Europeans hold anti-Semitic beliefs with Polish
people the worst offenders.
Poland, which is today the most
conservative Catholic nation in Europe, is seeking a Catholic “revival” to live
the old Catholic days of its nation. The problem is that the old Catholic days
in Poland include plenty of Catholic anti-Semitism 200, 400 and 500 years ago.
Another
problem of traditionalist or nationalist Catholics is that many of them are
rabid deniers of the Inquisition.
In early 2018, Poland, which is considered
today a model of Catholic conservatism, saw an explosion of anti-Semitic
language in public life — on public television and even by public officials —
after the conservative nationalist Catholic ruling party passed legislation
banning certain kinds of speech remembering the Holocaust. Such ban drew sharp
remarks from Israel.
Polish European Parliament member Sylwia
Spurek stirred up controversy on January 21, 2020 after tweeting a drawing by
vegan artist and activist Jo Frederiks depicting cows walking through a
slaughterhouse corridor in clothes reminiscent of those worn by Jews in Nazi
concentration camps. Essentially, the Polish European Parliament member
compared Holocaust to animal abuse.
The
Polish case is interesting because Poland is one of the strongest examples of
European nations resisting Islamic invasion, which entails anti-Semitism. But
the Polish Catholic nationalism entails its own kind of traditional Catholic
anti-Semitism. Even though a progressive, Pope Francis has fought nationalism
and anti-Semitism. What is happening in Poland is not approved by Francis.
The
survey also found that in Ukraine anti-Semitism, which was 32 percent in 2016,
now is 46 percent. In 2018 Ukraine decided to honor a nationalist leader whose
movement sided with the Nazis during World War II, drawing sharp remarks from
Israel’s ambassador.
A good way to honor the Holocaust
Remembrance Day is remembering that anti-Semitism in its Islamic, Nazi and
Catholic form is a threat to humankind.
Portuguese version of this article: Dia da Memória do Holocausto: Poucas pessoas sabem as
consequências do antissemitismo
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