Never again? No — again and again

The Auschwitz commemorations themselves provoked the oldest hatred. Who knew?

Michael Higgins, president of Ireland

It is now clear beyond doubt that, for a shocking number of people in the west, Jewish suffering has to be airbrushed out of existence while they demonise and punish Jews defending themselves against slaughter.

At yesterday’s events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp, a number of dignitaries made moving and appropriate remarks.

The double standards, however, were nauseating. For some of these leaders, who were voicing heartfelt obsequies about the Jewish victims of the Nazis, are pursuing policies to punish and demonise the Jewish victims of today’s Islamo-Nazis in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.

Obscenely, some of the commentary about the day even airbrushed the Jews out of their tragedy in the Holocaust. Worse still was the Auschwitz event in Dublin ,where a Jewish protester was actually dragged out of the meeting because she had turned her back on the Irish president who was using the event not just to politicise the Holocaust but also to demonise the Jews of Israel with a sly but unmistakeable antisemitic trope.