The failure of Holocaust education
For shocking numbers in the west, Jewish victimhood cannot be tolerated
Another day, another onslaught on diaspora Jews.
On Thursday night, in the affluent London district of Primrose Hill, Jewish volunteers putting up posters of Israeli hostages in Gaza were violently attacked. The Telegraph reports:
The group of six volunteers were hanging posters when they were approached by a woman expressing her support for Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militia opposed to Israel, with a man thought to be known to the woman also intimidating the group.
Police dealt with the incident and the group moved about a mile further north to Primrose Hill where, at around 8.30 pm, they started placing more posters on the bridge to Chalk Farm.
Almost immediately, a passer-by thought to be in his early 20s, started abusing the group with antisemitic language before allegedly launching an assault. One of the women was thrown twice to the ground, had her phone smashed and was repeatedly struck in the face and kicked.
Since the Hamas pogrom of October 7 in southern Israel, a tsunami of hatred against the Jews has surged across the west. Decent people everywhere are aghast and astonished that this should be the response by so many to the greatest single act of mass murder against Jews since the Holocaust.
They are even more perplexed that a recurring characteristic of such attacks is to tear down the posters of the Israeli hostages that have been pasted up in public areas in a forlorn attempt to keep their fate alive in the public mind so that they may be returned home.
The reason for such driven and unhinged behaviour against posters stuck on walls is as obvious as it is appalling. Certain people simply cannot tolerate the fact of Jewish victimhood. So intolerable do they find this, they have to literally tear down the evidence with their own hands. No less significant is the way they do so, with both verbal and facial expressions of the most intense disgust. They find the idea of Jewish victims disgusting. And that’s because they find the very idea of Jews disgusting. What they are doing to those posters is what they would like to do to Israeli Jews.
For evidence of that, watch this video by Avi Horowitz who went to San Francisco State university to “raise money to kill Jews”. He found 28 out of 35 people with whom he engaged supported this aim, and 17 out of 35 actually offered him money “to kill Jews”.
How is such abhorrent behaviour to be explained? A major reason is that many if not most of these Jew-haters subscribe to the doctrine of “intersectional” identity politics and victim culture, which holds that some groups of people are oppressed and others are oppressors. The “oppressed” can never be held responsible for bad things they may do; the “oppressors” can never be victims of the “oppressed” or of anyone else. The haters believe that the Jews are all-powerful, that they drive capitalism and thus control the levers of world power which they manipulate in their own interests and against those of everyone else.
Why do they believe that? Because “intersectional” identity politics is the product of an education system which has long been captured by Marxist ideology, at the root of which lies an exterminatory hatred of the Jewish people. In other words, those who subscribe to identity politics are motivated at root by Jew-hatred.
And that also motivates those who are indifferent to identity politics but who believe — because historic Christian culture embedded in the west tells them so — that the Jews are motivated by vengeance and blood-lust. So they have eagerly swallowed the demonisation and defamatory lies of the Palestinian narrative, parroted day in, day out by the Hamas Broadcasting Corporation, Sky News and certain posh newspapers which spread the libel that the Israelis are wanton child-killers.
The fact that more than 1200 Israelis were slaughtered on October 7 by the supposedly “oppressed” Palestinians and more than 230 taken hostage, with an unknown number subsequently tortured, raped and murdered by those “oppressed” Palestinians while more than 100 remain captive in the hell-holes of Hamas, gets in the way of that narrative.
So the evidence of Jewish victimhood has to be torn down. Conscience and decency must be erased. The most persecuted people in the history of the world, who have remained under relentless attack ever since October 7 by Palestinians and their Iranian puppet-masters bent on completing Hitler’s Final Solution, must be turned into Nazis. To the west’s poster-tearing Jew-haters, genocide has become resistance while resistance to being wiped off the face of the earth has become genocide.
One of the many uncomfortable lessons to be learned from this shocking state of affairs is the utter failure of Holocaust education. Instead of educating people about Judaism, the history of Israel and the Jewish people, millions of dollars have been poured into Holocaust memorial museums and Holocaust lessons in schools in the belief that only if younger generations are taught about that horror will another Holocaust be prevented.
While October 7 was not remotely comparable to the Holocaust in scale, the motivation and behaviour of the Palestinians were certainly shaped by the same depraved intention to slaughter every last Jew. Yet all that Holocaust memorialising and education has failed to prevent the west from either being indifferent to or actually subscribing to the genocidal intention by Iran and their Palestinian proxies to destroy Israel and the Jewish people — and failed to scrub out the conviction, common to Jew-haters from time immemorial, that the Jews have only themselves to blame for their own slaughter.
Untold numbers have had their heads filled with images of destruction in Gaza being pumped out by the Hamas Broadcasting Corporation and the rest of the media — along with a narrative that Israel is not to be trusted, even when the facts prove it to be correct, while Hamas’s propaganda lies are to be taken on face value. And so untold numbers in the west parrot the mantra that nothing justifies the numbers of Palestinians being killed by Israel — which is, whether they admit it or not, to argue that the Jews should be made powerless to resist a second genocide.
This exact argument, that the defence against genocide is an abomination rather than the genocide itself, was a Nazi defence in the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War. On his Sandbox blog, the Middle East analyst, Martin Kramer, has written about this “Dresden defence” which was mounted at the trial of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis’ paramilitary death squads, by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1947-48. The chief defendant, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, had supervised the killing of 90,000 Jews. However, Ohlendorf imagined that he had a moral conscience. Kramer writes:
During trial testimony, the prosecutor pressed Ohlendorf: “You were going out to shoot down defenceless people. Now, didn’t the question of the morality of that enter your mind?” Ohlendorf referred to the Allied bombings of Germany as a context:
“I am not in a position to isolate this occurrence from the occurrences of 1943, 1944, and 1945 where with my own hands I took children and women out of the burning asphalt myself, and with my own hands I took big blocks of stone from the stomachs of pregnant women; and with my own eyes I saw 60,000 people die within 24 hours.”
A judge immediately pointed out that his own killing spree preceded those bombings. But this would become known as the “Dresden defence,” to which Ohlendorf resorted still another time, in this exchange:
Ohlendorf: “I have seen very many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other nations, and orders were carried out to bomb, no matter whether many children were killed or not”.
Q: “Now, I think we are getting somewhere, Mr. Ohlendorf. You saw German children killed by Allied bombers and that is what you are referring to?”
Ohlendorf: “Yes, I have seen it”.
Q: “Do you attempt to draw a moral comparison between the bomber who drops bombs hoping that it will not kill children and yourself who shot children deliberately? Is that a fair moral comparison?”
Ohlendorf: “I cannot imagine that those planes which systematically covered a city that was a fortified city, square meter for square meter, with incendiaries and explosive bombs and again with phosphorus bombs, and this done from block to block, and then as I have seen it in Dresden likewise the squares where the civilian population had fled to — that these men could possibly hope not to kill any civilian population, and no children.”
Ohlendorf thought this defence so powerful that he invoked it yet another time:
“The fact that individual men killed civilians face to face is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as specially gruesome because the order was clearly given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate a deed any better, a deed which makes it possible, by pushing a button, to kill a much larger number of civilians, men, women, and children.”
(The chief prosecutor, an American, called this particular iteration “exactly what a fanatical pseudo-intellectual SS-man might well believe”.)…
“It was submitted,” the judges wrote, “that the defendants must be exonerated from the charge of killing civilian populations since every Allied nation brought about the death of noncombatants through the instrumentality of bombing”. The judges would have none of it:
“A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualised. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them”.
The tribunal sentenced Ohlendorf to death. He was hanged in June 1951.
Nuremberg enforced a fundamental distinction. All civilian lives are equal, but not so all ways of taking them. The deliberate and purposeful killing of civilians is a crime; not so the taking of civilian lives that is undesired, unintended, but unavoidable. The errors made by a bomber squadron cannot be deducted from the murders committed by a death squad. It’s a difference compounded many times over when those civilian men, women, and children are subjected to torture, rape, and mutilation before their murder.
As Kramer points out, this Nazi defence has been revived today to frame the massacre of Jews in the west. A culture that in the 1940s fought for civilisation against barbarism has itself now become depraved.
Recent posts
My most recent exclusive post for my premium subscribers argues that it feels as if the west has signed up en masse to Nazism scripted by Kafka. This is how the piece begins:
Brainwashing becomes the new normal
And you can read my most recent post that’s available to everyone, on the revival of an ancient calumny, if you click here.
One more thing…
This is how my email posts work.
There are two subscription levels: my free service and my premium service.
Anyone can sign up to the free service on this website. You can of course unsubscribe at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” at the foot of each email.
Everyone on the free list will receive the full text of pieces I write for outlets such as the Jewish News Syndicate and the Jewish Chronicle, as well as other posts and links to my broadcasting and video work.
But why not subscribe to my premium service? For that you’ll also receive pieces that I write specially for my premium subscribers. Those articles will not be published elsewhere. They’ll arrive in your inbox as soon as I have written them.
There is a monthly fee of $6.99 for the premium service, or $70 for an annual subscription. Although the fee is charged in US dollars, you can sign up with any credit card. Just click on the “subscribe now” button below to see the available options for subscribing either to the premium or the free service.
And you can always access the links to all my work by visiting my website at melaniephillips.substack.com .
A note on subscriptions
If you purchase a subscription to my site, you will be authorising a payment to my company Dirah Associates. In the past, that is the name that may have appeared on your credit card statement. In future, though, the charge should appear instead as Melanie Phillips.
And thank you for following my work.\