Israel has an "Anne Frank" problem

[pppolitics]

The Diary of Anne Frank is now standard reading in public schools. Almost any young voter has read The Diary of Anne Frank in school.

It is shocking to us that the world sat by and allowed genocide to happen.

It was drilled deep into our psyche that we cannot stand by and allow genocide to happen and that it is our responsibility to speak up, even if it isn't the popular thing at the moment.

This is why so many young voters are speaking out against Israel's genocide of the Palestinians: because we have been taught to do so, whether it is a popular position or not.

For young voters, Israel's genocide of the Palestinians gives us a sense of déjà vu.

[pppolitics]

Drawing a direct analogy between the Holocaust and Israel's conduct of the war on Hamas goes beyond the simple trivialization of terms like "genocide" or "war crime" or "crime against humanity", which is bad enough, and steps directly into trivializing the Holocaust itself by playing into the notion that either

A) The Holocaust wasn't uniquely bad, because Israel is doing something equivalently bad as we speak

or

B) The Jews have no right to cry about the Holocaust, because we are now seeing that given the chance they would do something equally awful to their enemies once they're in a position of power

both of these tropes get extensive, and I mean extensive, mileage in Arabic and particularly Palestinian culture, and are key to the mindset of anti-semitism that leads to justification of the mass extermination of Jews.

Now we all know that I despise the pseudoacademic practice of twisting terms to mean something broader than, and different from, what a typical person would expect that term to mean based on the common understanding of the English language.

However, in this case I feel like it's widely understood that the umbrella of "Holocaust Denial" typically includes not just denial that the Holocaust happened at all, it also includes denial of the scope, scale, or seriousness of the Holocaust, trying to downplay its unique horror and unique place in the history of the world and Jewish culture by saying something along the lines of "the Jews are just drama queens, what they suffered was no greater than what dozens of other cultures have suffered, but they milk it for all it's worth as part of their campaign to achieve power."

Holocaust Denial isn't some hypothetical.  It's a position that's been espoused by, at least off the top of my head, the Iranian and Syrian regimes.  This happened just last week:

In a video of a speech by Assad translated and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Monday, Assad can be seen telling a listening crowd that “there is no evidence that six million Jews were killed” during the Holocaust.

“True, there were concentration camps, but what shows you that this is a politicized issue, not a humanitarian one and not a real one, is that we talk about these six million, but why don’t we talk about the 26 million Soviets who were killed in that war? Are the six million more precious?”

source

Young voters don't like Assad.

[pppolitics]

What the Nazis did to the Slavs was mass genocide as well, but they weren't trying to eliminate all of them the way they were with the Jews.

6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

[pppolitics]

What the Nazis did to the Slavs was mass genocide as well, but they weren't trying to eliminate all of them the way they were with the Jews.

6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

That all depends on how you define the Holocaust.

Regardless, it doesn't change my point.

[pppolitics]

Literally your first post back once your ban on this forum expires and it's Holocaust minimalization to demonize Jews. This won't last.

1. This isn't my first post

2. I just affirmed the existence of the Holocaust after you previously accused me of being a Holocaust denier.

[pppolitics]

Literally your first post back once your ban on this forum expires and it's Holocaust minimalization to demonize Jews. This won't last.

1. This isn't my first post

2. I just affirmed the existence of the Holocaust after you previously accused me of being a Holocaust denier.

As I said earlier, to trivialize the Holocaust by implying that some current event is equivalent in scale or horror, that is a form of Holocaust denial.  It is denying the extreme nature of the Holocaust and downplaying the unimaginable cruelty that the Jews suffered.

The Nazis were hunting for Anne Frank so that they could put her in a box car and ship her off to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she would be tortured, starved, possibly raped, and forced to do heavy manual labor under the most degrading and harsh conditions imaginable, until she either died due to the appalling conditions and lack of medical attention (as she did, of typhoid fever), was beaten or starved to death, was murdered in a gas chamber, or was burned alive (as happened to many Jews as documented in, for example, Maus).

For no other reason than because she was Jewish.

To equate this in any way with what's going on in Gaza is just an appalling false equivalence that serves no purpose other than to downplay the reality of the Holocaust and trivialize the experiences of Anne Frank and her six million fellow victims.

A cold-blooded, industrial-scale national project built for the singular purpose of degrading, torturing and exterminating a single ethnic group.  Nothing like that has ever happened in history and god bless us all, hopefully nothing like that ever will again.

The Nazis did not just decide to murder 6 million Jews overnight.

Hardly anyone spoke out and defended the Jews, so the Nazis became more and more bold in getting rid of Jews.

[pppolitics]

This thread is in remarkably bad taste; moreover, it is completely unnecessary, since there is ample opportunity to discuss Israel/Palestine in many, many, many other threads on this forum.

I am talking about why young Americans are appalled (to say the least) by Israel's conduct.