Home Zachor - The Ongoing Exploitation of the Holocaust
Home Zachor - The Ongoing Exploitation of the Holocaust

Zachor - The Ongoing Exploitation of the Holocaust

When reporters compared Israel's bombing of Lebanon to the Warsaw Ghetto, as they had previously compared the falsified destruction of Jenin to the Warsaw Ghetto, some might have noted the bitter irony of comparing Jews to Nazis while comparing the fanatical cult intent on a renewed genocide of the Jews which itself engages in Holocaust denial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But this is part on the ongoing trend of the exploitation of the Holocaust that has its roots in the hijacking and expropriation of the murder of six million to serve everyone's pet cause.

In 2003 the animal rights organization PETA unveiled a new campaign titled, 'Holocaust on Your Plate.' The ads for the campaign featured a photo of a Jewish concentration camp inmate side by side with a cow. Controversial campaigns were nothing new for PETA which had put up ads trying to tie New York Mayor Rudy Guliani's cancer to drinking milk and handed out cartoons to children warning them that milk would make them sick and a handbook warning children that if their father goes fishing he might decide to kill their dog too.

In 2005 PETA apologized for causing any pain but not for the campaign and shows every sign of continuing to use Holocaust images and analogies and metaphors in its propaganda literature. Other animal rights organizations quickly picked up on the idea. The National Primate Research Exhibition Hall, compares itself to the Holocaust memorial at Auschwitz. The Consistency in Compassion Campaign (CCC), a project of the Northwest Animal Rights Network of Seattle, Washington, used images of murdered Holocaust victims in a pit juxtaposed with photos of dead cows. Over half a century after the Holocaust the popular propaganda of Streicher and Goebbels which depicted Jews as subhuman and of no more worth than animals had been resurrected and lived again on the pages of popular magazines and advertising billboards across America and Europe.

PETA had a long history of vandalism, pornography and slander behind them all of it played out as publicity stunts to ensure the maximum attention from the press; still some might have thought that it had gone too far and risked alienating the urban based demographic it was targeting. This exploitation though was just the opening shot in what would become a PETA campaign against the Jews. Like their European animal rights counterparts who have in many cases successfully targeted Kosher slaughter, banning it outright in Sweden and pushing its outlawing in England; PETA moved towards its goal of barring the slaughter of Kosher meat by targeting Kosher meat plants.

Not satisfied with merely abusing and exploiting the Holocaust and comparing Jews to animals, much as the Nazis themselves had, PETA would begin a campaign targeting Kosher slaughter of animals that continues to this day. This is typical of organizations that exploit the Holocaust, which begin by denigrating the Holocaust and conclude by turning on Jews themselves because after all displaying contempt for suffering is the prelude to inflicting it.

In exploiting the Holocaust in this way PETA was following a long trend of organizations exploiting the Holocaust for their own causes. In 1997 when Scientology wanted to protest the legal restrictions placed on it by the German government, it took out full page ads in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and numerous other major papers signed by major Hollywood celebrities such as John Travolta, Oliver Stone and Dustin Hoffman comparing Germany's treatment of Scientology cult members to the Holocaust. Scientology had always had close ties to Hollywood numbering many celebrities as members including John Travolta, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. A large publicity campaign was put out playing on the theme of, "first they came for the Communists", a notorious forged line of prose sunk into collective memory that makes the argument that any societal persecution or discrimination of anyone is itself the opening number to genocide.

The fuss faded but Scientology marched on. In 2003 again Scientology launched an exhibition in Berlin claiming that psychiatry was evil and had caused the Holocaust. "It is a cold, hard fact that psychiatry spawned the ideology which fired Hitler's mania, turned the Nazis into mass murderers and created the Holocaust," was a typical line from the display. That psychiatry was heavily associated with Sigmund Freud, a Jew, who himself faced persecution by the Nazis and whose daughter had to flee them, would be of no concern to Scientology. Himself committed to a psychiatric hospital the founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard had an obsession with the evils of psychiatry and viewed them as competition for his own supposed inventions of curing psychological problems using wires attached to tin cans.

The most recent scandal on this subject is a documentary put out by the Christian Coral Ridge Ministries entitled 'Darwin's Deadly Legacy' seeking to blame Darwin, Darwinism and Evolution for Nazism and the Holocaust. The ADL's condemnation of the ministry's documentary as exploiting the Holocaust only opened up a new can of worms. The ministry retorted by arguing that Hitler was an evolutionist, which may be the case but so is much of Europe and the United States. A prominent Jewish figure attached to the Christian religious right responded with an article accusing the ADL of defending Darwnism, though there is no line in their press release defending Darwin or Darwinism.

With many fundamentalist Christians enmeshed in fighting creationism vs evolution battles in public schools, evolution is to many fundamentalist Christians now the key evil, a position that must be inevitably propped up by referencing the Holocaust. As animal rights activists view eating meat as the ultimate evil and Scientologists see psychiatry as the ultimate threat, fundamentalist Christians follow the pattern by exploiting the Holocaust to fight their own ultimate threat. By co-opting the Holocaust each of these groups tries to stretch out a symbol for ultimate evil to fit their own worldview. To animal rights activists the Nazis were supremacists, to the Scientologists they were psychiatrists and to Christians they were secular godless evolutionists. What all of them agree on is that the Nazis were not what they actually were, which is the bigoted murderers of Jews. These different factions may differ on the details but all of them agree that rather than being the enemies of the Jews, the Nazis were in truth the enemies of Scientology or Christianity or all life on the planet and the Jews just happened to get in the way.

This indeed is the narrative of Christian religious historical revisionism on the Holocaust which postulates a secular godless mechanistic materialistic Nazi regime that persecuted Christians and Jews in the name of abstract rationalism. That this worldview is entirely divorced from history makes no real difference, it is a convenient attempt to avoid coming to terms with the reality that Nazi anti-Semitism was the outgrowth of a thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism.

After all if we divorce Christian anti-Semitism from Nazism, it's reasonable to ask then, why the Jews. If the Nazis were operating in a purely evolutionary realm of Eugenics, then the Jews were hardly inferiors by any objective statistical standpoint. With Jews vastly overrepresented in medical and scientific professions and even among the war heroes of WWI, it would be quite impossible for a rational scientific analysis to conclude that Eugenics mandated destroying the Jews. It is only when Eugenics was used to justify an pre-existing anti-Semitism and a pre-existing desire to destroy the Jews, that such a conclusion can be reached. Eugenics and evolution therefore becoming nothing more than rhetorical justifications, rather than ideological underpinnings for any effort to destroy the Jews.

With that idea discarded Christians may argue, as the Pope attempted to do, that the Nazis hated Christianity and killed Jews to get to the Christians but then one has to wonder why the Vatican remained intact and why priests sat there hearing confessions from SS men with fresh Jewish blood on their hands who with their consciences fresh, went out to kill again. Mostly one has to wonder why this novel idea didn't occur to the Catholic Church or to the American Churches during WW2, at least insofar as saving the Jews or at least speaking out against their slaughter.

Finally if the Nazis were out to wipe out Christianity they might have tried shuttering the churches, banning religion, burning all the bibles and executing all the clergy. Instead German churches continued to run praying for the victory of Germany in the war and German churchgoers continued sending millions in tithes to the Vatican, at a time when Germany was losing the war and desperate for funds. It is manifestly irrational to argue that the Nazis hatred for the Jews whom they tried to exterminate was merely a subset for their hatred of Christians, whom they did not try to exterminate and whom in any case were the Nazis themselves. To talk of Nazis hating Christians makes no sense because the two were one and the same.

Tens of millions of German Catholics and Lutherans who voted for Hitler, cheered at his rallies and served in the Wermacht and the SS and implemented the Holocaust and the conquest of Europe did not suddenly become pagans overnight. Norse altars did not replace churches during or after the war. The vast majority of Germans continued believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior co-equal with their belief that the Jews were an alien evil race that needed to be eradicated. There is no contradiction there since European Christians had believed much the same thing for many centuries and occasionally tried to implement it. The Nazis were subjectively no different from the Christian crusaders who massacred every single Jew in Israel and covered the German Jewish communities in blood as they marched their way to the Holy Land slaughtering men, women and children.

The new revisionist historical narrative as promoted by the Coral Ridge documentary attempts to reassign that evil from Christian hearts to Darwinian ones, even as it then blames the Jews in the form of the ADL for defending Darwinism. As with PETA and Scientology, once the Holocaust is lifted from being motivated by anti-Semitism to being motivated by Psychiatry, Darwinism, the Jews quickly then become identified with the very evils the revisionist history of the Holocaust postulates were the real motives of the Nazis. To PETA Jews are butchers of animals, to Scientology Jews are psychiatrists and to fundamentalist Christians Jews are the teachers and defenders of a godless secular morality. Not all of them, just the ones that won't stand together and join ranks with them in their act of historical revisionism and fight the real evils of hamburgers, psychoanalysis and dinosaurs.

When bombs fall on Beirut and the terrorist murderers of Jews are compared to the martyrs of the Holocaust, it is merely the logical conclusion of the intellectual processes of a world that has written off the Jewish Holocaust fragmenting it into a thousand other Holocausts to fit each ideological faction's worldview. To liberals there was no Jewish Holocaust only a universal one against racial and ethnic minorities which conveniently Jews are no longer numbered among. To conservatives there was no Jewish Holocaust only a religious one, primarily aimed at Christians, which Jews are not numbered among. To animal rights activists there was no Jewish Holocaust, only one aimed against all life on earth. To Scientologists there was no Jewish Holocaust, only psychiatry run amuck.

All these groups, opposed as they are to each other, agree on one thing, there was no Jewish Holocaust. The murder of the Jews was just a subset of a larger issue and the Jews have no right to use this universal idea of the Holocaust for any narrow religious or nationalistic claim. The Jews are allowed to commemorate the dead but not to agitate against a repetition of the Holocaust against those Jews still living. That far and no father. The Holocaust can be trotted out on behalf of Muslim Albanians, Catholic Croats, Animist Sudanese and any and every other people. It cannot however be used to defend the right of those same survivors of the Holocaust to found a nation of their own and defend its narrow borders against a fanatical ideology of 1 Billion that seeks to wipe them and theirs off the earth.

This ongoing exploitation of the Holocaust happening day by day, every time some columnist, tv personality, activist, writer, actor or random idiot flagrantly compares something to the Holocaust. It is why it is crucial to maintain the true memory of the Holocaust as an attempt to eradicate the Jewish people and not as fodder for the rhetoric of any faction with a political or social agenda. It is important to remember the dead but also the living because the dead cannot be killed again but the living can. Walk the empty streets of Tsfat and know that it can.

It was not the psychiatrists or the evolutionists or the meat eaters who came for us in 1939 but a collective worldwide ideology of whom modern Islam is merely the latest thrust. An ideology that rode with Nevuchadnezzar and Sisra, that strode confidently with Haman and Hitler, with Stalin and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. That spoke through the mouths of Kings and Popes, clergymen and atheists, Communists and Nationalists, Crusaders and Cossacks in a voice of death. It speaks now through Mullahs in turbans and beards but it is still the same voice, the same echo ringing through history when Pharaoh and Nimrod spoke it long ago. Walk the streets of abandoned northern cities as if half a century of Jewish history had been turned back in a moment and know it still lives.

Comments

  1. The only true analogy to the shoah I see happening in the world toay is the renewed persecution against Israel.

    Organizations like PETA, Coral Ridge Ministries (Pastor Dr. D. James Kennedy is a pompous ass. Evolution is just his latest scapegoat. A couple years ago it was abortion) are indeed exploiting the holocaust to the hilt.

    Traditionalists Catholics are as well. Though many won't deny the holocaust outright, they'll deny the actual number of murder victims.

    A few Polish Catholics I know insist the Nazis built the first death camps for Poles, not Jews. Another argued with me that the Holocaust was strictly political and had nothing to do with Jews. A college professor. Even educated people are falling for this nonsense.

    But Hitler made his agenda and goal crystal clear. The evidence is there.

    I pity children brought up with these grosly distored views of the holocaust. And world which is watching the foundation of another Shoah being built before their very eyes in Israel and Europe.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not to mention the many Arabs that increasingly claim they are victim's of "anti-Semitism" because they are semitic people, wheven the term is only applied to anti-Jewish persecution.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous14/1/07

    I was reading a book-by a Jew yet-and he essentially called Jews selfish for only caring about the Jews who died in the Holocaust while ignoring the millions of Roma, homosexuals, xtians and everyone else who died.
    This writer totally missed the point! The reason we Jews focus on the Jew-killing is to get across the message that when they come for us they will come for everyone else. If some maniac or maniacs are crying "kill the Jews" then EVERYONE is gonna get it, homosexuals, xtians, women, everyone!!! But this writer -a Jew yet- didn't get it. To him it's just a bunch of selfish Jews who only care about themselves!
    Jew hatred is a phenomena that exists-and it affects everyone. But people still don't get it. Or they just don't care about Jews.If they knew what happens to Jews happens to them they'd care more.
    Woman hatred is a similar phenomena. But people still think that "women's issues" aren't really universal "human issues". They just dont care, it's "just" women's issues afterall. They don't realize what happens to the woman happens to them too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous14/1/07

    "Woman hatred is a similar phenomena."

    Maybe in the Islamic world. However some of that hatred you mention is well deserved and radical feminism is to blame. Radical feminism has been chipping away at boyhood, manhood, traditional families, solidly pushing abortion on demand,
    moral relativism, (we're all alike don't you know) and the homosexual agenda. I don't want to leave out how radical feminism for the last 30 years has attempted to strip girls and women of modesty, replacing it with crass appetite and shallow orgasm seeking hedonism. " women have needs just like men - there's no difference.

    Bela Abzug and all the rest may they rot in hell.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous14/1/07

    There's a big difference between opposing feminism as a political ideology and hating women

    ReplyDelete
  6. Arabs are not semitic.
    They are Hamitic.
    And most so called "arabs" are no where near being arab..
    Ishmaelites are also Hamitic and not semitic at all anymore.
    Ishmael married an Egyptian making his kids hamitic ..they also went on to marry other Egyptians etc til not a drop of semite was left to them.

    Udiyah, you are a hater of women and speak about things you have no idea about. Grow up .

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yup Lemon.

    And nonetheless Arabs continue to claim now that they are the victim's of "anti-semitism." It's crazy as you said, but that's the whole point I believe of this article--how the various groups who think they are being persecuted are the real, intended victims of the world's atrocities. Yet they never see themselves as the perpetrators of any crimes.


    I just read this over again, particularly about the Coral Ridge/Darwinism/ADL situation. They're (Coral Ridge) definitely trying to make an association between the evil evolutionists and the ADL, which they also perceive as evolutionists purely for rejecting their stupid arguement that Darwinism caused the Holocaust.

    I've watched enough Christian television to see how they spin things around. They hate the ACLU and call it "the enemy" and it won't take long before they start calling the ADL "The Eenemy."

    Anything they don't like gets called The Enemy--the christian version of the muslim Great Satan.


    And just as the many christians during WW II continued to support the Nazis christian groups and individual christians like Jimmy Carter support the Palestinian terrorist government. To the best of my knowledge Hamas remains on foreign terrorists organization on the federal registry. So does Hamas.

    And we have history repeating itself. No doubt Jimmy Carter still goes to church every Sunday with little thought of dead/mamed/kidnapped Israelis on his mind.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous15/1/07

    "Udiyah, you are a hater of women and speak about things you have no idea about. Grow up ."

    Maybe hatred is too strong a word. Enmity may be more suitable

    I'm not a hater of women. I'm a woman with two adult sons who attended public school. I have grandchildren. I do know what I'm talking about.

    You think radical feminism has been an asset to our society, that's your opinion. But in the State I live in a child can't take medication, even an aspirin without a note and in the presence of a school nurse but they can take 12 year old girl to an abortionist without notifying the parents. I could go on but I won't.

    ReplyDelete
  9. the christian right thinks it can lay claim to anything it wants and anyone who disagrees is the enemy

    and plenty of times that winds up being the jews, whether or not the jews are responsible which is telling... I've got a piece on that coming up today

    ReplyDelete
  10. Great, it'll be very interesting to read :)


    BTW: regarding the Holocaust...in my opinion, only two events in modern history deserve to rightly be called a Holocaust--

    The murder and torture of six million Jews by the Nazis and the murder and forced starvation of seven million (or more) Ukrainians by the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Udiyah I gave no opinion on radical anything. You are assuming what my opinions are.
    They are not for this comment section which would be hijacked by a discussion.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous15/1/07

    re: Keliata's comment-I think the situation in China qualifies. It's been known for years that they kill female babies or passively neglect them to death
    (they also practice sex selective abortions). I read there's 30 million less women than men over there-holocaust of females is not hyperbole. I hear India is pretty bad with female lives as well.

    re: Udiya's remark-
    I get very leary when someone says the hatred is "deserved". They say that a lot about Jews you know-they judge the Jewish people by the very worst-seeing only what is wrong and not what is right. But people see what they want to see.

    re: Mark's comment
    yeah, and there's a big difference in opposing zionism as a political ideology and hating Jews.

    And yet so many of the anti-zionists are also Jew haters for some reason-same with the anti-feminists. Their attitude isn't one of constructive criticism and making improvements-their attitude is destroy! destroy! And they believe the woman hatred or Jew hatred is "deserved". It's all the fault of those zionists and feminists.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous15/1/07

    Lemon Lime Moon, you're right about being off topic. I apologize for that.

    I do have a question regarding genocide though. How many people must die before its considered genocide? What was what happened to Rawanda and to the Armenians - massacre? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  14. there are many incidents of genocide or attempted genocide, but only one holocaust that specifically refers to the nazi genocide of the jews

    I don't know that anyone has nailed down an exact figure of what constitutes a genocide,

    I personally tend to believe for something to be a genocide, there has to be a real attempt to exterminate an entire people, rather than merely something that produces a large death toll but without that intention

    ReplyDelete
  15. I agree with that. I'm not sure if the intent of the Russians was to exterminate the Ukrainian people but when the death toll goes into the millions and it is deliberate, the intent does appear to be total genocide of a people.

    Rawanda and the massacre of the Armenians are also human atrocities. But PETA comparing inhumane animal treatment to the Holocaust created by the Nazis is abhorent and trivializes it.

    Gross misuse of a word. We see the same thing with apartheid. Grossly misused.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

You May Also Like