Calling attention to some recent controversies sparked by invocations of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, Ben Cohen wonders why people “just can’t stop talking about Hitler” and addresses what this means for the Jews. On the left, it is the urge to universalize the Shoah that has proved most disturbing:
On January 17, the outgoing president, Barack Obama, appointed his deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, to the council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Rhodes, you will remember, was the White House staffer who constructed the administration’s smoke-and-mirrors communications strategy around the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. And after having crafted the myth of a moderate, cooperative Iran—which meant dismissing the Islamic Republic’s official doctrine of Holocaust denial as rhetoric without consequence—Rhodes has landed a post that feels like a thumb in the eye to many Jews, Democrats and Republicans alike.
One can only speculate about what President Obama was thinking—it was revenge, many said, and that is probably true up to a point. Of greater import, I’d say, is what this tells us about the tensions that arise from the manner in which the Holocaust is remembered.
Obama himself has been interested only in Judaism’s universalist aspects, and there is no reason to expect Rhodes to be any different. Implicit in his appointment is the view that the Holocaust is a tragedy that belongs to everybody, and that the best response to it is an anodyne, pacifist humanitarianism, solemnly declaring that all cultures are of equal worth, emphasizing diplomacy and dialogue when confronted by nationalist and religious fanatics.
There are many, many problems with this viewpoint. One of them involves a failure to grasp that these same fanatics wield the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon. Holocaust denial is a staple in the Arab and wider Islamic worlds, along with imagery depicting Israelis as Nazis. In the Soviet Union, the Holocaust’s Jewish character was outright negated; now Russian dictator Vladimir Putin portrays Ukraine as a Nazi state in order to win support for the occupation of Crimea. Again, this is a propaganda trend that shows no sign of abating.
Read more on Tower: http://www.thetower.org/4456-confronting-the-politicization-of-the-holocaust/