Antisemitism by Deborah E. Lipstadt

Author:Deborah E. Lipstadt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

INVERTING VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

Thanks for that explanation. While I haven’t run into the kind of Holocaust denial you initially wrote about or faced in court, I have encountered something else that gives me pause. It doesn’t fit into any of the categories of denial that you just described. These people do not deny that the Holocaust happened; instead, they use it to create a moral equivalency with other events. Is this just legitimate political expression? Does using the Holocaust in this way diminish its significance? Or does it depend upon what particular event it is being compared to?

Let me give you a few examples. I often hear Israelis described as the equivalent of Nazis. I have seen protestors on the streets of London and New York, and in other cities in Europe and North America, carrying placards with the image of Israeli leaders in Nazi dress. Sometimes the signs read “Israelis = Nazis.” At a rally in Berlin in July 2014, during one of Israel’s wars with Hamas in Gaza, people chanted, “Jews to the gas.” At a meeting of the United Nations Security Council in May 2016, the Venezuelan ambassador asked, “What does Israel plan to do with the Palestinians? Will they disappear? Does Israel seek probably to wage a final solution? The sort of solution that was perpetrated against the Jews?”

This linkage between Israel and the Nazis leaves me deeply disturbed. Quite frankly, it sounds to me like some form of Holocaust denial or, more to the point, like a particularly virulent form of antisemitism. Am I wrong?

Yours,

Abigail

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