Yet we are seeing the groundwork for it happening in front of our eyes.
Nazi antisemitism did not only rely on racism against individual Jews as untermenschen. They also railed against Jews as a nation.
And their propaganda against the nation of "Judah" bears a chilling resemblance to the anti-Israel rhetoric that is becoming mainstream today.
From United Press, December 1938:
Is this any different from current accusations that the "Israel Lobby" controls America?
The "Judah" terminology was used in the earliest days of the Nazi regime. And some of those exactly mirror the anti-Israel rhetoric of today.
In 1933, Hitler partially justified boycotting Jews - by accusing "Judah" of racism against Germans! (Dayton Daily News, 31 Mar 1933):
There is no difference between saying "Judah is racist" and "Zionism is racism." The modern antisemites may pretend they are anti-Nazi, but they sure mimic Nazi rhetoric.
One of the early Nazi slogans, which was enthusiastically taken up by Western antisemites, was "Perish Judah." It spread quickly from 1935 in Berlin:
...to 1936 in London:
The British Fascists used the "Perish Judah" phrase so much that they began marking Jewish houses and shops with the initials "P.J." to encourage others to smash the marked doors and windows as late as 1943.
"Perish Judah" has morphed into today's "Death to Israel."
The connection between "Judah" and Israel is seen even more explicitly in this report from 1935:
There is a clear line between Nazi railing against "Judah" and today's obsessive hate of Israel. Boycotts of Jews in the 1930s are now called BDS.
Then, Jews were accused of controlling Western nations politically; today Zionists are accused of the same thing.
Mobs screaming "Perish Judah" in Berlin have become mobs screaming "Death to Israel" and "Death to Jews" - still in Berlin.
No, we are not at the death camp stage. We are merely at the stage where Jews are being murdered for being Jews in Israel and some Westerners are justifying those terror attacks as well as laying the ideological groundwork to make such attacks appear legal and moral. The Western antisemites of the 1930s didn't need to convince the larger British and US populations to hate Jews - they only needed to to associate Jews with theft and malice and Jewish supremacy enough so that casual observers would start to believe a little of it. They were able to sow enough doubt as to whether Jews were worth the effort of defending - when public defense of Jews could subject one to attacks. They wanted to sow some doubt as to whether Jews were worth the effort of saving.
Today's anti-Zionists insist that they are not antisemitic. You know who else made that claim in 1933?
Just because the analogy isn't perfect doesn't mean it isn't valid. As the expression goes, history doesn't repeat itself - but it does rhyme. The parallels between classic antisemitism and today's obsessive hate to Israel is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes. If Israel wasn't filled with Jews, it would get roughly the same worldwide criticism that Belgium does.
We might not be at 1939 yet, but we are in the same decade. And while today's antisemites might not be building death camps, some of them are building a nuclear bomb - with the same lack of response by the West as during the Holocaust, partially because of the constant stream of antisemitic propaganda that ends up affecting national leaders enough to favor inaction over action.
Never Again shouldn't be an empty slogan. So far, it has been.
