Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Holocaust

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Wednesday, September 06, 2023

Hundreds of Jews were saved by (illegal) Latin American passports and papers during the Holocaust

Bergen-Belsen

From the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, How Latin American Passports Were Used to Save Lives during the Holocaust, by Efraim Zadoff.

This is a bit different than most stories of diplomats issuing papers to Jews. In this case, even the Germans often knew that the papers were issued illegally (and indeed many Jews with these papers were sent to extermination camps.) But the Nazis were keen on prisoner exchanges with the Allies and they sometimes used these Jews as bargaining chips to sweeten the terms of the swaps.

As many as a thousand Jews were saved this way. And the diplomats who saved the Jews were almost all punished by their governments.

Excerpts:

The use of Latin American passports during the Holocaust has yet to receive the attention it warrants in Holocaust historiography.

This article is based on a wider study aimed at shedding light on the identity of the individuals who served Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Chile (Samuel del Campo), Costa Rica, Ecuador (Manuel Antonio Muñoz Borrero), El Salvador (Arturo Castellanos), Guatemala, Honduras (Alfonse and Isabelle Bauer), Haiti (Johan Schluchin, J. Bruner), Paraguay (Rudolf Hügli), and Peru (José María Barreto and José Gambetta). These officials operated in a number of countries and under widely varying circumstances. Some were posted to Switzerland (Bern, Geneva, and Zurich), Sweden (Stockholm) or Portugal (Lisbon)—three European countries that maintained neutrality throughout the war. Others were situated in Axis-aligned Romania (Bucharest and Czernowitz) and Japan (Kobe) or in the Americas, in countries such as Bolivia, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and the United States. One operated out of German-occupied Poland. Most of these individuals risked and eventually lost their jobs for consciously taking action that ran counter to the instructions and policies of their superiors and of their own governments regarding the rescue of Jews during the war.

In some cases, these once-trusted diplomats were placed under surveillance and subjected to police interrogations in the countries in which they served. This diversity among the diplomats involved in the endeavor to save Jews with Latin American documents also characterized the individuals and entities behind that effort. In most cases, a broad group of Jewish activists with disparate orientations—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and Orthodox rabbis, Zionists and non-Zionists, officials of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), entrepreneurs and businessmen—led the struggle to get Latin American diplomats on board and obtain the required documents from them. Occasionally, non-Jewish individuals and officials, such as the Polish diplomatic team in Bern, cooperated in this effort and even actively supported it. The result was the rescue of many hundreds of Jews (probably over 1,000).

Three primary types of documents were used in such rescue efforts. The first was a passport, which indicated that the person named was a citizen of the country of issue. The Ecuadorian passport took the form of a hardbound traditional booklet, whereas those of Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, and Paraguay generally consisted of standard sheets of paper. Both contained a photo of the person or persons in whose name the passport was issued (sometimes such documents were issued to an entire family). In some cases, Jews received copies bearing notary certification, which lent additional credibility to the document; the original was stored in the archive of the organization that had sent it in case its retrieval became necessary.Footnote6

The second type of document used in this context was a certificate of protection, which indicated that its bearer enjoyed the protection of the country of issue, as in the case of documents issued by El Salvador and others by Paraguay.

The third type of document issued was known as a promesa (Spanish for “promise”), which, as reflected in its name, constituted a guarantee that when the bearer arrived at a consul of the state in question, he or she would be issued an immigration visa.

In all cases, both the diplomats who issued the documents and the Jews who received them were cognizant of the fact that they were not legal and unrecognized by the state in question and therefore could not be used for immigration purposes....The reason for securing such documents was that they provided a degree of protection for Jews by transforming them into the subjects of neutral or enemy states. ...Such documents were primarily used to help enable the Germans to hold hostages whom they could then swap for their compatriots held in Allied countries.

...The prisoner exchange between Germany and the Allied countries took place at the beginning of 1945. On January 21 of that year, a train left Bergen Belsen carrying 301 Jews holding Latin American passports. Before the train crossed the border into Switzerland, some Jews were removed due to their poor physical condition and were sent to the camps at Biberach and Wurzach in southern Germany. Some of the members of this group did not survive. Those who arrived in Switzerland underwent the required medical examinations and treatments, and were subsequently transferred by US hospital ship from the French port of Marseilles to the Jean d’Arc transit camp in Philippeville, Algeria.

The consuls serving in Sweden, Switzerland, and Romania who issued these documents were placed under surveillance and subjected to police interrogations in the countries in which they served. At the same time, upon receipt of information regarding the issuance of passports, the foreign ministries of the countries represented by the consuls decided to punish those diplomats by removing them from their positions in the foreign service.

Read the whole thing.

This is only a taste of a relatively unknown facet of the Holocaust.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Nazis insisted on humane cattle cars - for cattle, not Jews. The logic behind it is relevant for "human rights defenders" today.

Haaretz reports:

In the summer of 1942, Fritz Sendel, chief of staff of the German Order Police in occupied Poland, sent a message to the force’s commanding officers. Its subject: protecting the rights of animals that were transported on trains. “In the spirit of the Reich Animal Protection Act, I order, with immediate effect, that the officers of the stations (German and non-German) intervene immediately in cases of cruelty to animals, put a stop to it and report the offenders,” he wrote.

Sendel noted that “the majority of cases involving the cruelty to animals until now have been observed in regard to the horses used by the police forces.” On top of this, “the crowded conditions in the railway cattle cars, especially for animals being sent to slaughter, have also led to many credible complaints.”

The document in question was found in Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance by Eliyahu Klein, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, whose dissertation, under the supervision of Prof. Havi Dreifuss and Dr. David Silberklang from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, focuses on the relationship between Jews and non-Jews under the German occupation in Poland and elsewhere.

Sendel added an appendix containing precise instructions, ordering the police officers to take action to prevent cruelty to animals and to report on any colleagues who mistreated them. The recommendations included reducing the number of animals per railcar, allowing them to have time to rest and monitoring their condition.

“The text mentions the need to oversee the conditions of the animals being transported,” Klein says. Officers were urged to ensure that the railcars were properly ventilated, to take note of the capacity of the cars and keep track of the number of animals loaded onto each one, and to make note of their physical condition, including details of injuries, respiratory problems and other symptoms. In addition, the German personnel were to see to it that the animals were not struck unnecessarily while being loaded onto the train, and asked to report on cases of sickness or death during the transport.

Klein mentions an exchange of correspondence in the summer of 1942 between two high-ranking Nazi figures. In it the deputy transport minister of Nazi Germany, Albert Ganzenmueller, updated Karl Wolff, chief of staff of Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler, about the transports to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto. In response, Wolff wrote, as quoted in Kerstin von Lingen’s 2013 book “Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals”: “I note with particular pleasure after reading your communication that a train with 5,000 members of the chosen people has been running daily [to Treblinka] for 14 days and that we are accordingly in a position to continue with this population movement at an accelerated pace. ..."

Notice how Ganzenmueller sarcastically refers to Jews as the "chosen people" in a way not dissimilar to how we see the term used by today's anti-Zionists.

The seeming contradiction between how Nazis treated Jews and how they treated animals is not a new topic. I found a very interesting 1992 article that tried to explain this dichotomy in terms of Nazi ideology and its German antecedents.

It would be easy to dismiss the apparently benevolent Nazi attitude toward animals as “hypocrisy,” but this would be a facile way of evading an examination of the psychological and social dynamics of Nazi thinking and behavior. Rather than questioning the authenticity of the motivations behind Nazi animal protection—a question that is unanswerable—it may be more useful to ask how such thinking was possible and what significance it had.

One motivation was the German desire to distinguish themselves morally from Jews. The practice of Jewish ritual slaughter was attacked in the 19th century by German animal rights activists and banning kosher slaughter was one of the first acts of the Nazi government. Propaganda films that attempted to show how cruel Jews were to animals were widely distributed. Moreover, Nazis framed animal experimentation as a "Jewish" practice which should be curtailed (although laws to that effect had many loopholes.)

More interestingly, the paper argues that while there was no consistent Nazi ideology, to a large extent Nazis regarded all humans as animals, with Aryans as the highest form of animal that had to be protected from intermixing with lower forms such as Jews (untermenschen.) It quotes one SS document:

The subhuman—that creation of nature, which biologically is seemingly quite identical with the human, with hands, feet, and a kind of brain, with eyes and a mouth—is nevertheless a totally different and horrible creature, is merely an attempt at being man—but mentally and emotionally on a far lower level than any animal. In the inner life of that person there is a cruel chaos of wild uninhibited passions: a nameless urge to destroy, the most primitive lust, undisguised baseness… But the subhuman lived, too… He associated with his own kind. The beast called the beast… And this underworld of subhumans found its leader: the eternal Jew!

In the hierarchy of the animal kingdom, the Jews occupied the lowest possible position:

When groups of people, most commonly Jews, were likened to specific animal species, it was usually “lower” animals or life forms, including rodents, reptiles, insects, or germs. Hitler (1938), for instance, called the Jews a “pack of rats,” and Himmler, in order to help soldiers cope with having just shot one hundred Jews, told them “bedbugs and rats have a life purpose…but this has never meant that man could not defend himself against vermin” (Hilberg 1961, 219). The propaganda film Triumph of the Will superimposed images of rats over presumed “degenerate people” such as the Jews, and the 1940 film The Eternal Jew portrayed Jews as lower than vermin, somewhat akin to the rat—filthy, corrupting, disease carrying, ugly, and group oriented (Herzstein 1978, 309). ... Jews were also likened to bacteria and “plagues” of insects (Herzstein 1978, 354).

But the Germans even regarded Aryans, in a sense, as animals. Nazis proposed ways to breed superhumans the same way that animals are bred, reducing even Aryan human beings to little more than breeding stock:

Much of Himmler’s knowledge about animal breeding practices was directly applied to plans for human breeding to further Aryan traits (Bookbinder 1989). One of Himmler’s obsessions was the breeding of many more superior Nordic offspring (Shirer 1960, 984). Financial awards were made for giving birth if the child was of biological and racial value, and potential mothers of good Aryan stock who did not give birth were branded as “unwholesome, traitors and criminals” (Deuel 1942, 164–65). Encouraging the propagation of good German blood was seen as so important that several Nazi leaders advocated free love in special recreation camps for girls with pure Aryan qualities. In one of Himmler’s schemes, he argued that if 100 such camps were established for 1000 girls, 10,000 “perfect” children would be born each year (Deuel 1942, 165). Despite the criticism of the Reich Minister of the Interior, who opposed the “idea of breeding Nordics” when it reached the point of “making a rabbit-breeding farm out of Germany” (Deuel 1942, 203), plans were developed for a series of state-run brothels, where young women certified as genetically sound would be impregnated by Nazi men. The intent was to breed Aryans as if they were pedigreed dogs (Glaser 1978).

This viewpoint of all living beings as on the same continuum where the higher animals must be protected from the lower animals is, on its own terms, a coherent moral philosophy that was twisted into a monstrous reality.

It is all too simple to relegate Nazis to cartoonish villains as being evil for evil's sake. But the frightening part is that they justified their evil in the language of ethics. Their position towards animal rights were the most advanced in the world at the time and (unconsciously) influences animal rights activists' philosophy today. Similarly, Nazi Germany was in the forefront of medical ethics, using the same kind of logic described here to justify persecuting Jews as an ethical imperative to protect Aryans.

We see this same perverted twisting of ethics in the 21st century.

Today, there is an unmistakable singling out of Jews as the world's worst violators of ethics, just as the Nazis positioned Jews as morally reprehensible in their treatment of animals.

And today we see "human rights defenders" justifying murdering Jews as an ethical imperative of "resistance.".

Today's supposed "human rights" leaders believe that they have the moral high ground and cannot even see their own bigotry is being justified by their bizarre, twisted sense of ethics. Like the Nazis, they are writing long, seemingly well-researched papers to justify their foregone conclusions in the name of social justice.

Their justifications for attempting to destroy Israel are an eerie echo of the Nazis' ethical justifications for destroying the Jewish people.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

A couple of EoZ cartoons

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

How many could have been saved if Israel was reborn in 1938 instead of 1948? (posters)

There are always discussions on how to teach the Holocaust in a way that young people can internalize the horror of what happened. These discussions become more prominent around Yom Hashoah.

At the same time, with the upcoming Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel haters try to frame Israel as pure evil whose existence is itself a human rights crime and which reduces the security of Jews, not enhances.it.

Last week, pseudo rabbi Brant Rosen said this on Al Jazeera:

I responded with a tweet that received hundreds of Likes:

Here, "Rabbi" Brant Rosen argues on @AJEnglish to @marclamonthill that a military cannot protect Jews, and if Jews want to be safe they should just work in solidarity with other minorities to protect themselves in the Diaspora.

Six million Jews were unavailable for comment.

On Sunday night, I decided to combine these two themes.

I took actual photos of victims of the Holocaust, but I specifically chose photos that non-Jews could identify with. Except for the first, which as taken in the Birkenau camp before that family was murdered, I chose photos without the yellow star, without the emaciated victims. And I colorized them so they would look recent and not like they came from a long ago era.

I then wrote fairly angry posters noting that no one tried to save these Jews from being murdered - but if Israel existed, things might have been different.

I admit, this exercise really affected me as I was doing it. I was too emotionally drained after four posters to continue.

I don't know if others would be as impacted, but perhaps this is a direction that might be useful for teaching both about the Holocaust and the importance of Israel. It won't help for the many real Jew-haters out there (there are plenty of people on Twitter responding that Israel's crimes are worse than Nazi Germany's) but there will always be Jew-haters - the point is to reach normal people.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

"Human rights orgs" give the world permission to hate Jews again

In 2001, Barbara Perry wrote a book called "In the Name of Hate: Understanding Hate Crimes." Chapter 7, "Permission to Hate: Ethnoviolence and the State" says:

[H]ate-motivated violence can flourish only in an enabling environment. In the United States, such an environment historically has been conditioned by the activity-and inactivity-of the state. State practices, policy, and rhetoric often have provided the formal framework within which hate crime-as an informal mechanism of control-emerges. Practices within the state-at an individual and institutional level-that stigmatize, demonize, or marginalize traditionally oppressed groups legitimate the mistreatment of these same groups on the streets. This chapter examines the ways in which state rhetoric, policy, and practice provide the context for violence against minorities.

She brings examples of how political figures, by invoking or dog-whistling tropes against oppressed groups, enable hate crimes against the same groups.

The theory seems to have merit. After all, when bigotry is normalized, then the environment is riper for people who want to act in a bigoted way. They don't feel like they are outliers and they believe that there would be fewer consequences for their actions.

There was a cottage industry of people warning that Donald Trump's alleged bigotry would increase hate crimes, and then magically finding such correlations. (The increase in hate crimes began in the second term of the Obama administration, but for some reason no one seems to blame him.)

Relatively few people noted that there was a similar increase in hateful speech from the Left in the same time period - much of it directed at Trump voters.

To be sure, hate from the Left doesn't usually translate into direct hate crimes, while far-Right hate sometimes does. But hate is always directed at the Other - and it is just as reprehensible when the Other is black or gay, or whether The Other is Republican or live in flyover states.

A major barrier to having feelings of hate is that no one wants to believe that they are bigots. They want to believe that their hate is a righteous hate towards a group of people who richly deserve it. It just so happens that groups like Black people, gays, or women are easily categorized and hate towards them is more easily analyzed than hate for political opponents. However, the emotions are the same, and just as destructive - the same feeling of superiority versus the Other and the same imperative that the Other not have the same rights as those of the hater.

Which brings us to modern hate of Jews.

Jews are indeed a defined group with a rich history of victimhood. Outside of the fringe that are white supremacist or neo-Nazi, people don't want to think of themselves as having the label "antisemite.". The Holocaust is still in living memory and no one wants to be on the side of the Nazis.

But lots of people are itching for an excuse to hate Jews without being called antisemitic, indeed while claiming that they are against antisemitism. They want someone to give them permission to hate in a way that they can still look themselves in the mirror - or better yet, to consider themselves paragons of morality.

The UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other "human rights organizations" have been happy to jump in and provide exactly that permission.

Have you ever noticed that the thorough, multiple debunkings of the "apartheid" slander against Israel get no attention? It is partially because the modern antisemites aren't looking for real reasons to hate Israel and Israeli Jews - they are looking for permission to act on the hate they already had beforehand. Once an Amnesty or a UN gives them that permission, by giving Israel a label of "racist" or "Jewish supremacist," they can pretend that their hate is not toxic Nazi-style bigotry but righteous moral indignation. They have no desire to look beyond the modern slanders of accusing Jews of moral crimes - they have "experts" on their side, and that is all they need to legitimize this new bigotry. The 200 page papers don't need to be read or analyzed; they are meant to simply give permission for the masses to hate Jews eight decades after Auschwitz.

This is the same permission that Barbara Perry noted for bigotry on the Right. NGOs fulfill the functions of the Perry's state-supported hate - in fact, they are in some ways more respected because they position themselves as having no political agenda, only a moral one.

Apologists might argue that this Leftist antisemitism, if they even admit it exists, is still much less serious than far-Right antisemitism. The neo-Nazi antisemites are more likely to have guns and to directly murder Jews, while the Leftist antisemites are merely boycotting Israel. If you define the consequences of antisemitism merely by counting the bodies killed directly by the bigots, they would have a point.

However, we have seen in recent years that while the Leftist version of the world's oldest hatred might not directly attack Jews, it encourages Palestinians and Iranian proxies to attack them - and gives them their own moral cover.

They have created an additional false intellectual framework that claims that Palestinian terrorism is legitimate self defense, and that Israel has no right to defend itself or its citizens from Palestinian terror. They push lies that US military aid to Israel has no oversight and that US arms are being used for war crimes - with the intent to destroy Israel's ability to defend Jews from Palestinian terror. They fund "charities" and Palestinian NGOs that are tightly tied to, and often fronts for, terror groups like the PFLP.

This is simply another layer of looking for, and finding, permission to hate and dehumanize.

Jews killed by right-wing crazies in a synagogue in the US are just as dead as Jews killed by Palestinian Jew-haters while driving in their cars in Judea or exiting their synagogue in Jerusalem. But the Left doesn't consider the latter to be victims of antisemitism - the cognitive dissonance would be too painful So they construct yet another castle in the sky, backed up by academics, pretending that the Palestinians who openly admit and publish their hatred for Jews don't really hate Jews and that they are the victims, not the dead Jews.

The entire house of cards of Leftist justifications for hating Jews (and only Jews) in Israel would collapse in an instant if the "progressive" anti-Zionists would spend five minutes looking at the critiques of the "apartheid" slanders and absurd arguments justifying murdering Jews. Or ten minutes to compare Israel's supposed "crimes" with the acts of any other country in the history of warfare. But truth isn't their goal - they only want to have permission to engage in the same kind of bigotry that they claim is exclusive to the Right. Facts get in the way of their deep desire to put those uppity Jews in their place.

Today, in the streets of London, you can get a crowd of thousands to openly cheer the idea that Palestinians have the right to target and murder Jews, and only Jews, in Israel. They just change the word "murder" to "resistance" and terrorism magically transforms from a crime against humanity into a heroic action.

These bigots have permission from the UN, from Amnesty and HRW, from The Nation and Electronic Intifada, from Peter Beinart and Marc Lamont Hill and dozens of other "intellectuals," to hate Jews - and from there to incite the murder of Jews.

People wonder how the Holocaust could have happened. How, centuries after the Age of Enlightenment that normalized the concepts of human rights and equality, could an entire country be so brainwashed to hate Jews? How could such a hate be not only accepted but enthusiastically promoted by ordinary Germans?

The intellectual groundwork for such an event is being put in place in front of our eyes today.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

80 years ago: Nazis massacre Jewish leaders in Tripoli before leaving

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I searched for the word "Jews" in newspapers from 80 years ago today, and saw many versions of this story:

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

01/09 Links Pt2: ‘The great unpunishment’: How, why so many Holocaust perpetrators got away with it; The Need to Curb Black Anti-Semitism; UAE will teach Holocaust in national school curriculum

From Ian:

‘The great unpunishment’: How, why so many Holocaust perpetrators got away with it

After spending 18 years bringing “Getting Away With Murder(s)” to fruition, British filmmaker David Wilkinson faced wall-to-wall rejections when he shopped the documentary to global broadcasters and subscription services such as Netflix.

Clocking in at three hours, Wilkinson’s film is a detailed indictment of the so-called “great unpunishment” faced by nearly all of the Holocaust’s perpetrators. The film focuses on specific German war criminals — and non-German collaborators — to explain how so many mass murderers avoided accountability.

“The lack of justice for the victims of the Holocaust is the greatest miscarriage of justice in the history of mankind,” Wilkinson told The Times of Israel. “The world needs to know this,” he said.

“Getting Away With Murder(s)” will finally land on several US streaming platforms on January 27, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The film has been airing in 11 European countries since July, said Wilkinson.

“It has been a slog all the time with this documentary,” said Wilkinson, who has produced or distributed 125 films in a career spanning more than four decades.

“In some ways, ‘Jews Don’t Count’ should have been the name of this film,” said Wilkinson, who had to fund much of the documentary himself, along with his wife, costume designer Amy Roberts of Netflix’s “The Crown.”

Even Israeli broadcasters, said Wilkinson, were not keen on supporting the sprawling Holocaust documentary.

“I was told a few times that Israel has more Holocaust documentaries than any other country,” said Wilkinson, whose film was also rejected by the Berlin Film Festival.

However, after the slew of commercial rejections, “Getting Away With Murder(s)” became a favorite of British critics. Wilkinson has been compared favorably to Claude Lanzmann of “Shoah” fame, and the influential “Guardian” voted the film its top documentary of the year.

“It was the power of the free press. Without them championing the film, I really do think it would have been ignored,” said Wilkinson.

The Need to Curb Black Anti-Semitism

In fact, Irving has neither apologized for any unintended incitement nor even acknowledged the phenomenon of growing animosity and violence toward Jews—especially among American blacks. If he had actually wanted to defuse the hold of these ideologies on some of his fans, he might have tried saying something like this:
There is no truth in the claims in Hebrews to Negroes that there was no Holocaust or that today’s Jews usurped Judaism from blacks and should be punished for it. In fact, roughly 6 million Jews were murdered for being Jews during World War II; there is no historical support for a religious usurpation; and it is never okay to harass or attack Jews. If your religion tells you that they deserve it, then your religion is despicable.

And he might have added:
Jews make up about 2 percent of the U.S. population but routinely suffer 60 percent of religion-based hate crimes. Here in New York City, nearly half of all hate-crime victims are Jewish—in a city only around 7 percent Jewish—and in cases where the attacker’s race is known, 42 percent of attackers are black. Brooklyn has experienced 186 hate crimes so far this year, at least 74 of these against Jews. This is shameful, and anyone who commits crimes against Jews needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

If anything, Irving’s peace-and-love non-apologies served as a dog whistle to those whose ideologies he refrained from condemning. On his reinstatement day, scores of Black Hebrew Israelites, outfitted in the uniform of the group Israel United in Christ, amassed in military formation in Grand Army Plaza shouting: “Hey Jacob, it’s time to wake up. We have good news: we are the real Jews.” Still shouting, they army-marched to the nearby Barclay’s Center, where Irving was finally back on court, to distribute fliers promulgating the same brand of libel against Jews that Irving could have explicitly countered, but didn’t. Nothing that Irving has said or done since has stopped Hebrews to Negroes from becoming the best-selling book in multiple Amazon categories or delegitimized its hateful message.

Perhaps conscientious education can cure people of prejudice; certainly, dialogue is a critical and healthy part of civics. Anti-Semitism, however, is an age-old malignancy that leapfrogs bias to become something irrational, suffused with magical thinking and the potential for violence. Maybe to combat this growing surge, we need to focus less on explaining why anti-Semitism is not nice and more on discovering what forces of misplaced grievance and fear in the black community are inflaming it now.

UAE will teach Holocaust education in national school curriculum

The UAE will be adding Holocaust education to its school curriculums, the UAE Embassy in the US confirmed on Twitter last week.

"In the wake of the historic Abraham Accords, the UAE will now include the Holocaust in the curriculum for primary and secondary schools," was written in the tweet which added a quote by one of the Emirati brokers of the Accords Ali al-Nuaimi.

"Memorializing the victims of the Holocaust is crucial," he said. "Public figures failed to speak the truth because a political agenda hijacked their narrative, yet a tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust targets not only Jews but humanity as a whole."

The UAE is the first Arab state to officially include Holocaust education in its school curriculum.

"This means a lot," said US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides in a comment to the UAE Embassy's tweet. "Great to see it coming to fruition."

'Holocaust education is imperative for humanity'
"Pleased to see this important step being taken by the United Arab Emirates," wrote the US Special Envoy to Monitor Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt. "Holocaust education is an imperative for humanity and too many countries, for too long, continue to downplay the Shoah [Holocaust] for political reasons. I commend the UAE for this step and expect others to follow suit soon."

“The United Arab Emirates has been leading the way in peace and tolerance education in the region for some years,” said CEO of Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) Marcus Sheff. "IMPACT-se is delighted that they have taken this important step in educating about the Shoah and humbled to have partnered with the Ministry of Education.”