Yair Rosenberg: How Not to Talk About the Holocaust
It’s rarely a good sign when the Holocaust trends on social media, and this week was no exception. On Sunday, in an interview with 60 Minutes, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi declared that he needed more evidence to determine whether the Holocaust took place. “There are some signs that it happened,” he said. “If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched.” That same day, on Twitter, a writer engaging in the usual internecine feuding on the left falsely claimed that America’s entry into World War II accelerated the Holocaust; a pile-on predictably ensued.Fighting for social justice while ignoring Arab slave masters
As a grandson of Shoah survivors who is named after one of its victims, I certainly found these spectacles discomfiting. But they are far from unique. Indeed, it seems as though every month we are subjected to another politicized paroxysm over the Nazi genocide, in which the millions murdered are victimized once more by partisans who instrumentalize their deaths for contemporary political debates.
To be fair, it can be quite difficult to discuss the Holocaust, a travesty so vast that it defies description. But we can know what not to say. To that end, here is a handy five-point guide explaining how not to talk about the Holocaust. Feel free to share it on social media the next time you see someone trying to dragoon the calamity’s victims into their latest political pet peeve.
1. Don’t compare things to the Holocaust that aren’t the Holocaust. In some senses, this is obvious. Whatever one thinks of them, vaccine passports are not the mechanized murder of millions of Jews and other undesirables. Mask mandates are not the Nuremberg Laws. But these are easy cases.
The truth is, some things do warrant comparison to the Holocaust. Personally, I can think of no more relevant frame for understanding China’s heinous treatment of its Uyghur Muslim population. But just because some things can be likened to the Holocaust doesn’t mean they should be. The reason is sadly simple: When you compare something terrible to the Holocaust, the argument inevitably becomes about the comparison rather than the terrible thing you intended to decry. Instead of raising awareness about an atrocity, you end up distracting from it.
Invoking the Holocaust seems like a shortcut, but it is actually a dead end. The term Holocaust has rhetorical power because so many people already understand its awfulness. By definition, contemporary catastrophes do not have that cachet, and any effective advocate needs to use specifics and facts to impose the urgency of their cause on the public. Skipping this step and jumping straight to Holocaust elides the hard but necessary conversation required to educate and motivate outsiders to action.
The hypocrisy of those purporting to believe in social justice and ranting about white privilege and colonialism is well documented. The antisemitic obsession of those who see Israel as the world's only violator of human rights and declare their fealty to the Palestinians is especially galling given their lack of interest in the abuses committed by Palestinian leaders against their own people, the persecution of Palestinians in Lebanon, and the torture and murder of Palestinians by the Syrian regime. Even more remarkable is the silence of human rights advocates regarding slavery in the Arab world.Howard Jacobson: The Kveen - An English Jew pays his respects
The subject received brief notoriety in the 1980s with the publication of John Laffin's book The Arabs as Master Slavers (1982) and Murray Gordon's Slavery in the Arab World (1989). Both traced the history of slavery in the region. Laffin noted that "the slave trade was first begun in Africa by the Arabs; they were the procurers and suppliers" and that "from the earliest period of the history of Islam in Africa, slaves were frequently mentioned as tribute or taxes paid to political superiors."
Laffin quotes The Economist from 1956: "Saudi Arabia seems to be the most guilty as far as 'classical' slavery is concerned." The Saudis were the last to abolish slavery in Arabia – in 1962. Nevertheless, Laffin noted that "by the 1960s slavery in Arabia was flourishing as never before."
Fast forward to the present.
A report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) was just released that found an estimated 50 million people living in modern slavery conditions in 2021, including 3.3 million children. Of these, 28 million are trapped in forced labor and 22 million in forced marriage.
Over 10% of them were in the Arab states, which had the highest rates of forced labor (5.3 per thousand people) and forced marriage (4.9 per thousand people).
According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), more than 500,000 people are slaves in Arab countries.
I have no warrant to talk for other Jews, but if there was one thing about her comportment that spoke to me as a Jew it was precisely this seriousness. Life was not a lark to her.
When Jews speak of being chosen they are not asserting spiritual superiority. The covenant God made with them demanded a renunciation of frivolity and self-assertion in favor of the pursuit of ethical purpose. Call it a covenant of impersonality and disinterestedness. In 1954 the queen entered into a near identically sober and demanding covenant.
British Jews have had good reason to feel safe under the protection of the British royal family. It is well-known that the Duke of Edinburgh’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg was honored by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for hiding Jewish children in her house during World War II. In accordance with her own wishes, she is buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Prince Charles is a regular guest at Jewish charitable events and has spoken out often and eloquently against antisemitism in all its forms. Whether or not the interest the royal family takes in Jews extends to their knowing many or reading the books they write or trying the food they eat, I can’t pretend to know. But atmospherically, by virtue of its principled a-political lukewarmness, the royal family seems to promise refuge.
The queen herself had less to say, in public anyway, on these matters. But it served her well to be above the fray, not only above politics, which ends up muddying whoever it touches, but above definitiveness. Wasn’t it some such symbolic abstraction that was enjoined on her when she was anointed in quasi-Old Testament language? The God of the Jews is invisible, an idea, the more sacred for being impalpable and quite probably not there at all. Whenever I looked at a portrait of the queen, or heard her speak, I thought I saw, not indifference to the storms that shook the country, but the dispassionateness of someone who listened to a higher authority than parliament or the people.