For the first time in my life, I am starting to really understand how the world let the Holocaust happen.
I never really got it. I’ve read numerous books about the Holocaust, but it was always intangible to a certain extent. I guess my mind couldn’t quite comprehend how something so atrocious, so unequivocally immoral and horrific, was allowed to happen and how the world simply turned a blind eye. To me, the Holocaust was a no-brainer – it was a black-and-white situation where there was no argument, whatsoever, that it was acceptable or that there was some kind of reason or excuse that made it okay.
Today, I’m starting to get a glimpse of how the world let it happen.
The Holocaust started with words. It started with small, seemingly benign sentences, words, images.
The Jews have historically been the world’s scapegoat. At any time in the history of the Jewish people, you can find a group who blames the Jews for something that went wrong in their lives. It’s always been so easy for people to do. That is no different today.
Many people are associating the recent tremendous surge in antisemitism with what is happening in Israel. They are essentially saying that if Israel wasn’t “doing what it was doing,” antisemitism wouldn’t be rising. They are delegitimizing and demonizing Israel and using it as a scapegoat for antisemitism. The fact is, what people are saying about Israel is merely a ploy to rationalize and excuse antisemitism. By blaming it on Israel, people then have an excuse for being antisemitic, and the whole world happily jumps on the bandwagon – some, blatant antisemites, others ill-informed and ignorant sheep who take the first catchy headline they see under the guise of social justice and human rights.
FOR THE first time in my life, I am starting to really understand how the world let the Holocaust happen.
I am really seeing how this is a downward spiral of quicksand and how no matter what we say, we are a mere 0.2% of the world’s population, our voices being drowned out instantaneously. The amount of propaganda out there, the ease with which it is spun up, is absolutely astonishing.
Today I am seeing how easy it is to fall into the quicksand of antisemitism and how quickly the world is ready to bury us.
While there may be a certain percentage of people who are misinformed sheep latching onto faulty propaganda about Jews and Israel, the people churning out the lies, misinformation, and propaganda know exactly what they’re doing. They know that woke culture is at its prime right now and that the world would be inflamed and angry if they heard Israel was doing something appalling such as “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” and “colonialism.” It’s in this way they start to twist the narrative. Then you take terrorists who are calculated and conniving, Hamas, who already exploit the narrative and the media, and you combine them with the antisemitism that has always been alive, albeit suppressed to a certain extent, plus woke culture, and you have the perfect climate for the worst of antisemitism to thrive and come alive.
With what I’m seeing today, I realize that this is entirely possible to have happened in Europe in the 1930s, ultimately leading to the Holocaust. I can now understand how small little fires that were set and unleashed around a world full of antisemites, maybe repressed or suppressed antisemites, could lead to an atrocity such as the Holocaust. I see the willingness of people to so easily believe what they hear, and I see how easy it is to drown out the truth, especially when less than 0.2% of the population are speaking up about it.
All of that taken into account, adding social media into the mix makes it all the more scary.
When you have people who have been given an influential platform for no reason whatsoever, who have millions of followers who idolize them, look up to them, and take what they see to be their reality, you get an even scarier reality of possibilities. Social media has birthed a faster and more immediate way to spread massive misinformation and hate.
SO WHY am I writing all of this?
I started off by saying that I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. As such, I grew up hearing the atrocities committed by antisemites, by Nazis, and I know the danger of antisemitism all too well. I know that if we don’t stop this now before it gets out of hand, we will head down a very dark and dangerous path. Antisemitism should be something that the entire world is wary of, for it represents the presence of hate among the world, and as we’ve seen in the past, this hate, if left to fester, mutates into hatred of much more than just Jews. As the late, great Rabbi Sacks Z”L says in his brilliant video about The Mutation of Antisemitism, antisemitism should be the world’s early warning system that we are going down a slippery and dangerous road.
Don’t blame it on Israel. Israel is merely defending itself. We all just want peace and want to coexist in this world. Don’t let Israel or something else Jews have supposedly done be a scapegoat for anyone’s antisemitism. Educate yourself with proper resources and speak up against it.
Don’t be the person who turns a blind eye and who stands by silently, merely watching as the world slowly crumbles, as Jews are being attacked, both physically and online. It all starts with words. Speak up against the seemingly innocuous words against Jews. Don’t be fooled by the people who say that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By being anti-Zionist, you are denying the right of the Jewish people – a people who have been ethnically cleansed and expelled from every country and place we try to make our homes – to live in our homeland and to have a Jewish state that accepts us.
I have pledged Never Again, and I will not stand idly by.
Speak up now, before it’s too late.