One of the most bizarre claims that has been making the rounds in extreme right-wing circles and was cited by the Republican candidate for president during Tuesday’s debate is the libel against Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, which claims that they have stolen people’s pet cats and eaten them. This was immediately debunked by the moderators at the debate. The city manager and the police chief of Springfield have stated unequivocally that this is untrue. It never happened, but the talk persists anyway.
In her daily newsletter earlier this week, former U.S. Attorney and law professor Joyce Vance quotes commentator Matt Sheffield on this subject who writes, “It's not just that the Haitian story is ridiculous. It's not just that it’s a lie. It is both of those things, but it is more than that; it is also dangerous. Dehumanizing people is what makes inhuman treatment of them possible. It’s how you justify the family separation policy that ripped children from their parents, some of them so young that reunification is still elusive more than five years later. In extreme cases, dehumanization is a path towards genocide, the way the Nazis called Jews in Germany vermin and claimed that they spread disease and used the blood of non-Jewish children in rituals as prelude to the Holocaust.”
Again and again through this presidential campaign and for years before, we have been warned of a non-existent crime wave created by immigrants to this country and heard the proposals to execute a mass deportation of migrants in the future rather than pass appropriate legislation to regulate the flow of immigration. The use of such fictitious narratives is setting up a society where atrocities against other human beings can be justified by dehumanizing them first. As Sheffield notes,Jews have long been the recipients of such libels throughout history. The medieval blood libel claiming Jews killed Christian children because they required their blood in order to make matzah persisted into the early part of the 20th century, as recently as the infamous trial of Mendel Beiliss in 1913 Czarist Russia which inspired the Bernard Malamud novel “The Fixer,” and the movie made of it in 1968. The fabricated “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from 1903, that claims that there is a vast Jewish conspiracy to take over the world continues to be published in spite of detailed refutation of its contents over the past century. This blasphemous texts still finds readers who accept its lies as gospel Editions in all sorts of languages have spread throughout the world over the years and it can be found on the Internet of course.. Fictitious narratives indeed have laid the foundations for persecution and other atrocities that we know only too well. Hitler read the protocols and distributed copies throughout his regime representing it as the truth and justification for his vicious policies against the Jews. We know well that the Jews were only one of a number of groups targeted for death by the Nazis. Tragically, hatred of the “other” persists in our country and around the world. Haitians today, tomorrow another group.
What is even more concerning for us Jews these days is the rise of antisemitic acts across the country and around the world, often masquerading as critiques of Israeli policies. Haters are quick to claim that anti-Zionism is not just another name for antisemitism though it is nearly impossible to tell the difference. Along with this, we are witnessing once again attempts in some right-wing circles to legitimize Holocaust denial. The efforts by some supposed historians and professors to claim that the Holocaust never happened or that if it did happen, the numbers affected were far smaller than we know they actually were, has been debunked time and again for decades. These lies have been refuted over and over by the overwhelming wealth of material: photographs, videos, documents, testimony of survivors and of perpetrators and more, providing massive amounts of proof of the tragic reality of the Shoah. Many universities have appropriately dismissed these so-called “historians” from their faculties around the world. In some countries, Holocaust denial is a punishable crime and people have been arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for perpetrating it. In 2022, the United Nations adopted a resolution aimed at combating Holocaust denial and antisemitism. The resolution was proposed by Germany and Israel.
In spite of this, we see television personality Tucker Carlson recently interviewing and giving a platform to a notorious Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist, Darryl Cooper. Cooper speaks approvingly of Adolf Hitler and denounces Winston Churchill. He claims America was on the wrong side of the Second World War among other claims. If hosting Cooper was not bad enough, Carlson called him “the most important popular historian in the United States.” Beyond this, Elon Musk has called this discussion “very interesting” in a post on his platform X, as if these views should be given careful consideration.. Given the opportunity to condemn Carlson for promoting Cooper, J.D. Vance, the vice presidential candidate, refused to condemn Carlson for promoting Cooper and his ideas.
The Biden administration and all Democrats in Congress issued statements condemning this support of Holocaust denial and the Jewish members of both houses of Congress issued a very forceful statement which included the following: “The normalization of Nazism is unacceptable and dangerous and must be forcefully condemned. Americans deserve to know that their leaders will rebuke the cancers of antisemitism and Nazism whenever and wherever they appear.” Some Republicans also expressed concern, though others seemed reluctant to express their views on this matter. I have not seen any response from the Republican presidential candidate who earlier this year hosted another Holocaust denier at a dinner at Mara Lago. These types of signals should raise great concern not only among Jews but among all minorities in this country.
Both Rabbi Akiva, a leading authority of the second century as well as Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who became the central figure in Christianity, cite the verse in Leviticus as one of two central teachings of Judaism and by implication Christianity as well, “Love your neighbor as yourself” along with loving the Lord your God will all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. I know very well that some have attempted to limit the definition of “neighbor” to those who are like themselves, have similar beliefs and practices, who look and act like them, and so forth. However, simply by scrolling down the page in chapter 19 of Leviticus, one notes that we are also called upon to love the stranger, those who are not like us. I pointed this out some years ago when I spoke before the Criminal Laws subcommittee of the South Carolina House judiciary committee in favor of adopting hate crimes legislation. Our local bigot, “serving” on the committee, told me I was perverting the word of the Lord and predicted that I would “go to hell.”
One of Rabbi Akiva’s colleagues, Shimon ben Azzai, extended the principle of neighborly love by citing a different verse as the central principle of Judaism, “This is the book of the generations of Adam, on the day that God created Adam, in the image of God He made Adam.” We are called upon to recognize the divine image in all people regardless of whatever distinguishing characteristics one may point to. Efforts to demonize people of other faiths or races or nationalities or to deny their history and suffering go against the basic principles of our faith and the teachings of our neighbors as well. People who claim to walk in the path of their savior need to reflect on this basic principle that is recognized in virtually all the religious traditions around the world.
As the years go by, there are fewer and fewer firsthand witnesses of the Holocaust. Our last survivor at Temple B’nai Israel, Nancy Apfelroth, sadly passed away this past June in her 97th year. For years she and her late husband Ulrich spoke in High Schools, synagogues and civic groups, and elsewhere of their personal experiences of the Shoah, having lived through it and thankfully survived. Though they are now no longer among us, Nancy’s testimony was recorded in 1995 by the Shoah Foundation and on those recordings she speaks of life as a child in her town in Poland prior to the Nazi invasion and of the experiences she and her community had after the Nazis invaded her native land. It becomes our responsibility now to continue to transmit and teach about the events of the Holocaust to this generation and to those who follow and to counter the antisemitic efforts to eradicate the memory of this horrendous crime from the history books.
Last Sunday, we began our religious school sessions once again. Our school is very small, but we continue to offer personalized instruction to our students. This year’s curriculum includes a unit on the Holocaust. We are using as our text a book that came out in the early 90s entitled “The Holocaust: The World and the Jews, 1933 – 1945”, written by Jewish educator Seymour Rossel. Rossel’s aim in this volume is explicitly to counter those who deny the reality of the Shoah, by providing evidence through photographs, documents, and testimony of those who lived through that period. He invites students to become historians. He writes, “All of these documents, writings, and photographs are first-hand evidence of what happened in the Holocaust. Every photograph, every official document, every paper tells a part of the story. Using your own eyes, the evidence in this book, and the text that ties together photographs and documents, you will discover for yourself what happened in the Holocaust.”
The Supreme Allied Commander during the Second World War was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later the 34th president of the United States. It is recorded that once he entered a death camp in April of 1945, he made it his business to inspect every nook and cranny of the place and immediately called for Washington and London to send reporters and photographers to document the evidence of Nazi brutality. Already at that time, he recognized that the day would come when some individuals would claim that none of this happened and he wanted to make sure that such vicious nonsense would be totally refuted and, as we’ve seen, his prediction continues to be true..
As has been recognized by leaders and institutions worldwide, the denial of the Holocaust is nothing less than another form of antisemitism and no platform should be available for these phony “historians” anywhere in the world. Any decent public official should immediately, without hesitation, condemn the efforts to spread this venom and lay the foundations for additional hatred and worse. This should not be a matter of partisan politics and one would expect that all Americans would unite around these fundamental values insuring human dignity for all people throughout our country and the world.
Comentarios