The Holcaust Never Happened

Meryl Yourish reports in her blog entry Swedes: Who cares about old, dead Jews when Gazans died last month? today:

See if you can follow this logic, because it’s pretty much escaping me. A town in Sweden has decided to cancel its Holocaust remembrance procession because of the Gaza war.

A northern Swedish city has decided to cancel a planned Holocaust Memorial Day torchlight procession due to the recent IDF offensive in Gaza, it was reported Tuesday.

The official reason given for the decision, made by the municipal board and local church in Lulea, was safety concerns, but Bo Nordin, a clergyman and spokesman for the church, cited the war in Gaza.

“It feels uneasy to have a torchlight procession to remember the victims of the Holocaust at this time,” Nordin told Swedish National Radio. “We have been preoccupied and grief-stricken by the war in Gaza and it would feel just feel odd with a large ceremony about the Holocaust.”

I’m sorry, could you please explain that logic to me again? It would feel wrong to remember the victims of the Nazi genocide because Palestinians died in Gaza last month? Do you mean that it would feel wrong to remember people who were killed because they were Jewish because people who were Jewish killed Gazans?

Would someone kindly tell me again how criticism of Israel is not related to anti-Semitism, because I’m really missing that vital blind spot.

The decision drew fierce criticism from various organizations as well as residents of the city, and a defiant group of Lulea locals has decided to hold the torchlight procession anyway.

Good for you. And hey, Bo Nordin, way to show the compassionate side of Christianity—by being unable to feel sympathy for two disparate groups at the same time. You’re some religious leader, all right.

I will give explaining a try. This is the typical German way of thinking, which has been more or less adapted by the rest of Europe as well. It has to do with the psychological mechanism of self-exculpation that lets every single misdeed by Jews, real or perceived, and by Israel, the über-Jew, somehow magically lessen the German/European guilt of the Holocaust. Therefore every single misdeed by Jews, real or perceived, has to be duly noticed, given its due "importance", and charged up against the genocide of the European Jews.

This thinking is, too, based on the deeply antisemitic premis that Auschwitz was a reformatory, a premis that has always been an accepted fact for the German-, and now for the European mainstream as well.

It seems that what Israel, the über-Jew, has done in Gaza has finally nullified the Holocaust in the mind of the Nordins of this world. The charging-up has finally come to a satisfactory end. I don't think that it will remain an isolated case. Watch Roncesvalles and this space for more.

Cross-posted at Roncesvalles!