Symptom of craziness

The Nazi-era annals of those with only tenuous Jewish links paradoxically illustrate how unparalleled the Holocaust was.


Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
09 April '10

The latest Egyptian blockbuster movie, Cousins (Welad Ela’am), ostensibly set in Tel Aviv (actually filmed in far-off Cape Town), unabashedly demonizes Israelis as Nazis. In one scene, as drivers halt their vehicles for Holocaust Remembrance Day’s memorial siren, the Arab hero provocatively asks an old man standing at solemn attention: “And what about the Holocaust you perpetrated against the Palestinians?”

Dwarfing and distorting the Holocaust serves our enemies – from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas (who earned a PhD in Moscow for a dissertation which denied the Holocaust and simultaneously blamed it on Zionists).

This is the common Arab warp of history. It goes entirely unchallenged in the Arab/Muslim milieu and is fast becoming axiomatic in Europe and among the so-called progressives who proliferate in America’s media and campuses.

Their assorted misrepresentations omit to mention that the very word genocide was coined post-Holocaust specifically to describe what was plotted against the Jewish people. Eventually the term was devalued and used in reference to any bloody combat, though Europe’s Jews were never a combatant side and instigated no aggression against Germany. Not even the remotest casus belli existed against them.

THE NAZI-ERA annals of those with only tenuous Jewish links – such as the once-great Wittgenstein clan of Austria – paradoxically illustrate how unparalleled the Holocaust was, how distinct from even the worst massacres of recent history which are fallaciously compared to it and used to diminish its terrifying uniqueness.

This is particularly odd given the fact that the Wittgensteins weren’t Jewish according to any Jewish criteria, that none perished in any of Germany’s industrialized death facilities and that some Wittgenstein scions fought with distinction in the Wehrmacht. Unlike the struggling Jewish masses, the Wittgensteins were among the wealthiest members of the prewar European upper crust. They were intellectually brilliant and exceptionally eccentric by any yardstick. They could plainly afford to be.

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