A neglected element in Holocaust education

Sar Shalom

In teaching about the Holocaust, much emphasis is placed on the horrors, no need to elaborate, perpetrated by the Third Reich regime and the SS officer corps. However, much less, if any, is placed on the measures that the regime used to entice the German population to see what would eventually be done to the Jews as a justifiable reaction to the supposed threat posed by world Jewry. One aspect of this campaign was to start with publicizing incontrovertible unflattering facts about the Jews. These unflattering facts became a gateway drug to accepting half-truths about the Jews which in turn became a gateway drug to accepting total fabrications. Once those total fabrications were accepted as "truth," it became possible to believe that whatever was done to the Jews subsequently was justified punishment for what they supposedly did.

A similar pattern is playing itself out in how the Palestinianists propagandize about Israel's actions as they affect the Palestinians. It is incontrovertible that there is some degree of suffering, albeit considerably less than is claimed among the Palestinianists, among the general Palestinian population and the Israel exercises some degree of influence over how they live their lives. Those facts are the gateway drug for Western do-gooders to believe that when terrorists embed themselves within peaceful marchers demanding return to their homes in internationally recognized Israel and Israel deploys snipers against those terrorists, Israel is using kinetic force against the march for return as a march for return. That in turn is a gateway drug to believing that Israel is opening (nonexistent) dams in the south in order to flood Gaza trains American police departments in all the brutal methods of suppressing minority community.

Update: Many western do-gooders think they are promoting justice by calling for the full force of international opprobrium against Israel in response to her genuine shortcomings, half-truths, and alleged crimes. In actuality, they are following the same process that ordinary Germans followed when they allowed themselves to accept that fabricated allegations were genuine and thus justified what would otherwise be unspeakable allowing today's do-gooders to justify what is a vast overreaction to any bona fide shortcoming of Israel but seems like a proportional response to the monster that is depicted by the half-truths and fabrications.