International Holocaust Remembrance Day has failed, says one prominent Jewish spokesperson

By Carolyn Yeager

Caroline B. Glick* proclaimed last January (2014) that “International Holocaust Remembrance Day” on January 27 has not worked because it has not helped to reduce antisemitism but has made it worse!

All who agree that the entire affair should be canceled as ineffective, raise your hand!

Notice that the goal of “Holocaust Remembrance Day” is not, for Glick, primarily to memorialize the alleged victims but to reduce the occurrence of antisemitism. Antisemitism is the center of Jewish thinking. their #1 concern; it stands above holo-denial which is just an aspect of, a symptom of, the Big A – Antisemitism. 

Antisemitism is the universal compliant of Jewish activists everywhere, but the fact of the matter is that wherever Jews go they bring antisemitism with them. It is Jewish attitudes and behavior that are the cause of other people's dislike of them, even though Jews unanimously insist it lies in the twisted psyches of Europeans.

Just the other day, Danny Cohen, Director of BBC Television no less, was  complaining at a conference in Israel that “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew in the UK as I’ve felt in the last 12 months. And it’s made me think about, you know, is it our long-term home, actually. […] having lived all my life in the UK, I’ve never felt as I do now about anti-Semitism in Europe.”

Last month, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who is also Jewish, decried the rise of antisemitism in Great Britain and called for “a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism in the UK.” And this is just two of many, many who are saying the same thing.

But Caroline Glick goes a few steps further.

She implies the United Nations's Holocaust Remembrance Day every January 27th functions more like some kind of a hoax on Jews.

She first points out that Jews/Israel have their own day, Yom HaShoah which falls in March or April. She calls Jan. 27th an “extra” holocaust memorial that Israel doesn't need, and questioned whether Israel should bother with sending another delegation to Auschwitz next January [next month] if it doesn't serve any positive purpose for Jews.

Glick further diminishes the United Nations-appointed day by saying that “every day is holocaust remembrance day for the Jewish people because, at some level, every day we feel the ulcerative loss” of six million victims, and miss them. Compare this with her statement that non-Jews "bowing their heads for 5 minutes every January 27th in honor of dead Jews" is only pretending to care.

Glick admits Israel was a co-sponsor of the resolution, but fails to say that Israel also drafted it and decided it should fall on January 27, the day holo historians pinpoint as the liberation of Auschwitz. In other words, though it is Jew-created it still doesn't serve Jews well enough.

Resolution fails to live up to its promise

At the time, Glick says, Israeli politicians and American Jewish leaders extolled the resolution as signaling a new era of UN relations with the Jewish state. The main claim was that it would make a “significant contribution” to combating antisemitism.

But after eight years, says Glick, none of this has happened.

Instead, according to her, UN “aggressions” against Israel have escalated since the International Day of Commemoration was adopted in 2005. Thus, she concludes, Holocaust memorializing in Europe is enabling anti-Semitism. rather than combating it.

Got that? Glick says the over 200 UN Security Council resolutions condemning and/or faulting Israel for not following the rules that bind everyone else are “aggressions against the Jewish state.”

Here are some of the ways antisemitism is being enabled by the Jan. 27 Holocaust Remembrance Day, as elucidated by Glick in her article:

• A week before January 27th, the UN ushered in 2014 as the Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The occasion was marked, among other things, by the January 20 opening of a year-long exhibit at the UN Headquarters in New York portraying Israelis as Nazis and Palestinians as Jews.

• Since 2005 [the year the commemoration was approved] anti-Semitism has risen throughout Europe, as have levels of anti-Semitism among Europhilic Americans. [Glick's word choice, meaning Americans who positively identify as European. Sounds like a disease, doesn't it?]

• Jews throughout Europe feel under assault, and unprotected. The situation is so bad that Jews don’t even bother reporting most of the anti-Semitic attacks they suffer.

• Europeans use the focus on the Holocaust to pretend that European anti-Semitism began with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 and ended with their defeat 12 years later. In truth, the Nazis’ rise to power was a natural consequence of 1,600 years of European Jew hatred. [She sometimes says it “goes back to Jesus.”]

• From the time of Roman Emperor Constantine, persecution, expulsion and massacre of Jews was the norm, not the exception, in European life. [Ergo, all Europeans, going back to Constantine, are guilty of “Jew hatred.”]

• Hitler and his colleagues were supported by the Germans, and by the majority of the people in the European lands they conquered, because of their anti-Semitism and their dehumanization of Jews [not in spite of].
  

• Yale University created YIISA [Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism] to serve as the catalyst for a serious reckoning by American and European academia with the scourge of anti-Semitism that was not eradicated – or even seriously dealt with – after the Holocaust.

• Arab donors, PLO officials and Europhilic academics demanded that Yale close YIISA. This closure was one more indicator of anti-Semitism’s profound and enduring influence on our daily lives.

It is vital that we understand why, says Glick.

It is because most Europeans and their American admirers don’t have a problem with anti-Semitism. They shrug their shoulders, turn a blind eye, or condone continued assaults on Jews.

How maddening this is to Glick and other obsessives, of which Abe Foxman is a good example. She adds:

The Arab transposition of Jew hatred from Europe to Israel provided the Europeans with a new political framework to attack Jews. And with it, they continue to blame Jews for everything from the price of oil to Islamic terrorism while slandering the descendants of their [our!] grandparents’ victims with blood libels against Israel.

Our grandparents' victims!? What an underhanded attack this is. It's undeniably true that the holocausters have been slandering OUR grandparents with blood libels since 1942! She is turning the pointing finger around 180 degrees.

Continuing toward her crescendo:

In this rancid environment, rather than serving to combat Jew hatred [otherwise known as antisemitism] International Holocaust Remembrance Day inadvertently enables it. By bowing their heads in honor of dead Jews for five minutes every January 27, the Europeans get to pretend that the Holocaust was exogenous, as opposed to organic to, and still very much a part of European civilization.

Very well then, let's NOT hypocritically bow our heads for 5 minutes, and let's NOT have this hypocrisy filling up the newspapers, television and the Internet for a week and more trying to satisfy Jewish lust for retribution. Let's admit that we don't really give a damn about it or the Jews, and ignore the whole thing! If we admit this, what can they do to us besides fume and fuss. But Glick is not done yet:

Modern Zionism was conceived as having two objectives – to enable the Jews to protect ourselves from anti-Semites; and to end anti-Semitism by normalizing Jews as a nation among the nations. But, the Jewish state cannot end other people’s hatred of Jews, because we didn’t cause it. Only the anti-Semites, through their own moral reckoning with their anti-Semitic past and present, can do that.

But, but, but Caroline, we don't have to do it, do we? We don't have to accept your guilt trip. Why did we ever do it in the first place? Only for political reasons. Our position should be that we didn't cause Jews to be parasites posing as eternal victims, so we can't cure them of it no matter how much money we give them. (It goes back to Abraham.) Only the Jews, through their own moral reckoning, can do that … if they choose. If not, it should be no skin off our backs. (It's our money that they need, it's our land that they want, it's our culture that they claim as their own yet want to destroy.)

Now for Glick's Grand Finale:

In light of the Europeans’ continued refusal to undertake such a moral reckoning, far from combating anti-Semitism, 'International Holocaust Remembrance Day' serves as a cover for it. Israel and the Jewish people should not let the Holocaust serve as a fig leaf for their [the Europeans] continuing, and growing, hatred.

Right on, Caroline! Holocaust Remembrance Day is only a fig leaf, a cover for antisemitism. Let the truth come out, if that's what it must do. Let's do away with this ineffective and dishonest “Day” as it has not accomplished it's purpose, and is ill-equipped to do so.

According to you, Caroline, Europeans have hated Jews for 2000 years; if that is so it must be “built-in," hard-wired and therefore unchangeable. Let us recognize this fact. Let all Jews abandon European and 'Europhilic' lands and gather in their own beloved land of Israel where they can finally protect themselves from antisemites.  There is hope. You have my vote.

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*Caroline B. Glick is a passionate Zionist who grew up in Chicago's Hyde Park and now divides her time between Mevasseret Zion, Israel and Washington D.C. After college, she made aliyah to Israel in 1991 and joined the IDF (Israeli Defense Force). From 1994-96, she was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians. In 1997-98, she served as assistant foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. She then returned to the U.S. for graduate school but in 2000 returned to Israel as a journalist and magazine editor. From 2004-12 she served as senior fellow for Mid-Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C.

In 2012 Glick joined the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles as Director of the Center’s Israel Security Project while remaining in the above-mentioned senior fellow position. As such, she travels regularly to Washington “to brief senior officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.”

She has published two books: Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad, 2008, and The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, 2014.