Confronting 'history's longest hatred'

[Behind the Aegis]

It's been called history's longest hatred. The last aging survivors of Auschwitz see everywhere evidence that virulent Jew-hatred did not die in the Berlin bunker with Hitler. Indeed, in 2010, victims of the Shoah see their suffering denied, their legacy perverted and inverted.

The president of the European Jewish Congress recently put it bluntly to European Parliamentarians: "Jews are afraid to walk the streets in Europe with Jewish signs. Synagogues, Jewish schools and kindergartens require barbed-wire fences and security and Jewish men, women and children are beaten up in broad daylight . . . Jews are being forced out of many European cities, like Malmo, . . . because of the atmosphere of hostility and violence."

This week along with other Jewish leaders, we with Secretary Hillary Clinton and Hannah Rosenthal, Special Envoy on Anti-Semitism at the State Department to discuss the crisis. Enroute to the nation's capitol I listed some of the key sources of the moral pollution:

Holocaust Denial: Even without its looming nuclearization, Iran brings to bare the full weight of state-sanctioned Holocaust Denial. This is the springboard energizing Tehran's campaign to justify to Muslims worldwide demonizing Jews and deploying genocidal rhetoric and action against the Jewish state-through Iran's sponsorship of Jew-hating proxies--Hezbollah and Hamas--and, according to Interpol, the Mullahcracy's direct involvement in a murderous attack on the Jewish communal headquarters in Argentina.
Holocaust Relativization In Eastern Europe, there's a campaign to scrap January 27th--International Holocaust Memorial Day--and merge it with a commemoration for victims of communism. The state-funded Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania--mandated to "collect, keep and present historic documents about forms of physical and spiritual genocide against the Lithuanian people"--omits over 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered by the Nazis with the help of local collaborators--apparently because Jews, then or now, aren't real Lithuanians.

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