The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Columnist Daniel Henninger correctly observes that “There was a time when most American schoolchildren had a functioning knowledge of the Holocaust and the camps.  No longer.  Universities’ hiring and enabling of activist left-wing professors—proponents of the anti-Israel movement called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—has affected a generation of students.  A Quinnipiac poll found 51% of Democrats younger than 35 don’t support sending military aid to Israel after Hamas’s attack.”  Two illustrations of this “anti-Semitism problem” among progressives:

• Recently, progressive activist groups released a “Gaza 2024 statement” asserting they will not vote for Joe Biden “if he does not end US support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza.”  The announcement offers background on “Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.”
• An open letter from 100 Columbia University professors called the Hamas massacre “a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power.”

Furthermore, a recent Wall Street Journal editorial documents the growing global war on the Jewish people:  “The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This most modern of pogroms—global, televised, politicized—demonstrates exactly what is at stake as Israel ramps up its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.”

• In mid-October hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia, stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Mobs raided hotels in other parts of the North Caucasus looking for Jews, and a Jewish community center under construction in the city of Nalchik was the target of an apparent attack.
• Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, including an attack with Molotov cocktails against a synagogue in Berlin on 18 October. Some Jews found Stars of David painted on their homes, an echo of the Nazi persecution.
• Two Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns, and some British Jews no longer feel safe wearing visible symbols of their faith. Tens of thousands of protesters in London over three successive weekends called for “jihad” and chanted “from the river to the sea,” a demand for the erasure of Israel and by extension its citizens.
• A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted “gas the Jews” after the Hamas attack.
• Americans like to believe such things could not happen in the U.S. They have. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 388% increase in anti-Semitic incidents from 7-23 October compared with the same period a year ago. The 312 incidents the ADL recorded include a car carrying individuals with Palestinian flags allegedly swerving toward a Jewish family and several alleged assaults by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ADL tally counts 109 anti-Israel rallies that featured support for Hamas or violence against Jews in Israel.
• David Brooks comments that “A group of highly educated American progressives cheered on Hamas as anti-colonialist freedom fighters even though Hamas is a theocratic, genocidal terrorist force that oppresses . . . and revels in massacres of innocents.  These campus activists showed little compassion for Israeli men and women who were murdered at a music festival because they were perceived as ‘settlers’ and hence worthy of extermination.”

These and other incidents since 7 October challenge the notion that one can distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism.  “Yet many Western intellectuals—and a growing number of politicians—insist on maintaining this false distinction. They’ve seen what Hamas has done to innocent Israeli civilians, and what pro-Hamas protesters have said and done in Western streets. They’d nonetheless forgive any violence by Hamas or Hezbollah against Jews as anticolonial defiance.  This is why Israel is fighting, and must fight, as hard as it is for its survival as a state. And why it’s inexcusable for any Western politician now to demand a cease-fire in Gaza. No leader who is demonstrably incapable of protecting Jews in his or her own country should try to prevent Israel from defending itself. This is how the West slips from ‘never again’ into ‘nowhere is safe.’ This global war on Jews also clarifies what is at stake for Western societies in this fight. The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.”

And just a reminder about The Jewish Holocaust that so many young people know little or nothing about:  It ran from 1933-1945.  Germany’s Nazi party under Adolf Hitler called it “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”  The Nazis collected and sent Jews to 23 main concentration camps in Europe.  Extermination camps included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno.  Some 6 million Jews were murdered, often in gas chambers, burned and dumped in mass pits.

The columnist Ross Douthat offers a few additional insights:  “In 1996, the late Richard John Neuhaus described the Holocaust as ‘our only culturally available icon of absolute evil.’  With Hamas’s attacks, the story seemed like it might be simpler: Here were atrocities against Jews carried out with seemingly genocidal zeal; here was a case where Neuhaus’s formulation seemed immediately relevant; here was an opportunity to emphasize the necessity of historical remembrance. One thing I did not expect amid these shifts was that arguments on behalf of Israel would themselves stray from Shoah exceptionalism by arguing that Hamas is worse than the Nazis. But maybe it makes sense, as response to the diminished memory of the Holocaust, that there would be uppings of the rhetorical ante along with invocations of the past.”

The historian Andrew Roberts offered the same argument at length in an essay for The Washington Free Beacon. Here’s an excerpt: “For whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so.”

• In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a notorious speech to 50 of his senior lieutenants in Posen. “I want to speak frankly to you about an extremely grave matter,” he said. “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. … I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. … It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.”
• “By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption. . . The sheer glee with which Hamas, by contrast, killed parents in front of their children and of children in front of their parents, was broadcast to the world. Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, but it wasn’t built into their actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been.”
• “Roberts emphasizes Hamas’s public savagery as against Nazi attempts to hide their crimes from the civilized world. But those expressions of barbarism, like the terrible crimes of the Islamic State to which they’ve been compared, are notable precisely because they’re throwbacks to a dreadful but also entirely historically familiar way of war, in which brutality and humiliation and rape are part of the arsenal of combat, and berserker passions are deliberately embraced.”

Finally, Douthat draws a penetrating distinction between the evil of Hamas on 7 October and the evil of the Nazi’s Holocaust:

“But again, it’s precisely the patience and untrammeled power of the Nazis that makes their crimes distinct . . To  kill and rape and torture, as Hamas did, when given a brief window of opportunity to strike against a hated and more militarily powerful adversary is terribly evil — but in a way that’s intensely recognizable from all the cycles of violence and revenge in human history. Whereas to plan awful crimes with exquisite care and technocratic deliberation when you’ve already conquered, you’re completely in control, the population you’re targeting is entirely in your power — that strikes me as more horribly unique. Roberts, in other words, has it backward: Patient, careful evil is worse than impatient reckless evil — more terrifying and more culpable at once. Bloodlust is always wicked, but building an apparatus to kill with cold indifference is ultimately the more satanic crime.”

See Ross Douthat, “Is the Holocaust still seen as history’s ultimate example of absolute evil?” in the New York Times (1 December 2023); Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal (1 December 2023); Wall Street Journal editorial (31 October 2023); and David Brooks in the New York Times (27 October 2023).