OH, THAT HOLOCAUST ENVY: An Alarming Lesson in Anti-Jewish Resentment.
[I]n Maryland, we just got a chilling reminder that the worldview that nourishes such fads—whether DEI or intersectionality or race theory or “privilege” discourse—has spread far and wide and holds up the Jew as the ultimate public enemy.
At issue is a Maryland House bill that would establish a grant program for Holocaust education in schools throughout the state. The grant money would go to fund teacher training and class materials.
State education grant programs aren’t terribly oppressive. But they do cost money. And that is money poorly spent, according to opponents of the bill who spoke at a recent committee hearing. One parent objecting to the legislation is worth quoting at length, as an example of the raw anti-Semitism at the heart of the competitive victimhood that governs progressive-minded institutions.
He started off addressing “the black members of this board,” and launched into a tirade we have all heard before and will hear again, though we’re hearing it a bit more often these days. “It would be absolute treason, after 250 years of the Holocaust, of what we went through in chattel slavery, to allow people to come and take our suffering, put a few shekels on it, and benefit off of what we went through,” said the man, himself African-American. “This is the United States of America. We were the ones who went through the Holocaust. There was no Jewish suffering in this place—in fact, they helped to bring us over here, to the native Americans and the Hispanics.… It is treason to your ancestors to let someone take your suffering, and to do this to benefit them to tell a story that is ahistorical.”
Last month, Brendan O’Neill charted The rise and rise of Holocaust envy:
Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is not famed for its astuteness. These omnipresent public-school leftists, who rock up to every radical demo to holler facile chants in fake accents they learnt from EastEnders, are about as far from scholarly as you can get. Yet a few years ago they did something that was world-beatingly dumb, even by their famed low standards. They handed out a leaflet about the Holocaust that described it as an unspeakable tragedy in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’. Spot the omission?
Yes, they forgot the Jews. They forgot the Jews. It was 2008 and the SWP was skulking around a festival organised by the far-right British National Party (BNP). They handed their leaflets to anyone who’d take one. The leaflet denounced the BNP for ‘deny[ing] the Holocaust’, which was apparently an act of mass murder against gay people, trans folk and the disabled. No one else. Just them. The irony of the SWP slamming the BNP for ‘denying the Holocaust’ while simultaneously erasing from the record the six million souls obliterated by the Nazis was too much to take.
Their omission of the very people the Holocaust was designed to destroy did not go unnoticed. Even other radical leftists were appalled. The SWP seems to have discovered a ‘Jew-free Holocaust’, swiped the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Perhaps the SWP is keen to appeal to people who think it was ‘all right that Hitler killed six million Jews, but think it too much that he also killed LGBT people’, the AWL said. Then came the AWL’s keenest observation: yes, the omission of the Jews was probably ‘a slip’, it said, ‘but for such a slip to pass unnoticed through writer, typesetter, printer, organisers and distributors, without anyone at any stage picking it up, must say something’ (my emphasis).
* * * * * * * *
Where once racists accused the Jews of inventing the Holocaust, now the demand is that the Jews share the Holocaust. Yes, the Jews can have remembrance of their genocide, says [Anshel Pfeffer of Haaretz,] but first they must agree to ‘share it’ with other victim groups.
Flashback: Whoopi Goldberg’s Ignorance About The Holocaust Is What Happens When Intersectionality Rots People’s Brains.