It was decades ago that I first noticed complaints coming from some of the German youths who’d been taught about what Germany did in the WWII Holocaust. They were fed up with hearing about it. “What’s it got to do with us?” they asked. They weren’t responsible for what their parents – and/or their grandparents and now even sometimes great-grandparents – did back then.
Maybe young people today feel that way about history in general.
Years ago I also started to see the complaints pile up in blog comments and MSM article comments, and not just from Germans. Why don’t the Jews stop whining already? We’re sick and tired of it. Sometimes it crossed the line into Holocaust denial. Sometimes the commenter said he or she wanted more Jews to be killed, they were such a blight on humanity.
The internet was very good at spreading this stuff around. I noticed very early in my internet career that searches for anything connected with Israel or Jews would turn up reams and reams of the most vicious anti-Semitic material, and that a person would have to wade through it to get to anything worthwhile. After a few years of that, the search engines managed to tweak the algorithms so that somehow the worst of it was filtered out. But Jew-hating is – among other things – catching.
So last December this phrase caught my eye in an article I read [emphasis mine]:
“Free Palestine from German guilt.” That’s the message on several posters for the pro-Palestinian protests that have been organized since October in cities such as Berlin. These messages are seen in places where there have been demonstrations: in other places, rallies have been banned out of concern that there would be calls in favor of Hamas. The police closely monitored the authorized protests and have gone so far as to remove posters — and arrest those carrying them — with the “quite neutral” slogan of “From the river to the sea, equality for all,” recalls Christa Waegemann, Middle East Regional Director of the NGO Media in Cooperation and Transition.
There is nothing neutral about that “river to the sea” slogan, of course. It’s a call for the obliteration of Israel, and the addition of the word “equality” doesn’t change that. But it’s the “free Palestine from German guilt” slogan that’s of special interest to me, expressing as it does German weariness with bearing the burden of its historical guilt and a desire to free itself by supporting Palestine and accusing Israel of genocidal crimes.
Does much of the rest of Europe have the same desire to cast off its own guilt? After all, in many countries there was quite a bit of cooperation with the Holocaust. What better way to unburden oneself of that history than to decide that Jews are evil, almost as bad as the Nazis themselves were? What a relief that must be.
I believe that the US’s different history is one of the main reasons that Jew-hatred has lagged behind in this country – the US doesn’t share that sense of Holocaust guilt. But as I said, anti-Semitism is catching, and in the US it has also been imported through large numbers of students and especially professors from Arab countries teaching our university students, as well as financial support from countries like Qatar.
