A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (58 page)

Jews in Hungary were troubled by the establishment of the Hungarian Guard—a paramilitary group that reminded them of the Nazi-inspired Arrow Cross during World War II. A few Jews demonstrated at the group’s swearing-in ceremony; some carried mementoes of loved ones targeted by the Arrow Cross.

As in Weimar Germany, the call for “protection” from an imaginary threat appealed to many people at a time when the economy was slowing and unemployment was on the rise. In Hungary, the angry rhetoric led to the murder of five Roma between 2008 and 2010 by so-called “patriots” and at least 30 firebomb attacks on the homes of Roma families. At the same time, Jobbik supporters barraged Hungary’s Jewish community with antisemitic chants, posters, and acts of vandalism.

The supporters of Jobbik have not been people on the fringes of society; they have been in the mainstream. Moreover, the party has had particular appeal for young Hungarians; nearly one out of four voted for Jobbik in 2010. Thousands of them visited the party’s website, watched rallies on YouTube, and purchased Jobbik and National Guard T-shirts and other merchandise. As one observer noted, “even those who don’t agree with their ideology, they [the Jobbick party] catch them also by creating this fashion trend.”
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Krisztian Szabados, head of the Political Capital Institute, attributed the success of the party to its ability to use racism to its advantage. He told a reporter, “Jobbik [has] simply delivered extremism to an electorate that demands it. No mainstream party has seriously tackled the antagonism towards minorities that has been here for decades.”
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In 2009, many people thought that support for Jobbik would diminish. That year the courts banned the National Guard (a ban that was later overturned). And yet, just a few months later, Jobbik won 15 percent of the vote in elections to the parliament of the European Union and 47 of the 386 seats in the Hungarian parliament—about 12 percent of the total. Although Fidesz, the conservative party, held a solid majority, Jobbik became the nation’s third-largest party.

Jobbik was not the only political party in the early 2000s to win votes by arousing fears and anxieties. France’s National Front and the British National Party also appealed to stereotypes and myths of the “other,” but these parties focused more on Muslims and immigrants than on Roma and Jews. In 2009, those parties also won seats in the parliament of the European Union. They also tend to support one another. Both Nick Griffin of the British National Party and Jean Marie Le Pen of the National Front have stirred the crowds at Jobbik party rallies.

The antisemitism that has marked the early twenty-first century was rooted in ancient anti-Jewish slurs. Some were applied to Israel in an attempt to delegitimize the nation. Others, including the myth of a Jewish conspiracy, were recycled to address fears of globalization, financial disaster, and other crises. Perhaps one of the most incredible examples of such recycling is the false claim that the Holocaust is a hoax or, in the words of Nick Griffin of the British National Party, “a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, an extremely profitable lie, and latter-day witch-hysteria.”
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Why would he and a number of other politicians and activists deny the most documented mass murder in history? Walter Reich, former head of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, offered one answer:

The primary motivation for most deniers is anti-Semitism, and for them the Holocaust is an infuriatingly inconvenient fact of history…. What better way to… make anti-Semitic arguments seem once again respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for governments to pursue anti-Semitic policies than by convincing
the world that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed simply never happened—indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media? What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for anti-Semitism than by denying the Holocaust?
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As Holocaust deniers from countries around the world met in Iran in 2006, some Iranians took to the streets to show their support for those who claimed the murders never happened.

Those who question or deny the Holocaust see themselves as “revisionists.” Most historians strongly disagree. They point out that although historians debate the causes and the consequences of the Holocaust, there is no debate as to whether Germany under Adolf Hitler systematically put to death millions of Jews, “Gypsies,” political radicals, and other people.

Perhaps the most prominent Holocaust “revisionist” has been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who became president of Iran in 2005. In 2006, he hosted a conference to “neither deny nor prove the Holocaust” but “to provide an appropriate scientific atmosphere for scholars to offer their opinions in freedom about a historical issue.”
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On the guest list were 67 “Holocaust deniers” from the United States, Germany, Canada, France, and other nations, but not a single scholar who regarded the Holocaust as a fact.

Although Iran is a Muslim nation, it differs from its Arab neighbors in language and culture. It is also home to more Jews than any other Muslim
nation in the Middle East. Despite the fact that the government has often treated those Jews as second-class citizens, Iran has long protected their religious rights. Furthermore, the nation has never been at war with Israel. Indeed, before the Iranian revolution, the two countries had a good working relationship. What, then, has motivated Ahmadinejad and his followers to deny the Holocaust? David Menashri, director of the Center for Iranian Studies and dean of special programs at Tel Aviv University, offered some possible answers:

The immediate explanation may simply be a sincere belief in the need to eliminate Israel and a conviction that the Holocaust was a primary tool used to establish the Jewish state and justify the suppression of the Palestinians. America’s involvement in Iraq and growing Iranian oil income may have contributed to a perceived sense of strength. In addition, Ahmadinejad may hope to consolidate his political position at home by giving voice to extremist views against Israel. With Iran’s domestic problems continuing to multiply, he may also be trying to divert attention away from economic issues and toward an external enemy in order to mollify public opinion. Finally, voicing such opinions and taking the lead in supporting the Palestinian cause may be Ahmadinejad’s way of promoting Iranian leadership in the Islamic world. Regardless of the reasons for his frequent harangues on the Holocaust, the strong sentiments held against Jews (although not necessarily against the Jews of Iran) by the president and the media serve to further radicalize such views in Iranian society.
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In other words, Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders view antisemitism as a very convenient hatred, even though that policy has been criticized both at home and abroad. Sadegh Zibakalam, a political science professor at Tehran University, wrote of the 2006 conference,

I don’t know what is the honor of gathering a group of anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and racists—and [bringing] them to Iran, for what?… And this is happening at a time when our nuclear case is at the UN and we have to do our best to gain the trust of the international community.
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Haroun Yahaya’i, the head of Iran’s Jewish community, also spoke out. Describing the Holocaust as one of the twentieth century’s “most obvious and saddest events,” he wondered: “How is it possible to ignore all the
undeniable evidence existing for the killing and exile of the Jews in Europe during World War II?”
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Others have noted that too many people in far too many nations have been willing to believe that the facts have been “embellished” because they know very little about this period in history. A Hungarian activist pointed out that the history books used in his nation’s schools “are without a word of criticism regarding the role of Hungary in the Second World War”
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—or, he might have added, the Holocaust. Sociologist Maria Vasarhely conducted a survey that showed the consequences of that failure to teach history as more than a set of heroic tales: in Hungary, 15 percent of college students held racist views and one-third of history majors were prejudiced against Jews. Thirty-five percent believed that criminality is in the blood of the Sinti and Roma.
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Iranians, Hungarians, and Spaniards are not the only people who have difficulty confronting the facts of the Holocaust. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI was one of many religious leaders who spoke out against Holocaust denial at the Iranian conference on the Holocaust.
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Yet just three years later, he lifted the 1988 excommunication of four bishops excluded from the Catholic Church because of their association with the Society of St. Paul X, which was founded in 1969 by priests opposed to all church reforms. One bishop, an Englishman named Richard Williamson, was a Holocaust denier who repeatedly referred to the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
as “proof” that “the Jews” were preparing “the Anti-Christ’s throne in Jerusalem.”

The Vatican insisted that the pope was not aware of Williamson’s views when he lifted the excommunication, but many people wondered why his staff had not investigated more carefully. Perhaps the pope’s most prominent critic was Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. As a German, she felt that she and other Germans had an obligation to challenge any attempt to deny the Holocaust.

Merkel, a Protestant, did something that political leaders rarely do: she publicly criticized a religious leader of another faith—Pope Benedict. She insisted that as a person who grew up in Nazi Germany, Benedict had a duty to make it “absolutely clear” that he opposed all Holocaust denial. In the end, he agreed.

Merkel was not alone in insisting that leaders have a responsibility to take a stand against Holocaust denial. Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, founded a group called
Yahad in Unum
(which means “together as one” in Hebrew and Latin) to identify the mass graves of Jews and Roma murdered by the Germans. By 2010, his group had documented
850 extermination sites in Belarus and Ukraine, many previously unknown. Desbois explained why he has taken on this task:

First of all, to give [the victims] dignity and so they can finally receive a
Kaddish
[a memorial prayer for the dead]. They were killed like animals and buried like beasts. Today, thieves quite often open the graves to look for gold teeth
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But also, because today, on our planet, there are some individuals and groups that create propaganda that pretends that the Holocaust never existed, that it’s a lie to justify the birth of the State of Israel. Denial is not an intellectual position. There is no denial without anti-Semitism. Denial odiously tries to remove all legitimacy from the Jewish people…. The Holocaust was the black fruit of anti- Semitism. “Antisemitism is a sin against God and against humanity,” [said] Pope John Paul II…
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We do not want to, we cannot, condemn the children murdered during the Holocaust to silence; we do not want to, we cannot create a modern world on the thousands of unknown mass graves of murdered Jews.
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Why do leaders like Angela Merkel and Patrick Desbois vigorously oppose attempts to minimize, diminish, or deny the Holocaust? Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, offered one answer in a speech to the German Reichstag. He addressed his remarks to young Germans. He told them that he had “neither the desire nor the authority” to judge them for “the unspeakable crimes” committed by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. “But,” he added, “we may—and we must—hold [today’s generation] responsible, not for the past, but for the way it remembers the past. And for what it does with the past.” He continued:

To remember is to create links between past and present, between past and future. To remember is to affirm man’s faith in humanity and to convey meaning on our fleeting endeavors. The aim of memory is to restore dignity to justice…
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In remembering, you will help your own people to vanquish the ghosts that have been hovering over their history. Remember: a community that does not come to terms with the dead will find that the dead will continue to perturb and traumatize the living. Reconciliation can be achieved through and in memory.
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To those who fear that memory perpetuates hatred, Pilar Rahola pointed out that “lack of memory leads to ignorance, ignorance produces prejudice, and prejudice breeds intolerance. Who said there is nothing more dangerous in the world than sincere ignorance?”
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Perhaps that is why the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights responded to the rise in antisemitism by creating a working definition of the term. It describes antisemitism as a “certain perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred.” To aid in law enforcement, the group included examples of modern-day expressions of hatred. It also recognized that today’s antisemitism comes from new and different directions and therefore encouraged member nations to legislate against those who incite hatred in new ways—including those who promote Holocaust denial.