What Auschwitz means

Drudge is highlighting a story about a group of Jewish students who were attacked by 3 French men for draping an Israeli flag around their shoulders -- in Auschwitz.
The general impression left by those who spoke to the JPost is that for these men to behave in such an insensitive and disrespectful way must mean that the reason they were in Auschwitz in the first place was to gloat about the Jews' fate.
Said one of the students:
"These people's total disregard for the feelings of the people who come here, especially the Jews who come here to mourn, is horrible. But, I suppose some people don't come to mourn; some people come for completely different reason, which we cannot completely comprehend."
Laurence Weinbaum, Director of Research at the World Jewish Congress and resident scholar for the group, said: "In some way, I felt that these men were satisfied to visit Auschwitz."
I don't really know, but I wonder whether the psychology behind these men's visit and actions was slightly different. I have a feeling that for them, Auschwitz -- and the entire second world war -- is associated less with Jews and more with the evils of Nazism, with its military power and expansionist aims. Indeed, Europeans continue to abhor these, as you can see in their ambivalence towards foreign military intervention.
These mens' actions, therefore, are probably less evidence of sympathy with the Jew-killers than of the way it has become completely accepted, in certain European circles, that Israel is the new Nazi state. Even in the context of a concentration camp.

[NOTE: For a brilliant analysis of the surprising lessons Europeans have drawn from the Second World War and the Holocaust, see this article by Mark Steyn , written a week after the Madrid bombings. He says:

When an American Jew stands at the gates of a former concentration camp and sees the inscription "Never again", he assumes it's a commitment never again to tolerate genocide. Alain Finkielkraut, a French thinker, says that those two words to a European mean this: never again the führers and duces who enabled such genocide. "Never again power politics. Never again nationalism. Never again Auschwitz" - a slightly different set of priorities. And over the years a revulsion against any kind of "power politics" has come to trump whatever revulsion post-Auschwitz Europe might feel about mass murder.]