Thursday, September 22, 2005

Non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust -- our allies?

Ephraim Zuroff's piece about Simon Wiesenthal in the JPost whittles down his legacy to a few seminal points, including this one:
The plight of the Nazis' non-Jewish victims was always a sensitive subject, but Wiesenthal consistently called for their recognition, convinced that Hitler's other victims were the Jewish people's best potential allies in Holocaust commemoration and education.
It's an interesting point because there have been a few instances this year where the Holocaust/ww2 has been treated as a Jewish-only concern. For example, Prince Harry wearing the Nazi uniform was treated primarily as an offence to the Jewish community, whereas it was really an offence to all victims of the Holocaust as well as all the Brits who fought the Germans and who were victims of the Blitz. Singling it out as a 'Jewish' issue made it seem as if Nazism was something offensive only to Jews. This very month, when Holocaust Memorial Day was under threat in the UK, the Muslims' claim that it wasn't fair to single out "Jewish suffering" was challenged on many grounds, but not really on the ground that the Holocaust wasn't only about the Jews. By accepting the Muslim vs. Jewish paradigm at face value, we helped politicize the Shoah.
Quite simply, we shouldn't box ourselves into a corner where we are fighting for Holocaust commemoration alone, and where it becomes a 'special interest' issue.

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