Mick Hartley

Brendan O'Neill on the rise of Holocaust envy, as more and more groups want a piece of what they see as the gold standard for victimhood:

In part, the use of words like ‘Shoah’, ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Never Again’ against Israel is just Jew-baiting. There are some people out there who relish the pain it inflicts on the descendants of the Jews who were gassed by the Nazis to imply that they are guilty of similar crimes today. To say ‘Never Again’ about Israel’s war on the army of anti-Semites that butchered more than a thousand Jews on 7 October is not a considered political critique – it’s racist gloating, Jew-taunting. Yet there is more at play, too. That the Holocaust can be weaponised against the Jews themselves is a testament to its wholesale extraction from historical reality and its transformation into a general tool of political posturing….

We’ve seen a stubborn insistence on the ‘sharing’ of the Holocaust time and again in recent years. Who can forget when the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day on the basis that it was ‘too narrowly focussed on Jewish suffering’? It needs to be more inclusive of ‘recent genocides such as that in Rwanda and of Muslims in Srebrenica’, the MCB insisted. In short, share your victim status, Jews. Give us a taste. Pool your historic suffering….

Today, humanity’s memory of the Holocaust is assaulted less by the noisy denialism of racist scum than by the jealous claims of victim groups who want some of that glow of victimhood that they think the Jews have been keeping to themselves. How else to explain the MCB’s tantrum over society’s ‘narrow focus’ on Jewish pain? So the Holocaust is not denied, at least not by respectable people, but it is shared, which is to say diluted. Every time a modern event is inserted into the moral universe of the Holocaust – whether it be a horrible war, factory farming or whatever – the Holocaust itself is diminished, dismantled, rendered ordinary rather than extraordinary….

The motor of today’s dismantling of the specificity of the Holocaust – which is to say, the truth of the Holocaust – is not fascism or racism. It’s victim politics. Ours is an era that validates victimhood above all else. Which grants moral authority to those who ‘suffer’. Where you can accrue both social standing and state resources through advertising your wounds, through bigging up your experiences of hate speech, oppression, etc. And so it just won’t do for the Jews to have a singular claim to the greatest, vilest act of victimisation in human history.