« Rule of thuggery prevails in Denmark | The 'Iran Experts Initiative' and its infiltration into Joe Biden's administration »
January 30, 2024

The Irish government continues the left’s ‘de-Judaizing’ of the Holocaust

By Andrea Widburg

The other day, the Irish Foreign Ministry published a little tweet to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day. The problem is that it forgot to note the primary purpose behind the Holocaust: To exterminate world Jewry. This was not an accident. For decades, the left has been trying to de-Judaize the Holocaust.

I first noticed this in 2013 when I was in Amsterdam and visited the Anne Frank House. Although it did a good job of walking thousands of people through the Annex, the museum mostly erased antisemitism from the Holocaust. At the time, I wrote:

At the end of the museum, there’s a room with very short videos, many of which are about special interest demands against a greater European culture that is not bowing to their dressing, immigration, or marriage requirements. The videos begin by focusing on a fictional young person with needs, and then, having personalized that need, gives a brief, shallow, fairly even-handed look at the issue, whether it’s veils in schools, forcing Christian civil servants to perform gay marriages, or allowing people to serve in the military while wearing religious garb.

Having started each video with the personalization, everyone knows what they’re supposed to think. None of the videos delves into the deeper issues. For example, are the veil-wearing girls embracing Dutch culture, or undermining it? (E.g., are they fifth columnists, like Maj. Hasan, or multicultural patriots?) If the veil is a symbol of religious faith, that’s one thing. If it represents the thin edge if the wedge for sharia, it’s another. By simplifying and personalizing the matter, the Anne Frank museum manages to say that a country’s desire to protect certain laudable institutions against a self-professed form of religious fascism is tantamount to Nazis killing Anne Frank.

I watched about ten or twelve videos, and the only nod to antisemitism was in the video about Holocaust Denial on YouTube.

The museum’s erasure of Jews and antisemitism is not unique. In 2016, under leftist aegis, the Anne Frank Center USA (which Otto Frank founded) renamed itself the “Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect” and repositioned antisemitism as just one among many bad things. In  2017, it described its mission as fighting “hatred of refugees and immigrants, anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, bias against the differently abled and any other hate that runs counter to the American promise of freedom.”

Image: Auschwitz 1945, which (according to the Irish government) had nothing to do with the Jews.

Interestingly, the above-quoted language no longer exists at the site. Now, in a brief mission statement that doesn’t even bother with antisemitism, the Anne Frank Center explains only that it exists to inspire “emerging adults through creative educational programs in order to build the informed and compassionate world Anne imagined in the pages of her diary.”

Meanwhile, the Anne Frank Fonds Basel, which was established to handle money from the sale of her diary, signed a partnership agreement with the New Israel Fund. The New Israel Fund, in turn, is a fiercely anti-Israel leftist activism group. Again, the Holocaust is irrelevant to the Jews, as the group Otto Frank founded funds antisemitic activities. Currently, the New Israel Fund is supporting a movement to protect Hamas from the Israel Defense Force.

With this context, I hope you’ll appreciate the Irish government’s tweet in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day:

The Twitterati were not amused:

Ireland is a gorgeous country with a grand, glorious, and tragic history. Its people are often lovely, especially the ones who came to America. However, its government’s values are beyond disgraceful—and that’s entirely to be expected from a leftist government. After all, as too few remember, Hitler was not “right-wing” (a meaningless term referring to one of the two totalitarian sides in the pre-revolutionary French government). Hitler was a socialist, which is right there in the name; i.e., National Socialists. The only difference between him and Stalin was that fascism allowed private industry under government control, which communism, which nationalized all private ownership, did not.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com