The Holocaust is once again being trivialized in the name of the politics. On Wednesday, Ohio Congressman Warren Davidson compared COVID restrictions to the Nazis' treatment of Jews. "This has been done before. #DoNotComply," he tweeted.

The Congressman joins a long list of those reaching for the Holocaust for such cheap political points. In June, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene compared wearing a mask to wearing a yellow star and had to apologize. In November, Lara Logan compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who did cruel experiments on Jews in concentration camps.

Across the globe, things are even worse; outright Holocaust denial is spreading like a virus. Earlier this week, outside a church in central Rome, a funeral concluded with a coffin draped in a Nazi flag, surrounded by participants giving Nazi salutes. In Iran, the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, often tweets things like "why is it a crime to raise doubts about the Holocaust?" and "#Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain." In 2019, right before attempting a mass-carnage attack on a synagogue in Halle, Germany, on Yom Kippur, a gunman livestreamed a video in which he said, "I think the Holocaust never happened."

​The Holocaust—the most documented and systematic genocide in history—took the lives of two-thirds of European Jews. Among our own family members, in Poland and Lithuania, most were wiped out: innocent men, women and children.

Of the Jews who managed to survive, all are now at least 77 years old, and thousands are dying each year. That trend has likely been accelerated by the ongoing pandemic. And if Holocaust-denial can persist even as first-hand witnesses to the atrocities are among us, we can only imagine how malignant these pathologies will become once the survivors pass on.

The correlation between denial of past atrocities and indifference to new atrocities is clear. Whether it comes from the extreme right or radical Islamists, antisemites uniquely belittle or justify the Holocaust while also belittling or justifying current and prospective violence against Jews.

​Of course, distortion or instrumentalization of the Holocaust is not new. Among white supremacists, denial of the Nazi gas chambers' existence has been an article of faith. Even in America, certain local legislators or educators were recently found to have urged "neutrality" in teaching about Nazism. In parts of the Baltics, the whitewashing and lionizing of Nazi collaborators has been commonplace. And through much of the Middle East, the Holocaust has long been tarred as a "Zionist myth" alongside a false narrative that Palestinians paid the price for Germans' misdeeds with the invention of a "colonial" Israel by foreigners.

And whether at the United Nations or street demonstrations, bigots wholly rejecting the history and legitimacy of a Jewish minority presence in the Middle East have sought to add insult to injury by weaponizing the Holocaust, saying Hitler hadn't gone far enough or that Israel is guilty of Nazi-like practices.

At a 2001 U.N. conference against racism in Durban, South Africa, activists asserted both. A decade later, Iran's president hosted Holocaust-denial conferences and cartoon competitions, attracting such luminaries as former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, a newfound champion of Palestinian nationalism.

A few years later, Malaysia's then-prime minister—a self-identified antisemite who had called Jews "hook-nosed" and said they "rule the world by proxy"—questioned the number of Holocaust victims. And during outbreaks of Hamas or Hezbollah hostilities with Israel, social media platforms have facilitated an unprecedented spread of hateful lies concerning Israelis, Jews and the Holocaust, with negligible intervention by those profiting from them.

Next week, the U.N. will have an opportunity to help more seriously address the scourge of historical revisionism. 15 years after the U.N. began marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a resolution on Holocaust-denial and distortion will come up for a vote. We hope member states will join in adopting an important working definition of Holocaust-denial, as well as, ultimately, an equally vital working definition of antisemitism.

​While combating trivialization of the Holocaust is only one element of strengthening basic societal norms, it is a critical one. Let it be said once more: those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

Read the op-ed in Newsweek.

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over heavily industrial cities.

It’s hard to breathe.

Those words, by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, testify to the rich and fraught history of Jerusalem. Sacred and singular, a symbol as much as a place, it has been coveted, conquered, and reconquered. Its layers of history can quite literally be excavated like an archaeological dig.

One thread, however, traces to practically the origin of the ancient city: Its centrality to the Jewish people. Until recently, this self-evident truth would have prompted no contention. In early Jewish texts, Jerusalem is “the light of the world,” the heart of Jews’ collective consciousness. While Christians and Muslims have cherished Jerusalem, many would make Rome or Mecca a focal point of their global faiths. For Jews, there has only been Jerusalem.

It is toward there that, over the course of their exile, Jews have directed their prayers. It is Jerusalem whose memory has been invoked in Jewish milestone events, whether marriage or bereavement. Jewish holidays commemorate yearly pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Even in the diaspora, sizable Jewish communities were identified with the city: Amsterdam was once called “Jerusalem of the West,” Vilnius was “Jerusalem of the North” and Thessaloniki was “Jerusalem of the Balkans.”

Jerusalem was established by King David as his capital 3,000 years ago. And it is the only city to have been the State of Israel’s seat of government. Few nations have roots as deep.

On Dec. 1, 2021, however, the United Nations again repeated a ritual that represents a modern spin on efforts to deny the roots, rights, and very legitimacy of the Jewish people in their sole ancestral homeland.

The U.N. General Assembly passed some 15 resolutions attacking Israel in December – more than those targeting all other 192 members states. That bombardment reflects not the actual record of Israel – the only pluralistic democracy in the Middle East – but rather the combined political weight of its adversaries.

Among the most odious motions is the one adopted on Jerusalem.

The resolution condemns Israel, the country that has not just championed religious freedom more than any other in the region, but maintained Islamic administration of the Temple Mount – the single holiest place in Judaism – and restricted Jews’ own ability to pray there.

If the condemnation weren’t unjust enough, the text again erases Jewish history by referring to the Temple Mount exclusively by its later Arabic designation, Haram al-Sharif. Other iterations have belittled Jews’ connection to the epicenter of their civilization by consigning the site’s long-standard name to parentheses.

In contrast with Israel – where Arabic signage is ubiquitous, Christian and other minorities have grown continually, and hijabs mix with skullcaps in universities, hospitals, and parliament – Palestinian leaders have exported an endemic denial of Jewish history by referring at the U.N. only to a Muslim and Christian heritage in Jerusalem.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously denied the very existence in Jerusalem of the Jewish temples. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, said of the mosque on the Temple Mount and of Jews: “Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. They have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet.”

But classical Islam, so closely connected with Judaism, never denied Jews’ place in the region – and Christian history is utterly inseparable from Jewish history in the holy city. It is Christian scripture that affirms that Jesus, a Jew, walked the Temple Mount even before the existence of the now-distinct religions.

The temple’s menorah is commemorated not only in Jewish homes each Hanukkah but on the Arch of Titus in Rome – which celebrates Jerusalem’s destruction and despoiling in the year 70.

Over recent years, more and more countries have said they will no longer tolerate denial of Jewish and Christian ties to holy places. But too much vacillation remains. Although Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands opposed outright a 2016 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization resolution lambasted for erasing the name “Temple Mount,” all three merely abstained on the General Assembly resolution guilty of the same offense.

At the U.N., because of its structural realities, there truly is no limit to Palestinian charges that not only defame but delegitimize Israel: whether “ethnic cleansing,” “Judaizing Jerusalem” or “apartheid.” The cynical linking of racism to Zionism – the movement to restore Jews’ national home in Israel, with Jerusalem, or Zion, at its heart – has been a longstanding tactic of Palestinian representatives seeking to challenge Israel’s existence altogether.

Fortunately, 30 years ago the United Nations revoked a notorious 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.
​
It is now time for all countries to take a stand for honesty, decency, and diversity by rejecting efforts to whitewash Jews’ roots in the land that gave them their very identity.

Read the op-ed in InsideSources.

Durban IV, held this year on Sept. 22 and marking the 20th anniversary of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, turned out to be a debacle. This was expected.

But the lies that it propagated, like those of its predecessors, did not begin in 2001, with the first such gathering in South Africa. The world should have seen what was coming back in 1975 when the “Zionism is racism” mantra was introduced with the passage of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379.

​Indeed, Durban was and remains a most regrettable creation of the United Nations.

It is high time for the United Nations to reject useless distractions from its mission of promoting humanity and peace. It must simply prohibit this hateful commemorative event from happening again.

​If member countries want to hold a festival of hate, they should do so without the blessing or the name of the United Nations. To go through this dishonest exercise of announcing something in the name of fighting racism, which prompts at least 20 Western countries correctly to boycott it, while others attend under political pressure, is ridiculous.

The United Nations should just save itself the embarrassment of having its name attached to this fiasco. The countries firmly committed to Durban are those that have called for Israel’s destruction. Many of them commiserate with Iran.

“Zionism is racism” is just a catchy slogan. Of course, there’s no truth in it. Zionism is not racism. The ancestral Jewish homeland, like Judaism itself, is built and based on a code of humanitarian behavior that is reflected today in Israel’s richly diverse population, one conceived in freedom, free will and mutual respect. The rest, let’s be honest, is politics and opinion. As in any democracy, Israel feasts on political debate. Its history reflects such energy.

For millennia, expanding civilizations made the Holy Land the prize of conquests. Jewish settlement there in an industrial world increased in the 1800s, even before Theodor Herzl launched the Zionist movement.

For 73 years, the modern State of Israel has blossomed as a legal, sovereign nation and is the foundation of thousands of years of the history and practice of Judaism.

In addition to Zionism not being racism, Israel is not an “apartheid” state. The mere utterance of words doesn’t make it so.

The construction of a security wall or other security provisions does not make it so. The BDS movement, another demeaning, delegitimizing campaign, is mostly harmful economically to Palestinians and enemies who perpetuate destructive “from the river to the sea” rhetoric. Israel does not exist on illegally occupied land. Research the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973).

These propagandistic themes are bogus. They persist without any basis in fact. Neither do such messaging efforts help the ambition, vision or hope for a Palestinian state. Any effort to guide or assist Palestinians toward statehood is getting a sneak preview in Gaza and parts of the West Bank (Areas A and B). They are not managing well, but not because of Israel. They are failing because of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which maintain the failed ambitions since the U.N.’s Partition Plan.

Durban will forever be known as a failure, the utter antithesis of the United Nations. So embarrassingly flawed is its heinous mission that it raises one question: Why allow these commemorations to occur at all? What is the purpose of the United Nations convening “hate fests” against a country that, in fact, delivers so many positive contributions to repairing the world? Consider the following:

• Israel routinely provides humanitarian, disaster relief and medical aid throughout the world;
• Israel installs water purification systems for other continents;
• Israel exports agricultural solutions for hunger-challenged countries;
• Israel celebrates cultural and religious diversity inside and outside the country; and
• Israel delivers key technological solutions to cybersecurity.

The answer is as simple as it is obvious. There is no purpose in convening any Durban commemorative event. None. It is a waste of time and resources.

Surely, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, a man of peace, understands how such events linked to Durban are counterproductive. In the same way that UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) removed the Carnival of Aalst in Belgium from its World Heritage list in 2019, the General Assembly and its agencies should disengage from anti-Zionist festivals.

Such events are poisoning minds. As Durban IV is now part of the past, perhaps the U.N. can exercise its power to halt Durban V.

Read President Kaufman's analysis in JNS.