{"id":38836,"date":"2017-10-10T09:12:28","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T15:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=38836"},"modified":"2017-10-10T09:12:28","modified_gmt":"2017-10-10T15:12:28","slug":"op-ed-why-they-keep-leaving-jews-out-of-the-holocaust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/op-ed-why-they-keep-leaving-jews-out-of-the-holocaust\/","title":{"rendered":"OP-ED: Why they keep leaving Jews out of the Holocaust"},"content":{"rendered":"

By RAFAEL MEDOFF<\/p>\n

The Canadian government has announced it will correct a memorial plaque at its new National Holocaust Monument, which spoke of the \u201cmillions of men, women and children during the Holocaust,\u201d but neglected to mention Jews.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Canadian Minister of Heritage Melanie Joly has compounded the original error, by announcing that the new plaque will acknowledge \u201cthe six million Jews, as well as the five million other victims, that were murdered during the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is, in fact, no historical basis for that \u201cfive million\u201d figure. Yet it keeps cropping up, cited by people who apparently assume it\u2019s true just because a lot of other people keep saying it is.<\/p>\n

After critics blasted the Trump administration for neglecting to mention Jews in its January 2017 statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, White House spokesperson Hope Hicks said the administration was trying to be \u201cinclusive of all those who suffered.\u201d She then provided a link to a Huffington Post UK article titled \u201cThe Holocaust\u2019s Forgotten Victims: the 5 Million Non-Jewish People Killed by the Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n

A busy White House spokesperson doesn\u2019t have time to start researching Holocaust statistics. That\u2019s understandable. Evidently she assumed a reputable news outlet would not run such an article without basic fact-checking. Also understandable. But she was mistaken.<\/p>\n

The author of the article was Louise Ridley, an assistant news editor at HuffPost UK who specializes in \u201cmedia, social affairs and gender,\u201d according to her tag line. Ridley described some of the groups that were persecuted, in differing degrees, by the Nazis, such as gays, Roma (Gypsies), and the disabled. Her list also included \u201ccommunists, Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, trade unionists, and resistance fighters.\u201d And she pointed out that the Nazis murdered several thousand priests. The Nazis also murdered millions of Polish civilians and Soviet prisoners of war. In fact, the total number of non-Jews killed by the Hitler regime far surpasses five million.<\/p>\n

But none of that was part of the Holocaust. The Germans murdered a lot of innocent people, for a variety of reasons. But the only ones who were targeted for complete annihilation, and whom the Nazis hunted down, in country after country, for the sole purpose of murdering them, were the Jews. The term \u201cHolocaust\u201d was coined to refer to that specific historical event.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t blame Louise Ridley or Hope Hicks for the confusion. It was Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi-hunter, who was first responsible for spreading the \u201cfive million\u201d figure. Confronted many years ago by Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, Wiesenthal said he invented the idea of \u201cfive million non-Jewish victims\u201d because he thought it would help get non-Jews more interested in the Holocaust. One can understand Wiesenthal\u2019s concern. But he chose the wrong way to address it.<\/p>\n

The President\u2019s Commission on the Holocaust, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1978 and chaired by Elie Wiesel, specifically warned against \u201cany attempt to dilute\u201d the Jewish nature of the Holocaust \u201cin the name of misguided universalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the Wiesenthal formulation appealed to White House aides who liked the idea of making the Holocaust more ecumenical, even at the price of historical accuracy. As a result, Carter\u2019s October 1979 executive order establishing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council\u2014which then created the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum\u2014referred\u00a0to the Holocaust as \u201cthe systematic and State-sponsored extermination of six million Jews and some five million other peoples by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prof. Walter Reich, former executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, has written: \u201c<\/span>And so the executive order\u2026officially defined the Holocaust in a way that realized Wiesel\u2019s great fear\u2013that the Holocaust would be defined as an event in which eleven million people, six million Jews and 5 million non-Jews, had been killed, and that the crucial distinction between the planned and systematic extermination of all Jews on racial grounds, and the killing of civilian non-Jews on, say, political grounds\u2013in response to resistance, or because of acts of collective reprisal or brutality\u2013would be lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simon Wiesenthal picked a number of non-Jewish victims that was high enough to seem substantial, but still a little less than the number of Jewish victims. He thought that formulation would still keep Jews as the primary focus. Evidently he didn\u2019t realize how easy it would be for someone\u2014even an American or Canadian government official\u2014to slide down the slippery slope from \u201ca Holocaust of Jews and non-Jews,\u201d to a Holocaust without Jews at all. It\u2019s just not that far from a Holocaust of everybody to a Holocaust of nobody in particular.<\/p>\n

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