PHOTO: CODEPINK

After Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk did a salute and debates spiraled: was it “the Nazi salute”? Musk has been courting far-right parties in Europe, especially Germany since the president dissolved the parliament in December. The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitism, concluded that it was not a “Nazi salute,” but an “awkward gesture.” But Hitler references were bound to come. Musk spent last week responding to the backlash with Nazi-themed puns, which would be denounced as anti-Semitic had it not been made by the owner of a powerful tech giant. The current president, who has uttered many anti-Semitic dog whistles, has also claimed that immigrants are responsible for anti-Semitism, when clear evidence suggests that White supremacists and xenophobic extremists are the leading culprits.

Two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, on January 27, which marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Elon Musk made a surprise videolink appearance at a campaign event for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), during which he told a crowd of around 4,500 people that “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.”

Musk’s remarks align with the AfD’s position that Germany as a nation should stop atoning for crimes committed by the Nazis in the past. The AfD’s leaders have openly endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, and made a spectre out of anti-Semitism as a ticket to shun Muslim immigrants. The chairman of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center accused Elon Musk of insulting the victims of Nazism with his speech.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Musk, saying he has been a friend of the Jewish people and that Musk had been “falsely smeared.” Had a Palestinian or a protester from the “pro-Palestinian” groups in the US stretched their hands out with the same awkward gesture, the Israeli leader’s reaction would certainly have been very different. Musk’s actions as a powerful global figure provide a disconcerting dilution of Nazism and the Holocaust, when an estimated 6 million Jews were massacred industrially by Nazi Germany. The remembrance of Holocaust should sensitise us with human atrocities, but we live in a world where global figures like Musk make desensitising comments about Nazism on social media.

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the following genocide in Gaza by Israel, backed by the US and the West—the word “anti-Semitism” stands for any criticism of Israeli policies. Now, more than ever, the world, particularly the West, must reflect on the politicisation of anti-Semitism and the widespread debasing of the Holocaust to justify the genocide in Gaza. US polemicist Norman Finkelstein had written about “the new anti-Semitism,” as a concept to shape-shift history and the “Holocaust industry,” which has exploited Jewish suffering for political gains in the geopolitical arena.

According to Finkelstein, the new anti-Semitism might also be called “antisemitic anti-Zionism,” and it has three components: a political programme to abolish the Jewish homeland, a discourse to demonise it, and a movement to make it a global pariah state. We saw all these components come to light, as Israel turned the Gaza Strip into a grey wasteland, attacked Lebanon, and openly executed genocidal policies. Anti-Semitism as a concept has been thrown around so easily, by the left, right and centre in Western politics to the extent that it has lost its real meaning. The US media and Hollywood, particularly, sensationalised the Holocaust for decades, eschewing real lessons from history that are yet to be learnt.

The Holocaust should serve as a reminder of the darkest capabilities of the human mind, and the indifference of the global community. But 80 years later, the world has not reckoned with the mass murder of Jewish men, women and children on the basis of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, political opportunism and profiteering. Rarely do we discuss that Americans—the ever-welcoming champion of the oppressed—were not ignorant of the persecution of European Jews in World War II, but were rather indifferent. And American racism had its part to play in influencing Nazism. In the 1920s, a widespread push to restrict immigration played into the eugenics movement to preserve the country’s racial purity—which was embraced by Nazi Germany. The international precursors to Nazism are often ignored, and the Holocaust is largely viewed as one where only Hitler holds responsibility, not the international community.

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish Voice for Peace called for “never again,” now. Many liberals, but Zionists, have shunned the Jewish Voice for Peace as “anti-Semitic.” Secular Jews are denounced and arrested in Israel, in the US, in Germany. Conveniently, disturbing facts are erased. Right after World War II ended, the US and the Soviet Union landed in a fight for global power. The so-called accountability for Jewish suffering during World War II seemed lost on US politicians as they sought to establish the nation as the most powerful in the world. The US began Operation Paperclip, a 14-year secret operation where approximately 1,600 Nazi German engineers, scientists and technicians were hired. After World War II, Germany was rebuilt with US aid to counter the Soviet Union and Jews who revolted against it were silenced. The atonement and lessons for the US where anti-Semitism is in fact a pervasive issue, remains unaddressed. The October 7, 2023 attacks, with the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, have been framed with the context of the Holocaust and detached from the image of the Nakba—the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948, which began the persecution of Palestinians to occupy their land.

Acclaimed anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe has written about the nexus between the Holocaust, Israel and Nakba. In 1947, before the famous partition resolution, the United Nations suggested allocating less than half of the country and proposed they would share the economy and currency with the Zionist settlers who were allocated a larger part of it. Only one factor led the UN special commission on Palestine, and all those powers behind it, to abandon every conventional principle of statehood and independence for the sake of satisfying the Zionist movement: the Holocaust. According to Pappe, “It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-a-vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them.”

The complex and difficult discussions about the Holocaust, about Israel, about Palestine, are integral to ensure that human rights can be upheld in today’s world order. It is not to say that the Holocaust should be compared with the genocide in Gaza, but the problematic weaponisation and revisionist history of the Holocaust in order to justify killings must be addressed by the international community. In October 2015, Netanyahu took the weaponisation to new levels in a speech in Jerusalem where he said the Palestinian grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea to murdering Jews in Hitler’s mind. After October 7, Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with German Okaf Scholz as “the new Nazis.”

Deborah Feldman, American-German writer of Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots , wrote about how pro-Israel political consensus in Germany shut out her dissenting voice as a Jew criticising Israel. Raised by Holocaust survivors, Feldman writes in the essay, “the only legitimate lesson to be learned from the horrors of the Holocaust,” is “the unconditional defence of human rights for all, and that simply by applying our values conditionally we are already delegitimising them.”