Query to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
2023-12-29
You use this Berlin number to call this Sweden-based outfit:
+49 30 26396660
2023-12-19
To: press@holocaustremembrance.com
From: Me
Subj: Your work on preventing genocide
Date: 2023-12-19 12:31 PM
Hello, I'm writing a piece for Odysseus Unsheathed concerning your definition of antisemitism. While researching that piece I learned that your organization is concerned also with genocide and working to make "never again" a reality.
On your website, it reads:
The Holocaust is eminently relevant to the present day. A well-informed understanding of the Holocaust, the paradigmatic genocide, can help in comprehending and addressing other genocides, mass atrocities, and human rights violations.
While your organization claims it has a “well-informed understanding” of the genocide of Jews by Nazis in WWII, and provides extensive educational materials on such to children and policymakers around the world, a critic might wonder how well that understanding has helped your own organization in "comprehending and addressing other genocides." A search on the word "Nazi" on your website returns 53 pages of results, but a search on the word "Bolshevik" returns nothing.
The Bolshevik genocide of Russian Christians began 16 years before Hitler came to power in Germany, didn't even slow down during WWII, and continued 42 years after Germany surrendered. But even though that holocaust dwarfed the Holocaust in every category of atrocity, murdering eleven times as many innocent human beings, there isn't a single mention of the Bolshevik genocide anywhere on your entire website.
Given this enormous blind spot in the IHRA's view of history, there is reason to wonder what to make of IHRA Chair Ann Bernes' statement in June of last year, “We mustn’t forget that we are bound together in this work not only by choice, but also by the facts of history.” When the "facts of history" are distorted by the gross omission or denial of such relevant facts as the communist genocide of 66 million innocent Russians, one wonders, then, what cause it is in that you are "bound together."
The question becomes particularly important in light of the role your organization assumes for itself in Article 13 of the 2020 IHRA Ministerial Declaration:
We, the IHRA Member Countries, recognize that understanding the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust is essential to the prevention of genocide and mass atrocity crimes. IHRA expertise is relevant to historically informed policymaking and addressing contemporary challenges.
If there is anything on which we can all agree, surely it must be the paramount importance of preventing genocide and mass atrocity. The IHRA purports to undertake that noble cause, using its "core competencies in education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust… [to] guide educators, scholars and activists responding to emerging mass atrocity crimes today." To that end, "deploring the extensive loss of life and rejecting the gross Holocaust distortion being used to justify it," in 2022, "IHRA Honorary Chairman Professor Yehuda Bauer stressed the importance of all IHRA Member Countries showing their support for Ukraine."
With such a quick response to the mass atrocity in Ukraine, I was dismayed to discover the IHRA hasn't yet condemned the mass atrocity ongoing against the Palestinians in Gaza. Indeed, a search of the word "Palestinian" on your website produced only one mention. It was from a 2018 statement, "IHRA Chair's Statement on Antisemitic Comments by President Mahmoud Abbas." Here it is in its entirety:
As Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, I was dismayed and very worried by the comments made by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, on 2 May in which he used antisemitic stereotypes in public discourse, falsely claiming that the Holocaust was a result of Jews’ “social function” and purported association with loans and banking.
Making mendacious allegations about Jews controlling the economy is one of the typical examples of antisemitic stereotypes denounced in the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide is a clear case of Holocaust distortion as spelt out in the IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.
These comments make the importance of IHRA’s mission to safeguard the record of the Holocaust and to counter Holocaust distortion even more evident.
The international community must uphold the terrible truth of the Holocaust against those who deny it. We must strengthen the moral commitment of our peoples, and the political commitment of our governments, to ensure that future generations can understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences."
Ambassador Sandro De Bernardin, IHRA Chair
One might characterize the selectivity of your historical facts as weaponization and the cause for which it serves as malevolent, given the IHRA's silence on the genocide of the Palestinians. Your "Working Definition of Antisemitism," adopted in 42 Western nations, is endorsed by every major Jewish organization. How do you answer those gentiles who would point to this as evidence of a malicious worldwide Jewish conspiracy?
Craig Nelsen