The Normalization of Anti-Semitism

"Today we are witnessing the absolute democratization of anti-Semitism. A symbol invented by a so-called comedian that allows young people out for a drink, soldiers having a laugh and even a footballer scoring a goal to have their own unique opportunity for Jew hatred."
Moshe Kantor, president, European Jewish Congress, EU Brussels

"Walking here, on this soil soaked with blood of our brothers and sisters, we must assure our children and future generations that a different world, full of hope and free of fear, can be built."
Israeli coalition leader, Yariv Levin

Poland wishes to be known as the place where Auschwitz is located, but as a death camp planned, built, maintained and intent on slaughtering innocent people as a monumental affront to human decency mounted by Nazi Germany within an occupied Poland. Auschwitz is a German death camp, not a Polish death camp; it existed on occupied territory, making victims of the militarily oppressed and focusing largely on the annihilation of European Jewry.

The annual ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial memorializing the lives of one and a half million people who perished there, mostly because they happened to be Jews, took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A day established by the United Nations to honour the memory of six million Holocaust victims. A formality which must have seemed to the United Nations the politically correct thing to do, but one that comes off as sanctimonious in view of the blatant anti-Semitism that runs through those hallowed halls like a river of poisonous malevolence.

Half of Israel's Kenesset members were present for the occasion. Twenty survivors of the deadliest, most wretched horror that mankind ever devised in the intention to destroy a people, walked through the gates under which the infamous words "Arbeit Macht Frei" masked the ferociously deadly camp's purpose. People enslaved by the Nazi juggernaut were in fact worked to death, finding freedom at last when their spirits departed their wracked bodies.

Holocaust survivors arrive for a ceremony to mark the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Nazi death camp's in Oswiecim, Poland, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2014, since the Soviet Red Army liberated the camp. Israeli lawmakers and government officials are to attend anniversary observances later in the day. The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews at the camp during World War II. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
 
And those were the ones who were deemed in good enough physical condition to be used as slave labour. Others far less -- or more -- fortunate as the case may be, were directed immediately to the death chambers. The carbonized soot that darkened the skies over the death camp nourished the soil around the area. Where there was no compassion there still remained hope, and there were survivors, those whom fortune permitted to endure and to survive. To have the courage to move once again under that gate.

Speaking on behalf of the Knesset lawmakers present of whom there was a 60-MK contingent, Mr. Levin iterated that people in Israel should know from their experiences that they must rely upon their own resources and determination to persevere and make a place for themselves in a world that has always rejected their presence. The place they have made for themselves in a return to the geography of their ancient heritage just happens to be in a world that continues vehemently to reject their presence.

And in Italy, President Giorgio Napolitano characterized threats against Rome's ancient Jewish community in recent days as a "miserable provocation", speaking in particular of the delivery of packages containing pig heads to the main synagogue in Rome.