The crest of the Atlanta soccer team Last week, Argentinian soccer fans caused an uproar by chanting anti-Semitic slogans during a match against a rival team. The rival team, Atlanta, is associated with the Argentinian Jewish community, as it stems from a historically Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires and currently has several Jewish players on the team. The anti-Semitic chants included “[kill] the Jews to make soap.” According to the Times of Israel, the All Boys fans chanted this as they waved Palestinian flags and T-shirts bearing Iranian symbols. The All Boys team lost the match 3-2, leading some of their fans to become violent. Members of the Atlanta team and their fans took shelter in the Atlanta locker room in order to avoid the ensuing violence until local police could escort them to safety. Anti-Semitism of this nature is no stranger in the world of soccer. In October of last year for example, separate incidents in both Italy and Germany saw stickers posted which featured photoshopped images of Anne Frank wearing rival team’s soccer jerseys. Historically Jewish football clubs and teams, such as Atlanta in Argentina or AFC Ajax in the Netherlands, frequently deal with anti-Semitic slurs, along with chants such as “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” These fans and chants have been denounced by all the rules organizations and official sports bodies in the various countries in which they appear, yet they persist in their bigotry. Outside of official bodies, it falls onto the players and their fans to combat the surge of bigotry in the soccer fandom. Luckily, some teams have taken the high road: for example, the Italian football club S. S. Lazio, the target of the first Anne Frank related campaign in 2017, chose to don shirts with images of Anne Frank and the message “NO [to] all anti-Semitism,” in order to combat the anti-Semitism of fans.
This week, the Anne Frank House has come under fire for preventing a Jewish employee from wearing his kippa for six months. The Anne Frank House, a nonpartisan museum dedicated to preserving the memory and writings of its namesake, denied Barry Vingerling, an Orthdox Jew, from wearing this essential symbol of the Jewish faith as it was worried it would infringe upon their efforts to remain “neutral.” “We wanted first to know if a religious expression would interfere with our independent position,” managing director Garance Reus-Deelder told the Daily Mail. Vingerling was told to remove his kippa when he showed up for his first day of work, and was then informed he would have to put in a special request for permission to wear it while working at the Anne Frank house. The process and debate surrounding Vingerling’s request took the Anne Frank House’s board of directors six months to complete. During the interim period, Vingerling was told he could wear a baseball cap with the museums logo on it as a compromise. The Anne Frank house eventually decided that allowing the skullcap would not constitute a break in its neutrality, and gave Vingerling permission to resume wearing it on the premises. Rules and regulations that put limits on Jewish cultural displays and practices are quickly becoming the norm in Western Europe. Recent attempts to ban Kosher slaughter in Poland, to ban circumcision in Iceland, and now to disallow the wearing of religious garb at a site dedicated to preserving Jewish culture and heritage are all par for the course. This incident is particularly telling of the atmosphere currently taking hold in the Netherlands. A recent study by the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, an independent Dutch foundation, found that incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism have risen by 40% in the Netherlands since 2016. This is not the first time the Anne Frank house has courted controversy concerning its role in promoting this surge of anti-Semitism. As recently as last week, the Anne Frank Foundation, which oversees the museum, has signed a partnership with an organization that has made grants to groups that support BDS. The Anne Frank House, a museum dedicated to a young Jewish woman murdered simply for being Jewish, has its board of directors debating whether or not Jewish religious garb on their premises would make them appear “partisan,” all the while allocating funds to organizations that demonize the one Jewish state. The rising tide of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, from which the Netherlands is not exempted, is rendering any place of Jewish suffering, whether they be the Anne Frank House or Auschwitz, an ideological battleground where history is being purposefully rewritten and obscured.
Oxford Union Society Recently, an assignment, designed by teachers and approved by an administrator, at Southern California’s Rialto School District sought to improve critical thinking skills of 2000 eighth graders by having them debate whether the Holocaust really happened or instead was “a plot” to falsify history. Now, Charles C. W. Cooke has made a case in the “National Review” that pressure to change the assignment was a symptom of narrow-minded political correctness, and that an opportunity has been missed to allow young teens to develop the argumentative skills of Oxford University debaters. Summing up Holocaust victims’ worst fears, Terence des Pres quoted an inmate of Dachau: “The SS guards took pleasure in telling us that we had no chance in coming out alive, a point they emphasized with particular relish by insisting that after the war the rest of the world would not believe what happened; there would be rumors, speculations, but no clear evidence, and people would conclude that evil on such a scale was just not possible.” Those Nazis were proven wrong. Their destruction of Europe’s Jews was and is the most documented crime in human history. Historians every day add to what we know about the Holocaust by working to uncover previously unknown facts. They debate the mechanics of the Holocaust—but not whether it happened any more than historians debate whether Nazi Germany Blitzkrieged Poland on September 1, 1939. If a “debate” whether the Holocaust happened was needed, it came a decade ago when self-styled historian Clifford Irving sued for libel in a London Court scholar Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust Denier. During a protracted, expensive trial Lipstadt chose to rely on the testimony of historical experts—not Holocaust Survivors. Her lead witness, historian Richard Evans, systematically exposed Irving’s claims that there were no gas ovens at Auschwitz as premeditated lies and purposeful falsifications of the documented historical evidence. The Judge censured Irving in the harshest terms, and “the debate” over the Holocaust had been won. By all means, eighth graders should be taught about the Holocaust in the context of World War II. In our Internet-dominated world, it is indeed necessary to promote critical thinking. Soon enough (if not already) eighth graders will be exposed to the ugly fact that even governments like Iran’s deny the Holocaust ever happened, while other bigots use websites to argue that black people exploited on Southern plantations were “contented slaves.” We must teach young people how to study history and learn the truth without making the classroom in a platform for legitimating pseudo-history and teaching hate. Jews aren’t promoting their “special version” of the Holocaust. It is teachers throughout Western Europe who are being pressured not to teach about the Holocaust, supposedly not to offend Muslim students. (more…)