“When tomorrow the light returns, this trip will continue on the road that connects my childhood to Rosa, my son to the Shoah”, I was reading the day before the commemoration of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup. during which 17,000 Jews were rounded up and deported. Joachim Schnerf, in a novel as effective as it is poetic, intense and essential, The Cabaret of Memories, recounts a young man’s last lonely night, in the silence of memory, before the arrival of his first child the next day. Grandson of deportees, he met his aunt Rosa only once, the last survivor of Auschwitz, who preferred to leave Europe and her family to found a cabaret in the Texas desert, where every evening, ” before the curtain falls, she lists everything she will not have the strength to talk about but that must never be forgotten: the roundup, the wagons, the selection, her mother at the entrance to the showers. smell. (…) Every evening in a different outfit, Rosa with infinite identities lists without telling, she names, hammers, so that we can never deny”.
When I wake up the next day, I discover the extent of the denial – which seems to have become an element of language of the left in the same way as primary anti-capitalism: Olivier Faure, Mathilde Panot, the Town Hall of the 20th arrondissement of Paris commemorate the roundup of Vel ‘d’Hiv’ by omitting the word “Jew”, replaced by “individual” or “person”, or by counting “LGBTQ” in the convoy, preferring the more than dubious parallels between Marshal Pétain and President Macron, or recall the real complicity of the Vichy government, and therefore of France, in a henceforth daily exercise of memorial self-flagellation. But here it is: the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup only involved Jews. Doubt is no longer allowed: the left today has fully integrated anti-Semitism à la Corbyn. In other words, a form of anti-Zionism that largely rubs off on the national Jewish community. In other words: the erasure of the Jew, confused with the dominant white man, the Israeli. In other words: the new Holocaust denial.
Admittedly, there are still “old-fashioned” Holocaust deniers in the West, in Europe, in France. Not only are they rare, but above all they have found something better: first relativism and more recently denial.
The new face of Holocaust denial
It all started with the constantly renewed parallel between the fate of French Jews during the Second World War and the situation of French Muslims today. First an absurd twitch of language that watered the speeches of the indigenist-Islamist left, then of the entire left, before being materialized by an unworthy yellow star during demonstrations of shame that marched to “denounce” the hunt to Muslims. Is there a single French Muslim child banned from school, park, library because of his religion? Is there a single trade, a single place, a single public service prohibited to French Muslims? Is there a single document that lists French Muslims? Is there a single camp where French Muslims are gathered? The Shoah was thus reduced to the “tragedy” of the refusal in France of the wearing of the veil for minors, of halal meat in canteens or of the fight against Islamism which kills.
Then came denial with the woke wave. The Jew has become the white – therefore unfit to suffer any oppression. Colonization has replaced the Holocaust in the hierarchy of collective indignation. Israel became the country of apartheid without taking into account the reality – the existence of Israeli Arabs, the number of students, doctors, engineers etc. Arab-Israelis. Conspiracy in the time of Covid has taken on the face of the Jew who has become an agent of the pharmaceutical industry. The refusal to consider that a Jew could be a victim of murderous anti-Semitism in Israel, as in France, has thus become the new face of Holocaust denial.
David Chapelle, African-American comedian, convert to Islam, whose stand-up hits on Netflix, caused a wave of surreal indignation, not because of his frankly anti-Semitic “jokes”, but of his “jokes” downright funny about trannies. None of the progressive newspapers even noted the crass extent of its anti-Semitism. That’s denial: the refusal to see the reality of anti-Semitism, which consequently fades away.