How Hatred Enables Tyranny: Nazi German Techniques Re-applied

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s worth reflecting on a disturbing pattern: how propaganda has been used to vilify Jews in different eras. The lessons we thought we learned from World War II— about the dangers of hateful narratives—seem to be fading. Today, some of the same tactics used by the Nazis are being deployed by Islamist/ Marxist movements and their supporters to turn public opinion against Israel, with worrying consequences.

A copy Adolf Hitler’s sick autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” was found inside a child’s bedroom at a Hamas base in the
Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities said. The copy of the Nazi leader’s 1925 autobiography outlining his deadly journey into antisemitism and the genocide of millions of Jews and other ethnic minorities during the Holocaust included “annotations and highlights,”  The book was discovered among the personal belongs of one of the terrorists,” the IDF said in the online post. “Hamas embraces the ideology of Hitler, the one responsible for the annihilation of the Jewish People.” - NY Post 11/12/23

What Happened in Nazi Germany

The Nazis used propaganda to convince Germans that Jews were the root of society’s problems. Newspapers, posters, and films portrayed Jewish people as subhuman and dangerous, blaming them for economic woes and cultural decay. These messages played on centuries-old prejudices in Europe, where anti-Semitic stereotypes had taken root in Christian doctrine and culture. The propaganda worked. Ordinary Germans accepted these lies, enabling the persecution and eventual genocide of six million Jews. 

How It’s Happening Again

Fast forward to today, and we see a similar playbook being used by Hamas and its allies, including Qatar. Through modern media and social networks, they spread the message that Israel is an oppressor, responsible for all Palestinian suffering. Casualty figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health—controlled by Hamas—are often inflated or misleading, but they’re repeated by Western media without much scrutiny. Staged events and manipulated images also flood the internet, painting Israel as a brutal aggressor.

Phrases like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Free Palestine” have become rallying cries in protests worldwide. But few stop to question the implications—these slogans call for the elimination of Israel. Meanwhile, Israel’s side of the story, including its right to defend itself against rocket attacks and terrorism, is often ignored.

Why It Matters

Just as Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews to justify their persecution, today’s anti-Israel narratives have made it acceptable to vilify and scapegoat Jewish people once again. In cities across the West, we’ve seen people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, vandalizing Jewish schools and synagogues, and chanting slogans that call for Israel’s destruction.

This isn’t just about spreading lies and hatred; it’s about how those lies pave the way for authoritarian tyranny. The Islamo-Marxist scapegoating of the Jewish state echoes Nazi tactics: using propaganda to consolidate power by uniting people against a common enemy. In Nazi Germany, this propaganda enabled National Socialists to dominate Europe, suppress dissent, and commit atrocities not only against Jews but against all who opposed their rule. Today, Hamas and its allies exploit similar methods to justify their authoritarian agendas and silence diverse voices within their societies.

The Bigger Picture

What’s most alarming is how easily the media and the public have bought into this propaganda. On this solemn day of remembrance, we should ask ourselves: Have we really learned the lessons of the Holocaust? The Nazis taught the world that scapegoating Jews isn’t just dangerous for them—it’s a tool for tyranny that harms everyone. If we fail to recognize and challenge these tactics, we risk enabling the rise of new authoritarian movements that use hatred and division to manipulate society under absolute power.

Holocaust's lessons being un-taught? Survivor of Nazi-labor camp and Israeli-American relate their views

UK schools are eliminating Holocaust history from curriculum- due to pressure from Muslims and their anti-Zionist, leftist sympathizers. US statistics show shocking ignorance about Holocaust among young people.

Israeli-American Girl Scout, Sivan Barashi, returned from a Scouts' trip to the Auschwitz Museum in Poland with a sense of the scope of the institutionalized genocide which she feels is not being adequately addressed in American schools' history curricula. Why might the subject discriminatorily be de-emphasized by Christians and/or liberals in public (and private) middle and secondary school education?

Nonagenarian, Daniel Szafran, survived the Nazi genocide of European Jewry as a slave laborer. Living in Las Vegas, he met with a small group of Israeli-American Girl Scouts who took an educational trip to the Auschwitz camp - where he was incarcerated. He doesn't feel that Holocaust education is emphasized sufficiently in America or even in Israel. 

Mr. Natan Barashy bemoans leftist influence in minimizing history resulting in the Holocaust in educational curricula. He also condemns Democratic Socialists throughout the world buying-into the libel which reverses Israel's defense against Islamist-Imperialist, Iranian-armed, Palestinians as "aggressive" - but supporting the anti-Semitic Muslim world, religiously mandated to annihilate the Jews of the world in a Muslim-led Holocaust against Israel. 

Anti-Semitism and preventing another Holocaust

On Holocaust Memorial Week, Jewish leaders from the right and left voice perspectives on the role of Israel in generating anti-Semitism and in averting another Holocaust. Jewish Task Force leader, Chaim ben Pesach, cautions westerners not to repeat tacit complicity in failing to thwart Jew-haters' goals to conquer Israel through an Islamist state of Palestine. At the Holocaust Memorial Park in Brooklyn, New York. 




 The Jewish Daily "Forward" editor, J.J. Goldberg, shares his views on the role of Jewish and Israeli culpability in the Arab-Israeli conflict in evoking anti-Semitism / anti-Zionism. Recorded at Sinai Temple, Los Angeles.






J.J. Goldberg will present the keynote address at the L.A. Holocaust Museum's annual ceremony on Yom ha Shoah, April 27th, 2014.

US failure to conform to Western standards outlawing anti-Semitic hate speech results in violence, enablement of genocide

Where is the threshold between condemning Israel and affecting Jews?

Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics, Columbia University, Lincoln Mitchell, criticizes the progressive blogosphere community's anti-Semitism, cloaked in anti-Israelism - in The Shooting, Anti-Semitism and Blogging, which is published today, June 11, 2009, in the Huntington Post:

You can't have it both ways, expressing righteous indignation when a white supremacist attempts to shoot visitors to the Holocaust Museum, while no longer being startled by the suggestion that the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States as well as millions of hard working, tax paying and voting Americans somehow don't have America's best interest in mind and are disloyal to their country, because of their support for Israel. Nonetheless, these suggestions are made almost daily in the comments section of this website.

The notion that one can be critical of Israeli policy without being anti-Semitic is, of course, true. Many, if not most, American Jews are critical of various aspects of Israeli policy while being far from anti-Semitic. However, the logic of this must end somewhere because too often this truism is interpreted to mean that anti-Israel sentiment can never be anti-Semitic. When it is suggested that Jews are subverting or controlling American foreign policy, putting what is good for Israel ahead of what is good for the US, or hoodwinking good Christians into supporting Israel, the criticism is no longer targeted on Israel. While one can criticize Israel without being an anti-Semite, suggestions of Jewish conspiracies or that Jews are not loyal citizens cannot so easily be made without being anti-Semitic. Historically, these have been at the core of the very definition of anti-Semitism

It is not just criticism of Israel that is the issue here. It is the regularity with which, in these comments and elsewhere, virtually every foreign policy issue is related back to Israel and somehow the Jews are blamed. Some friends and I play a game with foreign policy blogs on the Huffington Post where we try to guess how long it will take before Israel or the Jews are mentioned. Usually this occurs by the tenth comment, regardless of the ostensible topic of the piece in question. This is an obsession that is not healthy and goes beyond simply garden variety criticism of Israel.

Obviously the people making those comments are not going out and trying to kill Jews, but it is both a symptom and a contributing cause of a climate which facilitates, and which will very possibly continue to facilitate, violence of the sort we saw Wednesday.

This is an issue which should be of concern to all of the readers, bloggers, commenters and others who consider ourselves part of the Huffington Post community. We are all guilty of something, possibly hypocrisy, neglect or moral cowardice when we let these comments go unanswered and then loudly condemn acts of violence targeted at Jews. The connection, while not direct, is real. Those of us who call ourselves progressives have a special responsibility to speak out against bigotry in all forms, even when it starts out as being against Israel and seeps into anti-Semitism.

The author of Hitler's Willing Executioners (and son of a Holocaust survivor) Daniel Goldhagen explains how easily self-identifyingly moral people can evolve to tolerate - even commit - genocide. At the Los Angeles Holocaust Day Memorial in April, he relates first-hand interiews with contemporary genociders and genocide victims which he uncovered for his upcoming book, "Worse than War," being released as a PBS documentary in August.



"Hate speech or free speech? What much of West bans is protected in U.S." by Adam Liptak. Published in the NY Times, Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

"It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, "when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack."

Waldron was reviewing "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment" by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections "in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism." In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court's insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

Nazi / Islamist Nexus: Muslims partners / heirs to Hitler's legacy, crusade

To commemorate Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day, DemoCast educated the national, home cable TV audience of i-Life TV's Danny Fontana Show to explain Islamism's influence over Nazi ideology and its continuation of Nazi goals and strategies of stimulating anti-Jewish sentiments, then positioning itself as the solution to attain power.

We addressed how the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, inspired the Nazis with Islamic justification against the Jews. He organized and led the Nazi Waffen SS divisions in Yugoslavia. We pointed out how al-Husseini brought Johannes von Leers, Goebbel's favorite Nazi propagandist of annihilation, to convert to Islam, move to Egypt, and imbue the Muslim world (until his death in 1965) to continue the Nazis' annihilationist credo and crusade.

The world now confronts the Islamist continuation of the Fascist quest to global cultural domination - unifying their power and mollifying the West (as did the Nazis) by continuing Hitler's concerted campaign of scapegoating to stimulate anti-Jewish resentment, and empathy for the 'redemptive' Fascists.

Muslim anti-Semitism is growing in scope and extremism, to the point that it has become a credible strategic threat for Israel, according to a 180-page report produced for Israeli policymakers by the semi-official Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) and obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post.

According to the report, by educating generations of Muslims with a deep animus toward Israel and Jews, this anti-Semitism, actively promulgated by many states in the region, holds back the peace process and normalization efforts between Israel and Muslim countries. It also forms the intellectual justification for an eliminationist political program.

"This isn't ordinary prejudice," explained ITIC director Col. (res.) Dr. Reuven Erlich, formerly of the IDF's Intelligence Directorate, who heads the team of researchers that produced the report. "This prejudice is evil because it isn't theoretical. It is ideological incitement by states and organizations with the practical means of translating it into action."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rising anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe was injected into Muslim lands through commercial and diplomatic ties. Spurred by opposition to Zionism and ideologically strengthened by Nazi rhetoric and support, Muslim anti-Semitism grew in the 20th century into a phenomenon so widespread that blatantly anti-Semitic texts can be purchased on street corners of Arab cities, even in countries where almost no Jews remain.

The Syrian government still publishes [writings claiming] that Jews use Christian blood on Passover. You can't say this is anti-Israeli, or caused by the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict."

The report makes clear that the phenomenon of Muslim anti-Semitism is now widespread, popular and expanding.

"The anti-Semitism that fed the Holocaust isn't dead," Erlich says. "It is prospering."

Read original in the Jerusalem Post

Holocaust Martyrs & Heroes Remembrance Day

Jews around the world, and particularly in Israel, commemorate the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, as well as those who were able to fight back, beginning Wednesday evening, April 30, through sundown, May 1st.

Yom HaShoah V'Hagvurah, Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day, began Wednesday evening with a public ceremony at Warsaw Ghetto Square in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke, survivors lit six torches, the Chief Rabbis recited prayers, and Cantor Asher Heinowitz sang the El Malei Rachamim prayer.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabriel Ashkenazi, with a delegation of IDF top brass beneath the "Work Will Set You Free" inscription over the gates of the infamous Auschwitz death camp.

The central theme of this year's commemorations is "Choose Life." Last year, it was "Bearing Witness." At 10 PM, a symposium was held on the topic of "Choose Life," with the participation of Holocaust survivors and Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev.

Playwright, David Mamet explains in the Huffington Post:

"Israel's Jews are no more the cause of Arab Fundamentalist rage than they were the cause of European Fascism. We, as always, are the miner's canary, singled out as, and the first victims of national or global unrest."

A remarkable, home-made, video-essay memorial to victims of Nazi persecution and Allied liberation.
(Courtesy DenLexx via YouTube)

A photo-essay from last year's Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day from Israel National News.com

IDF Chief of Staff Gabriel Ashkenazi looks at the ovens used to burn Jews in Auschwitz. Ashkenazi's father was a Holocaust survivor; his mother a Jewish refugee from Syria.(Israel news photo: IDF Spokesman)



The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum launched English and Arabic video channels on Tuesday, just two days before Jews around the world begin their annual commemorations of the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem, the world's largest repository of information on the Holocaust, launched two The Arabic channel has testimonies and archival footage about the Holocaust with Arabic subtitles.


News from Polish Radio World Service
Jews and Poles meet for 'March of the Living' 30.04.2008
Listen 3,37 MB
The crowd walks between two German Nazi concentration camps, the same way along which camp inmates marched to their death in the gas chambers back in the times of World War Two, continuees Aharon Tamir: 'We march from Auschwitz I as the "March of the Living" contrary to the "march of death" during the Holocaust. We come to Birkenau and over there we have a ceremony. We pray, we speak, we commemorate, we say Kaddish, we speak about the future. That's the idea. What we call this educational project is "From Holocaust to Revival" - from the Shoah to the new future and the new blessings for Israel and the world. We will continue with this as much as we can and we added last year a lot of non-Jews, especially Poles. In this march we will have close to two thousand Polish participants marching with us on the Holocaust Memorial Day.'

Several thousand Jews from all over the world, together with two thousand Poles, will take part in the annual March of the Living on the first of May to commemorate the memory of the victims of Holocaust.

"March of the Living" has been held annually since 1988 by the Israeli Education Ministry and the "March of the Living" organization. It takes place always ten days after the Jewish Pesach or Passover holiday. On this day, Jews all over the world hold prayer vigils commemorating the victims of the German Nazi Holocaust.

'We bring thousands of people, youngsters, adults, mainly Jewish, but there are a lot that are not Jewish, from all over the world - from about fifty five countries. They come to Poland to visit the Holocaust sites, what remains from the large and wonderful Jewish community that was here and perished during the Holocaust. They visit Polish sites, meet Polish youngsters. We believe that we also have to interact with Poland today. And then, after they visit all of Poland, we bring all of them to Auschwitz Birkenau on the Holocaust Memorial Day to march,' said Aharon Tamir, director general of the March of the Living events.