There's no comparing Gaza to Nazi Germany, though some try

By Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein

Before time robs us of the last victims of history's greatest crime, Holocaust survivors are marking the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Nazi Germany's pogrom that signaled the doom of European Jewry.

Seventy years ago this week, their young eyes witnessed the burning of two hundred synagogues, looting of Jewish businesses throughout Germany and Austria, and deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. Who could have believed then that those November nights were only the prelude to genocide? For decades, survivors countered their nightmares with hopes for a better world changed by the collective memory of humanity's bottomless capacity for evil. Those hopes were crushed by Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur.

Now in their declining years, survivors suffer the ultimate indignity — denial of their suffering.

In Iran, Holocaust denial has morphed from lunatic fringe to government policy. President Ahmadinejad publicly declares the Holocaust never happened, but given the chance, he'd finish the job.

In Lithuania, where 96.4 percent of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and local collaborators, the Holocaust is distorted, not denied. Judges won't jail Nazi war criminals, but prosecutors seek to indict heroic WWII Jewish partisans. Meanwhile, Tony Blair's sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, recently landed in Gaza, and promptly indicted Israelis as today's Nazis: "You were in the concentration camps, and I can't believe that you are allowing the creation of such a camp yourselves." She also calls Gaza "a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Darfur."

Really? Conservative estimates put deaths in Darfur at 300,000, with more dying daily. These victims did not provoke the Arab Janjaweed who slaughter them. In the 1940s, European Jewry held no territory and had no armies. They were rounded up, brutalized, starved and systematically murdered only because they were Jews.

Gazans largely created their own hell. The fence surrounding them was really built by Hamas' suicide-bomber rockets targeting Jewish civilians.

Cynical distortions of the Holocaust won't bring peace to the Holy Land; they only fuel the cauldron of anti-Semitic hate and a culture of death.

Seven decades after Kristallnacht, history's deniers rob victims of their dignity and new generations of the moral clarity needed to differentiate between good and evil.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is director of interfaith relations for the Wiesenthal Center.

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