Former White House aide Sarah Hurwitz, who served as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, warned this week that Holocaust education was “confusing” young people into sympathizing with “weak, skinny Palestinians” instead of “powerful Israelis.”
She continued:
“You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza, and this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they’re hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they’re just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.”
And you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and then they think, “Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.” So, when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, “Oh I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
The lesson in her mind and the minds of those who think like her is that Jews were victims in the Holocaust, therefore the state of Israel has an unrestricted right to do anything it wants in the name of security. It can commit systematic mass murder and terrorism against the entire population of Gaza, it can turn a blind eye when Israeli terrorists do the same in the West Bank, it can shamelessly spy on and steal technology from its closest ally, it can negotiate in bad faith. Nothing matters because the thought process begins with “Israel is in the right.” Everything flows from that belief.
Oh yeah that makes sense–you see, if a crime is done to you, you’re ALLOWED to do it to others yourself forever! It’s EXACTLY like how people who were victims of trafficking and molestation when they were children get a free pass to rape all the kids they could ever want to for the rest of their lives, right? /s