General Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he liberated Europe's concentration camps, insisted that journalists and photographers document the atrocities immediately, or, he predicted, the world would soon say they had never actually happened.
In a few years from now, the last survivors of the Holocaust will have disappeared, and the memory of what happened will fade even further.
The Holocaust was infinitely more than an attack on "dignity and human rights." It was a unique crime: the attempt at the total extermination of an entire people by industrial means in supposedly civilized countries of the West.
In January, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk spoke of the "unspeakable atrocities" suffered by millions of Jews, but added that the atrocities had also been suffered by "members of other minorities." Not quite. Although other minorities were indeed persecuted by the Nazis, none of them faced attempted extermination. Speaking in this way trivializes the Holocaust and makes it comparable to other crimes.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres not only also trivialized the Holocaust; he tried to claim that the United Nations fights antisemitism. If only! The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs wrote in 2005 that the UN "has become the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism."
Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese, the UN's "Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories" (her title already indicates a stance hostile to Israel), has made countless antisemitic remarks. Nevertheless, in 2025, she was kept in her position for an additional three years. South African jurist Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, is also prone to antisemitic remarks, and in September 2025 she submitted to the Human Rights Council a report full of lies and overflowing with hatred towards Israel.
The United Nations now has a long history marked by the spread of antisemitic rhetoric, antisemitic acts, and defamatory and hateful accusations against Israel. Despite a budget crisis at the UN, roughly $100 million a year is allocated just to target Israel, along with a UN commission of inquiry that "promotes genocide against Jews."
Unfortunately, the trivialization of the Holocaust and the pretense of fighting antisemitism while simultaneously fueling it through the expression of hateful lies against Israel exist in the Western world far beyond the UN, and the reactions observed earlier this year confirmed that.
In the United States, President Donald J. Trump published an honest, dignified message, writing:
"Today, we pay respect to the blessed memories of the millions of Jewish people who were murdered at the hands of the Nazi Regime and its collaborators during the Holocaust..."
Vice President J.D. Vance, however, published a message in which neither the word "Jewish" nor the word "Nazi" appears:
"Today we remember the millions of lives lost during the Holocaust, the millions of stories of individual bravery and heroism, and one of the enduring lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history: that while humans create beautiful things and are full of compassion, we're also capable of unspeakable brutality. And we promise never again to go down the darkest path."
That was almost right up there with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's epic remark about the 9/11 jihadists attacks on the US: "Some people did something."
Europe was even worse. Some presidents and prime ministers, not all, published statements on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, that were minimalist and trivialized the Holocaust by associating it with other crimes, just as Türk and Guterres had done. Many people who claim to be fighting antisemitism constantly criticize Israel harshly and falsely, thus inciting hatred of Israel, which, as Israel is a Jewish state, fuels the very antisemitism they claim to be fighting. Some, such as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, have even accused Israel of genocide.
While most mainstream American media outlets covered Holocaust Remembrance Day, most major European media outlets did not. These same media outlets, which regularly publish hateful and false articles about Israel, thereby fueling antisemitism, also speak of the Holocaust as if it had been just a ho-hum crime, similar to other crimes
Why? Well, what happened in the Western world after 1945?
Western leaders, particularly European leaders, understandably did not talk about the Holocaust and seemed desperate to forget it. Most of the Jews sent to the death camps did not survive. The testimonies of those who did were for years ignored. When Primo Levi, an Italian survivor of Auschwitz, wrote If This Is a Man in 1947, no major Italian publishing house would accept it. After a small publisher finally did, the book sold roughly a thousand copies. When Elie Wiesel, another Auschwitz survivor and later Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, wrote Night in 1958, all the most prominent French publishers rejected it. Finally, it also was finally accepted by a small publishing company; hardly any copies were sold.
After World War II, 24 leaders of Nazi Germany were put on trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and mass murder. They were tried and sentenced in Nuremberg in 1945-46. Even though the industrial-scale murder of millions of Jews was mentioned, it was never the center of attention.
After the trial, silence surrounding the Holocaust quickly followed, as if the page could not be turned fast enough on it. When the trial of SS officer Adolf Eichmann in 1961 brought the subject back into the spotlight, it seemed that talking about the Holocaust would finally become possible, but after the interest generated by the trial's opening, the major Western media turned to other topics, such as the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's space flight or the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was only after the broadcast of Marvin Chomsky's Holocaust television miniseries in 1978 that the Holocaust became a widely discussed topic. Millions of Americans and millions of Europeans watched the series. Those Europeans who did not want to confront this chapter of European history were forced to do so. Claude Lanzmann's documentary film Shoah, released in 1985 and broadcast throughout Europe, also showed the horror of the Holocaust based on documents and testimonies damning for the Nazis and everyone who collaborated with them. Levi's If This Is a Man and Wiesel's Night began to be read more widely and considered iconic.
In 2005 -- 60 years after the Holocaust -- the Shoah Memorial was created in Paris; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe erected in Berlin, and other prominent memorials started being erected all over Europe. It was also in 2005 that International Holocaust Remembrance Day was instituted by the United Nations. The concept of the "duty of remembrance" emerged.
And faded fast.
The fabricated "Palestinian cause," on the horizon for years, began permeating the minds of many Westerners. Hatred of the Jew had resurfaced in a new guise.
For many years, the commitment of Arab Muslim leaders to destroy Israel and murder Israeli Jews had not attracted the attention of the Western world. The survival of Israel -- born in 1948 and attacked by five better-equipped Arab armies -- even aroused astonishment and sometimes admiration in the West. Jew-hate existed – as it has since the time of the pharaohs -- but was not expressed in polite society. In Europe, a feeling of shame prevailed, possibly even among some antisemites.
The creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 changed everything. The will of Arab Muslim leaders to destroy Israel and murder Israeli Jews was replaced by the new narrative that Israel had monstrously dispossessed a "small, oppressed people" of all its rights and that this "people" was waging a supposedly justified "national liberation struggle" against an imperialist, predatory, and criminal state: Israel. Historically, a "Palestinian people" – as opposed to various Arabs who happened to be living in the area at the time along with various Jews, Christians, Europeans and others -- was totally fabricated. There is simply no trace of a "Palestinian people" or a "national liberation struggle" before 1964.
In the year 135, Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea "Syria Palaestina" in an attempt to erase any connection of Jews to their land. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the area which was never called "Palestine" by its Ottoman rulers, was renamed "the British Mandate for Palestine." It was populated mainly by assorted Muslims, Christians and Jews and lasted until Israel's independence in 1948. In the Qur'an, Israel and Israelites are mentioned 43 times, Palestine and Palestinians zero. Moreover, the Qur'an itself states that the Land of Israel belongs to the Children of Israel:
"And remember when Moses said to his people, 'O my people! Remember Allah's favors upon you when He raised prophets from among you, made you sovereign, and gave you what He had never given anyone in the world. O my people! Enter the Holy Land which Allah has destined for you ˹to enter˺. And do not turn back or else you will become losers." - Quran 5:20–21 (Al-Mā'idah)
"And We said to the Children of Israel: 'Dwell securely in the land.'" - Quran 17:104 (Al-Isrā')
The late Zuheir Mohsen, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in 1977 said:
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.
"For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."
Hating Israel and Israeli Jews became possible for those who subscribe to this concocted revision of history.
The use of the term Nakba ("catastrophe") to describe the birth of Israel as a moment of ethnic cleansing was tacked on, and the Nakba was presented as a genocidal act similar to the Holocaust. The actions of the Israeli army were compared to the actions of Nazi Germany's army. For those who subscribed to that invented narrative, hatred of Israel and Israeli Jews could now be accompanied by accusations of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and Nazi behavior.
Consequently, it also became possible to say that the Holocaust was just one crime among others; that Jews, too, could commit atrocious crimes. For Europeans, this manufactured overhaul of the facts may have come as a relief: they could now tell themselves that if the Jews were as bad as the Nazis or worse, then murdering Jews was perhaps not such a terrible undertaking.
Organizations supporting the "small, oppressed Palestinian people" sprang up throughout the West to spread the fake news, the number of those who subscribe to it has grown —possibly too convenient a way to hate Jews to pass up — and journalists and political leaders, especially those with significant Muslim voting blocs, have run with it. Palestinian terrorism became treated as acceptable terrorism. The need to create a Palestinian state to get the better of those successful, upstart Jews emerged as an imperative.
The need to remember the Holocaust disappeared. One could still admire and pay tribute to dead Jews while simultaneously hating living Jews -- Jews in Israel and Jews everywhere.
When the terrorist group Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 Jews and others, in the eyes of many in the West, since those Jews were Israeli they were not all that innocent. Whatever outrage there was over the massacre was short-lived, if that. Protests against Israel began the same day as the massacre. Any atrocities the Palestinians had committed were denied. Only when Israel released images showing the savagery of the murderers, did the denials slowly and temporarily diminish.
Particularly unacceptable to many people is the Israelis refusing to sit back and let themselves be wiped out. All the same, the Israelis would warn Gazans to evacuate in advance of impending military strikes, with large numbers of leaflets, text messages and phone calls in Arabic, and the IDF even organized mass evacuations to safe zones. If Palestinians tried to leave, their own leaders would shoot them. The international community called these Israeli efforts to save Palestinian lives a "genocide."
"If Israel is attempting genocide," US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee remarked, "they are really, really bad at it."
Although a "genocide" was obviously not taking place, the thought that it could happen was, it seems, too good to give up. Accusations of genocide against Israel multiplied, resembling the deranged blood libels in medieval Europe, in which Jews were accused of killing Christian children to bake matzah with their blood.
That Israel was fighting for its survival against a terrorist organization that itself has explicitly genocidal aims was painstakingly ignored.
Antisemitism began surging again throughout the Western world.
The prevailing narrative now is that Jews do not have the right to say that they are, or ever have been, victims.
The US is the only country in the Western world where sympathy for Israel remains high: 77% of Americans across all age groups support Israel over Hamas. In Europe, sympathy for Israel and the memory of the Holocaust are again fading fast. The increasing presence of a Muslim population, who as polls show, loathe Israel and Jews, is not a help.
When Holocaust remembrance ceremonies are organized in Europe, they attract almost exclusively Jews.
Anti-Israel demonstrations, by contrast, attract huge crowds, along with calls for the destruction of Israel and hatred of Jews.
Jews continue to flee Europe, with many leaving for Israel. They know that Israel is a country disliked throughout Europe and surrounded by Muslim hatred, but that Israel offers them a sanctuary.
In Israel, the memory of the Holocaust does not fade. Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial that includes an outsized room filled with the shoes of the murdered, was established in 1953, five decades before Holocaust memorials were created in Europe.
Every year since 1951, Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed: sirens sound for two minutes, and Israelis stand still in remembrance of the victims.
By preserving the memory of slavery in Egypt at the time of the pharaohs nearly 4,000 years ago, the memory of the Holocaust, and the many persecutions in between, Israeli Jews maintain their determination not just to fight and survive, but to excel.
Europeans, by allowing the oldest hatred to resurface, based on a fabricated Palestinian history, and by currying favor with a growing Muslim population marked by a seeming desire to Islamize their new European home, appear to be embarking on a very dark path.
Anti-Semitic hatred led entire populations in Europe to crimes so huge that they are still unable to confront them. If they can instead cast Jews today as Nazis, it lets them believe what they did to the Jews was not so terrible, after all.
"The more the West tries to erase the Jews," wrote the journalist Melanie Phillips last month, "the clearer its suicide note becomes for the erasure of its own civilization."
For Westerners, Jew-hate, sadly, is just a distraction, a means of denial to keep them from seeing the real threat to their existence: the hijrah, Muslim migration to the West to make it Islamic.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
