Photo Credit: Yossi Zeliger / Flash 90
Jewish youth from all over the world participating in the March of the Living walk the tracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp site in Poland. (illustrative)

Is a second Holocaust possible? While not all hate-mongering leads to mass murder, history shows that genocide is usually preceded by continuous demonization of the eventual victims.

Never in history had the psychological infrastructure for genocide been prepared more thoroughly than it was before the Holocaust. In his book The Devil and the Jews, Joshua Trachtenberg summarized how Medieval Christendom viewed the Jew: as a “sorcerer, murderer, cannibal, poisoner, blasphemer.”

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Experts on Jesus’s lifetime know that in Roman times the Jews had no power to kill anyone. However, the false accusation of deicide persists to this day. The Nazis and their allies added another accusation of absolute evil: “Jews are subhuman.” The culmination of the extreme defamation was the slaughter of six million Jews.

The newest accusation against the Jews of absolute evil is the claim that they behave like Nazis. As I pointed out in my recent book Demonizing Israel and the Jews, at least 150 million people in the European Union think Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians or, alternatively, behaves toward them like the Nazis did to the Jews.

A major study in 2013 by the Fundamental Rights Agency shows that due to increasing anti-Semitism in Europe a substantial number of Jews frequently or always hide their identity in public. In Sweden and France, the majority of Jews do so.

This is not to suggest that European Jewry is in danger. It remains highly unlikely that there will be a second European Holocaust against the Jews in the foreseeable future, as there is far too much resistance to that very notion in society at large.

That same resistance, however, does not exist in large parts of the Muslim world. An Iranian nuclear bomb is not the only potential source for a second Holocaust. One just has to watch the atrocities committed almost daily by Muslims, mainly against other Muslims, in Syria and Iraq.

If they were ever to gain sufficient power, there are enough Palestinians who, in league with organized jihadists, would attempt to do the same to Israel’s Jewish population.

In order to prevent such a scenario, Israel must work with sympathetic journalists and other opinion makers to educate the West about the duplicity and cruelty that has become endemic to much of the Muslim world.

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Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is the emeritus chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism and the International Leadership Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.