Visit by Kubilius presents an important opportunity to confront the Lithuanians
on their shameful approach to Holocaust issues.
The visit this week of Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius will present
a difficult foreign policy dilemma. In recent years, Israel has forged
increasingly strong ties with the new Eastern European members of
NATO and the European Union, whose stances on Middle East issues
has generally been more supportive and understanding than those of
their Western European counterparts.
Desperate for political and diplomatic support in international forums, and especially
in the extremely important EU, Israel has been reluctant to criticize
the postcommunist countries for their attitudes and policies on a
wide range of Holocaustrelated issues.
One of the most important of these has been the campaign
being waged by these countries, especially by the Baltic republics
of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, to promote the canard that the
crimes of communism are the equivalent of those of the Nazis.
While the victims of the former certainly deserve
not only our sympathy but also a determined effort that those responsible
be brought to justice, both of which are sadly lacking and are the
cause of considerable “Holocaust envy,” the fact remains that the
false historical equivalency poses a very grave danger not only to
the accepted narrative of World War II and the Shoah, but also to
the future of Holocaust commemoration and education.
Thus, for example, one of the main demands of the Prague Declaration of June
3, 2008, the manifesto of the campaign of false equivalency, is to
designate August 23, the date of the Molotov- Ribbentrop Soviet-Nazi
Non-Aggression Pact, as a joint commemoration day for the victims
of all totalitarian regimes, i.e.
Nazism and communism, and thereby indicate that the communists bear equal responsibility
for the atrocities and fatalities of World War II and the Holocaust,
a step sure to ultimately lead to the elimination of a special memorial
day for the victims of the Shoah.
NO COUNTRY has done more to promote this false equivalency
than Lithuania. Vilnius has been pushing for the adoption of resolutions
along these lines in every possible international forum, and has
unfortunately had some success, but this tendency has been promoted
with a vengeance at home. Thus, for example, its campaign to prosecute
Jewish anti-Nazi Soviet partisans for supposed war crimes to create
a false symmetry between crimes by Lithuanians against Jews and those
by Jews against Lithuanians. Or its efforts to hide or severely minimize
the extensive scope of Lithuanian complicity in Holocaust crimes
and artificially inflate the number of Lithuanian Righteous Among
the Nations to counterbalance the huge number of local Holocaust
perpetrators.
Add to this its abysmal failure to prosecute Lithuanian
Nazi murderers, not a single one of whom has been punished since
independence, and the passage of laws criminalizing the denial of
communist “genocide,” a term which had to be redefined by the Lithuanian
parliament to fit the description of the crimes committed by the
communists in Lithuania. Or the strange tolerance vis-a-vis neo-fascist
demonstrations in the main avenue of Vilnius during which marchers
yelled “Juden raus,” as if the elderly Holocaust survivors who chose
to trust the nascent Lithuanian democracy needed a reminder of their
traumatic past. Or the shameful dismissal of world-renowned Yiddish
expert Prof.
Dovid Katz, co-founder of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute
and a lecturer at Vilnius University for the past eleven years, in
the wake of his courageous public support for the beleaguered Jewish
Holocaust survivors falsely accused of war crimes.
And to add insult to injury, Holocaust education in
Lithuania was turned over exclusively to the main promoters of the
Prague Declaration and the equivalency canard – the Historical Commission
to Investigate the Crimes of the Occupations, both of them, as if
there were equally evil, the Center for the Study of Genocide, in
whose museum in the center of Vilnius, there is no mention of the
Shoah, but quite a few anti-Semitic cartoons emphasizing the Jewish
origin of various communists, and whose few publications on the Holocaust
relate only to Lithuanian Righteous Among the Nations, as well as
the local Tolerance Center, which is controlled by a politician of
Jewish origin, Emanuelis Zingeris whose Jewish roots serve primarily
to give legitimacy to all of the above.
Over the past few years, Israel has done relatively
little to protest or effectively combat the steadily-worsening situation
in Lithuania. As we all know, we face very serious threats on multiple
fronts and need all the help we can get. But there are times and
issues which must, as a matter of principle and national pride, be
dealt with in a forthright manner.
The time has come to take the Lithuanians and the
other Eastern European countries to task on Holocaust-related issues
in a sophisticated, diplomatic and effective manner that will protect
the historical narrative of the Shoah and help thwart the equivalency
campaign before it destroys 60 years of efforts to convince the world
of the special importance of the Holocaust and its historical uniqueness.
This is our obligation not only to the victims, but to ourselves
and our descendants. This week’s visit by Lithuanian Prime Minister
Kubilius is such an opportunity which hopefully will not be squandered.
jpost.com
|