You wouldn’t want to just let anybody in your Holocaust memorial:

A plan to honor gays and other non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park was blasted Sunday by critics as political pandering.

Politicians and community activists gathered at the Sheepshead Bay park Sunday to demand Mayor Bloomberg block a plan they contend undermines the memorial’s core message.

“The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event,” said Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn), whose mother is a Holocaust survivor.

The city Parks Department has proposed adding five new markers to the memorial at West End Ave. and Shore Blvd. to honor homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, Gypsies and political prisoners targeted by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

It’s quite shocking to see how many Zionists, both Jewish and otherwise, want to see the Holocaust not as an example of man’s inhumanity” to man but as “man’s inhumanity to Jews”, who would agree with Dov Hikind that it is “a uniquely Jewish experience”. Hikind is a nasty piece of work but his views are shared by many more mainstream Zionists. As Norman Finkelstein (like Hikind a child of Holocaust survivors) argues in his book The Holocaust Industry this obsession with keeping the Holocaust a Jewish tragedy is partially due to its use as the founding myth of Israel. Israel needs to be a explicitely Jewish state because that is the only way to avoid another Holocaust and if the Holocaust happened to other people (homosexuals, Sinti & Roma, disabled Germans, etc) that justification makes a lot less sense. Hence the opposition to putting the Holocaust in context with other examples of genocide like Ruanda or the Armenian genocide, hence the opposition to remembering other nazi victims. Hence also the attempts to teach the Holocaust as the logical culmination of centuries of European anti-semitism.

Public Holocaust memorials need to be universal, need to be true to the historic reality if they are to have any meaning. Jewish people were the largest group of victims of the nazis, but we should never forget that millions of others were killed by them as well: Poles, Russians, German socialists and other political opponents, disabled German children, Roma and Sinti, Jehova’s Witnesses and other religious people opposing the nazis out of their beliefs and yes, homosexuals (the only group nazi laws against which were enforced on after the war). Hate is universal and there isn’t something uniquely Jewish about being the victim of it.

To think otherwise is to beg history to repeat itself. Again.