The Absurdity of Comparing European Asylums for Migrants with Concentration Camps

Last month, performances in Germany of the play Auschwitz on the Beach were canceled after much outrage over the work’s central conceit: that Europe is guilty of establishing “concentration camps” for the refugees streaming into its borders, mostly from war-torn or impoverished areas of the Middle East and Africa. Nonetheless, writes Giulio Meotti, such analogies persist:

[F]or the last three years, [European] governments, non-governmental organizations, bureaucrats, charities, and the media have embraced migrants in the millions, welcoming them with open arms. The Jews during World War II—most of whom were turned away, turned in, or betrayed by European governments—were not so fortunate. . . .

The current misrepresentation was first formulated by Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Asa Romson. “We are turning the Mediterranean into the new Auschwitz,” she said. Since then, this sham comparison has entered the European mainstream. . . . Even Pope Francis, who compared a center for migrants to “concentration camps,” adopted this nonsense. . . .

In Italy, currently at the center of the migrant crisis, the “Holocaust comparison” has even entered into the country’s jurisprudence. An Italian tribunal recently ordered the government to pay compensation of 30,000 euros to the municipality of Bari for “damage to the image of the town” caused by the presence of a migrant identification center. “Think about Auschwitz, a place that immediately recalls the concentration camp of the Holocaust and certainly not the Polish town in the vicinity,” the magistrate said. . . .

[Such] dramatic remarks seem to reflect a high degree of guilt by Europeans about not having offered more help to the Jews [during the Holocaust. But] the point is that . . . a debate about immigration—how to manage and control it—is being shut down. On one side, you find people who want to “stop the new Shoah” and, on the other side, “collaborators” who want to stop the large wave of unvetted migrants.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Europe, Holocaust, Politics & Current Affairs, Refugees

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF