A holocaust story on NPR: Just a coincidence that it is timed during Israel’s genocide of Palestinians?

Listening to NPR yesterday and apropos of nothing, they had a holocaust story (“80 Years Later a Holocaust Survivor Meets a Soldier Who Liberated Him“) just in time to gain sympathy for Israel as it genocides the Palestinians. I’ve noticed this before. Recent examples of “anti-Semitism,” like the incident in Boulder, CO mentioned in the article, overwhelmingly reflect hostility toward Israel because of its genocide of Palestinians.

From the forthcoing edition of The  Culture of Critique:

Finkelstein (2000) takes a functionalist view of the “Holocaust industry,” arguing that it serves as a vehicle for extorting money for Jewish organizations from European governments and corporations, and for justifying the policies of Israel and U.S. support for Israeli policy (pp. 7–8). Finkelstein also argues that embracing the Holocaust allows the wealthiest and most powerful group in the United States to claim victim status—a status that is wearing thin and is now often seen as hypocritical because of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza beginning in 2023.

From the NPR article:

The Nazis systematically killed an estimated six million Jews in the Holocaust. Today, just over 220,000 Holocaust survivors remain worldwide, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an organization that helps survivors receive compensation for Nazi atrocities.

Fewer and fewer first-hand witnesses remain alive to tell their stories, and the remaining survivors’ memories are fading. The USC Shoah Foundation is racing against time to gather these testimonies, uncover more Holocaust history, and increase global understanding of the genocide. …

“By and large, knowledge of the Holocaust is decreasing,” said [Rob Williams, a Holocaust historian and CEO of the USC Shoah Foundation] who previously worked for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “even in some of the countries responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust.”

Understanding the Holocaust, he argues, is crucial to understanding the modern world, including the postwar institutions designed to ensure that “never again” would not be an empty promise.

International organizations like the United Nations and NATO were created in the aftermath of World War II, and international treaties on the treatment of refugees and against genocide were ratified. The word “genocide” did not exist before World War II.

Skepticism of such institutions of international cooperation have gained political traction. Authoritarian governments, such as Viktor Orban’s in Hungary, have won power and undermined civil liberties. In Germany, leaders of the far-right political party Alternativ für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, have decried what they call a “cult of guilt” around the Holocaust, and questioned the country’s continued reckoning with Nazi-era crimes. In the U.S., members of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have expressed support for the AfD.

“I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that just as we are casting doubt on the value of democracy or on the value of human rights,” Williams said, “that we’re also beginning to witness a decline in understanding and memory of the Holocaust.”

In the U.S., violent antisemitic attacks have occurred in Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C. Popular online influencers with millions of followers have encouraged Holocaust denial. And multiple members of the Trump Administration have promoted antisemitic conspiracies and associated with antisemitic extremists.