The Economist, and the abuse of Oct. 7th memory

We recently complained to Economist editors about a July 17th article which included the following claim:

Mr Merz speaks of “imported antisemitism” among recent Muslim immigrants, a genuine if hardly dominant phenomenon: most recorded antisemitism in Germany is of the far-right sort.

However, according to the most recent German government report on antisemitism, most recorded antisemitic incidents – which doubled from the previous year – are not “of the far-right sort”.

Here’s the relevant section from the report published by the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism:

Among [antisemitic] incidents that could be clearly attributed to a political background, anti-Israel activism was the most common category, accounting for 26% [of all such incidents].

The report notes that:

The second most common background in 2024 was right-wing extremism, accounting for around 6% of incidents.

The error, grossly downplaying the role of anti-Israel activism from the far-left and Islamists in Germany’s post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism, including the a 200,000 strong Palestinian community whom the government’s culture minister acknowledged have been “fully radicalised”, is consistent with the tone and tenor of the article, beginning with the headline:

Germany’s “memory culture” prevents it from coping with Gaza

The headline aptly illustrates the central argument, that Berlin is so obsessed with atoning for the Holocaust, that it blindly supports Israel’s military actions – at the expense of innocent Palestinians (and pro-Palestinian activists).

The article features a cartoon by Peter Schrank, who, in 2014, published a cartoon at the Economist so clearly antisemitic that it was removed by editors, and elicited an apology.

Here’s the Schrank cartoon in the current article:

So, Schrank depicts a pro-Palestinian activist stepping next to a Stolpersteine – the small, brass cobblestones, each one bearing the name and biographical details of a victim of Nazi persecution, that are embedded throughout the sidewalks of Europe.

The imagery is arguably open to some degree of interpretation. However, given the context of the article, and Schrank’s previous work, it seems at minimum as an attempt to question Germany’s political culture of atonement for Nazi atrocities, and a plea make room in the state’s collective consciousness for Palestinian victims of Israel’s putative atrocities – and, presumably, Berlin’s alleged role in abetting Israel’s war against Hamas.

However, if you peruse Schrank’s X account, (and look at his hashtags) it’s clear that he’s not merely calling on the state to more forcefully criticise specific Israeli policies in its war against the terror group. Rather, he believes that Israel is committing genocide – in which case his cartoon can more accurately be understood as a form of soft Holocaust inversion. The cartoonist is condemning Germany for not seeing Palestinians – as he seems to – as ‘the new Jews’. ‘The Jewish victims’, the new anti-Semites have insisted, particularly since Oct. 7, 2023, ‘have become the perpetrators’.

Finally, the cartoon not only evokes the dangerous phenomenon referred to by the late scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld as the abuse of Holocaust memory. It’s also, by virtue of evoking the Holocaust in relation to Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre, an abuse of Oct. 7th memory.

As we’ve argued, almost immediately after the most deadly antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, many British media outlets began framing the story not as one about the savagery of the Hamas pogrom itself, but, instead, about Israel`s putatively disproportionate military response to the attack, which was soon characterised as “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide”.

By the first anniversary of the attacks, Hamas’s bloodthirsty pogromists had been effectively erased from the story, while the victims of the pogrom – those murdered, raped, tortured, mutilated or taken hostage – had become often merely a footnote in the increasingly common revisionist trope of ‘Israeli genocide’.

Unlike Holocaust revisionists in the decades since WW2, who were generally consigned to the political fringes, the whitewashing, obfuscation and inversion of Oct. 7th is not only socially acceptable, but has almost become de rigueur within much of the discourse on the attacks and their aftermath. This phenomenon has been characterised by Balas Berkowitz as the rendering of Oct. 7th as a “non-event”.

There seems little doubt that the unprecedented surge in antisemitism in the West following the massacre has, in part, been driven by this odious inversion. The moral corruption within media institutions that have effectively normalised this toxic and intellectually unserious narrative can’t be overstated.