The Shoah is already here
The warning signs that preceded the Holocaust are visible again, this time on a global scale and cloaked in modern language.
“Never again” has become a ritual phrase, repeated solemnly on Holocaust Remembrance Day and then set aside, like a relic from a distant and incomprehensible past. But the Shoah is not behind us. It is already among us. And today, only the existence of the State of Israel stands as a barrier against a renewed and global attempt to eliminate the Jewish people.
Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer once warned that the extermination of the Jews was almost beyond language. That fear has come true in a different way. The words remain, but their meaning has drained away.
“Never again” is spoken while Jews are silenced, expelled, attacked, boycotted and murdered—often with the quiet acquiescence of the societies around them. Those who speak most earnestly about the importance of remembrance are not the ones shaping the present. History is being shaped by those who fight now.
Friedländer showed that Nazi antisemitism did not begin with gas chambers. It began with silence, with polite detachment, with neighbors looking away.
German-Jewish scholar Victor Klemperer described meeting a once-friendly policeman in December 1938 who passed him without acknowledgment, staring straight ahead. “That man,” Klemperer wrote, “represented 79 million Germans.”
Today, that look—cold, distant, complicit—has multiplied into the billions. A Jew meets an old acquaintance, sits at a table with longtime friends, and enters a shop in Rome, Vicenza, Paris, New York or Toronto.
The world averts its eyes. Newspapers report Jewish murders in Manchester or Bondi, the hunting of Israeli athletes in Amsterdam, expulsions from universities, assaults in the streets. Among friends and colleagues, there is silence. A barely concealed distance. Antisemitism is understood, excused and normalized.
Are you Jewish? Be quiet. You know how it is. You’re a Zionist. A genocidaire.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, social environments, institutions and the media have been mobilized. Victims have been transformed into executioners. Jews are called “Nazis.” A red-green-Islamist alliance has deployed a wealthy, sophisticated propaganda machine that has poured billions into spreading hatred of Jews. Its goal is not ambiguity. It is elimination.
“Kill the Jews.” “Death to the Jews.” “From the river to the sea.” The language is explicit.
This is not carried out today by a centralized, scientific machinery issuing orders from above. It proceeds from below, through society itself, through a pervasive international network of indoctrination. Human rights are weaponized to justify madness: Israeli actors assaulted in the street; police explaining that shouting threats is protected speech; violence excused by a doctrine that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, where revenge is not only permitted but morally required.
Gays persecuted by Islamist regimes are told they must hate Israel, the only state in the region that protects their equality. Women are excluded from feminist movements. Scientists are barred from research centers. Artists are expelled from theaters. A vast mass of Jews and Israelis is erased. This is a Shoah.
The siege is global. Once, Jews fled Nazi Europe to America. Today, the United States itself is a theater of antisemitic violence. In the Middle East, the war is fought with terrorism. Elsewhere, it is fought socially, culturally and institutionally. You can only fight to defend yourself.
This did not happen overnight. Mein Kampf was not written in a day. Years of preparation preceded the Holocaust. Today, documentation shows how international operations, coordinated with vast resources, mobilized institutions—from the United Nations to courts, universities, film festivals and trade unions—to transform the “Palestinian cause” into a human-rights banner, despite its explicit negation of human rights.
Hollywood, Venice, Princeton, Turin, La Sapienza, and even a pizzeria in Naples expelling Israelis. All are nodes in a network that has trapped the world in the lie of genocide, a lie disproved in seconds by the most basic facts.
As with the Nazis, this phase begins with expulsions, isolated murders and economic and cultural persecution. It aims not yet at industrial extermination from above, but at disappearance from below: frightened communities withdrawing, emigrating, silenced into submission. Synagogues are attacked. Cemeteries desecrated. Jewish neighborhoods invaded.
From Rome to Berlin, Melbourne to Lakewood, Obninsk to Rouen, arson, threats and violence have become routine. Think twice before praying, antisemitism warns. Death waits around the corner—knives, bullets, cars.
Israel fights on one front; Jews everywhere fight on another. The attack targets soldiers and singers, athletes and students, workers and worshippers. Jews are eliminated from campuses, from professions, from politics, from public life. Children tell their parents not to speak Hebrew. Wearing a kippah is dangerous. A Star of David invites assault.
Remembering Auschwitz is no longer enough. Wake up. We are in the phase of mass antisemitic attack. The explosion of “incidents” is not only a Jewish problem; it is a European and American catastrophe. In France, attacks rose by 1,000 percent after Oct. 7. In the United States, they reached 10,000 in a year. Canada and Australia are engulfed. Murder follows rhetoric.
This is the most profitable algorithm in the West: antisemitism gains votes, sells papers, recruits followers. Trade unions strike for Hamas. Universities host courses on “genocide” while expelling Jewish students. Politicians dismantle antisemitism laws. The Oscars reward anti-Israel propaganda. A woman in New York screams, “I’m gonna kill you Jews,” as a car plows into Orthodox pedestrians.
This is the new Shoah: to confine Jews, one by one, into fear and isolation. It was in a discussion with American-Israeli journalist Elli Wohlgelernter that I first understood how this Shoah is advancing from below, through society itself, unlike the Nazi extermination plan imposed from above.
I have spent my life writing about antisemitism. Warning about it. Describing it. It was not enough. Do not say “never again” this Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27. It has become empty. Say instead: I will fight for Israel. That has meaning now.
Iran’s ayatollahs, like Hitler’s Germany, reveal antisemitism for what it is: an obsessive system of thought, a simplification of reality, a worldview that defines existence as violence. Destroy Israel. Destroy the Jews. This is Iran’s declared aim and that of Islamist terror, allied in the West with radical leftist movements.
Israel, however, fights back. Every time Jews stood at the edge of annihilation, an inner force compelled them to resist. Even in the Warsaw Ghetto, facing certain death, young people fought, laying the foundations for Zionist resurrection. Israel’s strength today is not only Jewish self-defense; it is a pillar in the global struggle against autocracy, terror and the collapse of democratic civilization.
The war against Jews is always a war against civilization. The Canadian scholar, Ruth Wisse, was right. Jews have learned to fight. And since Oct. 7, not only Jews but their allies must remember: the Shoah did not destroy only the Jewish people. It devastated the entire world.
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