FOr the past six decades, Serge Klarsfeld has dedicated his life to hunting down the Nazis and bringing them to justice. There was Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon”, whom Klarsfeld and his wife, Beate, tracked down in Peru; René Bousquet, who ordered the death of thousands of Jews in the Vel ‘d’Hiv’ rodeo; and Paul Touvier, who was detained at a priory in Nice and became the first Vichy official to be convicted of crimes against humanity for the collaboration of the Holocaust.
Now, he is targeting Mark Zuckerberg.
Klarsfeld, 84, is one of many Holocaust survivors and activists who are speaking out loud as part of #NoDenyingIt, a campaign against Facebook and its founder for allowing Holocaust denial on the platform. In addition to Klarsfeld, who lost his father at Auschwitz, participants include Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent, Anne Frank’s stepsister Eva Schloss, and many more.
“The Internet makes many gullible or anti-Semitic people want to believe that the Holocaust did not happen,” says Klarsfeld. “It is wrong, it goes against history and makes people anti-Semitic, because if the Holocaust did not happen, that means the Jews lied about the murder of their parents and grandparents.”
#NoDenyingIt was launched by the Claims Conference, or the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, an organization seeking reparations for Jewish victims of Nazi oppression, recovering stolen Jewish property and preserving the memory of the Holocaust.
This controversy began in 2018, when, during an interview with Kara Swisher from Recode, Zuckerberg mentioned Holocaust denial on his own during a discussion of Facebook’s censorship policies.
“Let’s take all of this [issue] closer to home. I am Jewish and there is a group of people who deny that the Holocaust happened, “said Zuckerberg. “I find it deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t think our platform should remove that because I think there are things that different people are wrong about. I don’t think they are intentionally misreading ” .
Later in the chat, Zuckerberg expanded on his company’s rather nebulous policy. “The principles we have about what we remove from the service are: if it is going to result in actual harm, actual physical harm, or if it is attacking people, then that content shouldn’t be on the platform,” he said. .
But Klarsfeld and the #NoDenyingIt campaign argue that Holocaust denialism does result in “actual physical harm” and therefore violates Facebook’s policy.
“He it is Jewish, ”says Klarsfeld about Zuckerberg. “And it is important that Facebook, which is a great vehicle for ideas, thoughts and images, does something about hate speech, and not just hate speech but incitement to violence. Because if people begin to believe that the Jews did not die in the Holocaust and this was a great deception, then they will be angry with the Jews and commit violence. In the United States, there have been synagogue shootings. In times of crisis, people look for scapegoats, and throughout history, Jews have been scapegoats. Throughout history, if you give people an alibi to commit violence against Jews, they will use that.”
And he adds: “If he bans pedophiles from Facebook, people who deny the Holocaust should also be banned. He prohibits people who show their breasts on Facebook and will not prohibit people who say that the Jews did not die during the war. ”
“It prohibits people who show their breasts on Facebook and it will not prohibit people who say that Jews did not die during the war.“
In addition to Facebook, Klarsfeld is deeply concerned about the rise of the far right, many of whose leaders and followers are anti-Semitic, not only in the United States but around the world. One of the leaders he says is too tolerant of the far right is the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
“He did not condemn the violence that occurred against the Jews by the extreme right, and should have. He is not responsible and did not do what he had to do, which is to condemn the extreme right, and the neo-Nazi extreme right, “says Klarsfeld, adding:” He called some of the [Charlottesville far right] “very good people”, who shouldn’t have said and who was a big Error. Some of its voters are far right. So it tends to be lenient with some of the far-right movements. ”
We’ve also seen a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism among prominent black celebrities in the United States, from rappers and actors Ice Cube and Nick Cannon, to professional athletes DeSean Jackson and Stephen Jackson, to Diddy, who was commissioned to broadcast a speech by one of the nation’s top anti-Semites, Louis Farrakhan, to an audience of millions on July 4.
“If Puff Daddy put up a speech by Farrakhan, a well-known anti-Semite, on the Internet, it means he shares his ideas, and it’s a very easy thing,” explains Klarsfeld. “Their easy Explaining all the worries of the world and putting them on the back of the Jews has been going on for many centuries. It means that you are not responsible for your concerns, or that the government is not responsible for your concerns, it is the Jews who is responsible We have to remind people that there are 12 million Jews, 2.5 billion Christians and 2 billion Muslims. So I don’t see how Jews could be running the world based on those numbers. ”
These days, Klarsfeld, along with his wife Beate and son Arno, are doing everything they can to educate younger and older generations about anti-Semitism and the horrors of the Holocaust.
“We buy pages in the newspapers, we give conferences and we try to be active against the extreme right, which until now, we have not yet taken the necessary measures to condemn these anti-Semitic parties,” he says. “It has to be done through education and the teaching of compassion and tolerance.”
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