By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
Some
people were shocked when Jonathan Glazer used the Academy Awards to
launch into a vicious diatribe, disavowing his Jewishness, and demanding
that Israel stop attacking Hamas.
But that’s probably because they didn’t watch his movie.
Particularists go to great trouble to retell the story of what really happened. They value and cherish the actual history. Universalists however see the Holocaust as only another example of capitalism, nationalism and the bourgeoisie making all of us (except leftists) into monsters.
For the particularists, Jews are the survivors of the Holocaust, but for the universalists, like Glazer, Jews (and all of us who aren’t militant leftists) are on the verge of being Nazis.
That is why ‘The Zone of Interest’ is not concerned with Jews, with Nazi ideology or with anything except depicting the comfortable family life of the Auschwitz commander. The point that we are meant to take away is that there are always ‘holocausts’ going on, shooting and screaming just a little past where we choose to look while we enjoy our comfortable lives.
‘The Zone of Interest’ is not the story of Rudolf Höss, one of the worst mass murderers in human history: it’s an argument for why we are all (except Glazer and his comrades) like him.
Jews and Jewish organizations embraced the movie because they failed to understand it.
Jonathan Glazer, like most revisionists, had made his intention abundantly clear. His goal was to create a film that would “make us feel ‘unsafe’, by showing how we’re emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we’d like to think.” In other words, we are the Nazis.
Why are we Nazis? Because we’re middle class, bourgeois, citizens of great powers. And because, above all else, we’re not leftists. Antifa, which is joining Islamists in attacking Jews outside events commemorating the Oct 7 atrocities, springs from the old Communist assertion that we’re all either leftists or fascists. Today that means the majority of us are fascists.
That’s why Jonathan Glazer hates us. It’s why he made ‘The Zone of Interest’ to tell us so.
Oct 7 drew a clear binary line. The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust could be met by viewing the brutal Islamic killers, rapists and kidnappers as the new Nazis, or the Jewish families, living in peaceful sheltered communities, who were brutally murdered as the real Nazis.
Glazer and ‘The Zone of Interest’ firmly come down on the side of the Jews as the new Nazis.
‘The Zone of Interest’ focuses its attention on the complicity of peaceful middle class families and that was the message of the ‘ceasefire’ rallies and of Glazer’s Oscar night rant. It’s the justification so often put forward for the Nova music festival rapes because the sheer obliviousness of the young women to the nearness of Gaza made them more guilty, not less.
It’s a sentiment that one could easily imagine Jonathan Glazer agreeing with, and whether or not he does, it is what moviegoers were meant to walk away from ‘The Zone of Interest’ with.
That so many Jews, liberal and even not, were surprised by Glazer’s hateful display is a symptom of how little they understand about the pervasive hijacking of the Holocaust.
For a long time after the Holocaust, its story could virtually not be told. But while the Holocaust did not appear in the media, in movies, theater productions and television, it was instead being quietly told by survivors, by families and by communities to each other. When the Holocaust began to appear in the media it was quickly hijacked, bastardized and perverted to attack Jews.
The only reason the Left agreed to tell the story of the Holocaust was to appropriate it.
The universalist reinvention of Anne Frank’s story by Communist writers climaxes today in productions that reinvent the story as illegal aliens hiding from ICE or last year’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ set in Nazi Germany, with a black or Asian cast, but no Jews. Underneath the identity politics virtue signaling is the same underlying interchangeability as ‘The Zone of Interest’.
The Jews and the Nazis are not fixed elements, but characters whose roles can be filled by anyone. The ‘Jews’ are not the Jews, they are the people who claim to be oppressed,’ the Nazis’ are not the Nazis, they are the comfortable middle class people on the other side.
This idea at the heart of ‘The Zone of Interest’ is a poisonous Marxist lie. The Jews were initially targeted because they were successful middle class professionals. And the Nazis, like the Muslim terrorists, were supremacists who saw themselves as oppressed because they had lost territory and lost a war. Indeed, both sides had lost the same war, WWI, which united Nazis and Muslims in their hatred of the Allies and the Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas springs, had ties to Arab Muslim officials who had wielded power under the Ottomans, but then lost that power under the British, and wanted to restore slavery and repress non-Muslims.
But Glazer and ‘The Zone of Interest’ are not interested in history, especially Jewish history, but in indicting us, and making Americans and Jews into the new Nazis, and Muslims into the new Jews, ultimately justifying another Holocaust as the true lesson of the original Holocaust.
The universalist hijacking of the Holocaust was one of the great tragedies of its aftermath. It allowed leftists to not only exempt themselves from guilt for its crimes, but to make Jews and the Allies into the new Nazis. A generation after the Holocaust, German leftist terrorists started killing Jews all over again, this time in the name of the ‘Palestinian’ cause, arguing that Jews were the new fascists and they were the anti-fascists when they rounded up and killed Jews.
The universalization of the Holocaust is not just historical revisionism, as we can see at Entebbe or at the Oscars, it swiftly becomes an argument for killing Jews all over again. The USSR, which had partnered with Hitler in carving up Eastern Europe (before being betrayed by its former Nazi partners) and then set out to exterminate its own Jewish population, helped invent the idea that the Jews of Israel were the new Nazis and had to be exterminated all over again.
The Soviet Union created the ‘Palestinian’ cause and Moscow recently hosted a summit featuring Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad and all the ‘Palestinian’ terrorists.
Jonathan Glazer, denouncing Israel for defending itself against the new Nazis at the Oscars, was in the best tradition of the Soviet reversal of Nazis and Jews, and good and evil.
Glazer and ‘The Zone of Interest’ follow up on a long leftist tradition of genocidal reversals which relabel the Hamas terror bases for wiping out the Jews as “open air concentration camps”, the campaign to stop another Oct 7 as “genocide” and “another Holocaust”, and Israel as a “fascist state”. Hamas terrorists burning Jewish families alive in their homes are just “ghetto resistance fighters” and the extermination of the Jews becomes the final solution of the “resistance”.
The Holocaust as a metaphor relentlessly flips the script until the real message is preventing another Holocaust by killing the Jews. The climax of the ideology at the heart of Glazer’s politics and ‘The Zone of Interest’ is that the lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jews of Israel must die.
‘The Zone of Interest’ is not a movie about the Holocaust, it implicitly incites another Holocaust. It has no room at Jewish film festivals, in Jewish homes or in the halls of Jewish memory. Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading
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