Nasima Begum doesn’t like Jews very much. Past tweets include heartfelt thoughts such as “Death to you Zionist scum.”
This didn’t stop her from getting work with the BBC or being brought on board by the Anne Frank Trust UK to train the “youth” in the arts of tolerance.
The Trust was seeking trustees with “lived experiences” of “anti-black racism, disablism, homophobia and transphobia” and was “particularly keen to address anti-black racism as a priority” as “highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement.” Those concerned about mere anti-Semitism need not apply.
Organizations with Anne Frank’s name, but having nothing to do with her, Holocaust victims or the Jewish community have proliferated around the world. These organizations, generally not even Jewish, have instead served as incubators of anti-Semitism in exactly this sort of way.
The Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland funds BDS hate groups. An Anne Frank center in Frankfurt Germany compared Islamic State terrorists to Jews. At the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, a Muslim guide compared Israel to Nazi Germany. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam removed references to Anne’s Jewishness, banned a guide from wearing Jewish clothing and attacked Israel. An exhibit placed a photo of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon side by side with one of Hitler.
And yet this may be the first time an Anne Frank organization invited a speaker who had called for the murder of Jews. So many Anne Frank groups had tiptoed around it, but the Anne Frank Trust UK actually went out and did it.
“We are excited to welcome performance poet, producer and creative practitioner Nasima Begum to our special workshop this evening,” the Anne Frank Trust UK announced.
Begum’s job was “youth empowerment.”
Not surprising when the Assistant Director for Youth Empowerment at the Anne Frank Trust is Amna Abdullatif, who tweets enthusiastic support for anti-Semitic politician Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Under pressure, the British organization announced that Begum “may have views that are not consistent with our values” and promised that it would launch an investigation, even though controversies over Begum had already been aired in the past and would have been known to it.
There is a reason that this keeps happening at organizations named after Anne Frank.
Anne’s story was hijacked early on with a play, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” by Lillan Hellman, a Hollywood Stalinist, who turned it over to Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the Communist-linked married couple who purged most of the Jewish references.
Since then, Anne Frank has been reinvented in the form of various races, most recently as an illegal alien hiding from ICE, and another production which sought a “multi-racial cast representing many heritages.” The elimination of Anne’s Jewishness, much like the universalization of the Holocaust, presages anti-Semitism. Once the Jews have been replaced in their historical role, it becomes all too easy for anti-Semites to turn them into the new Nazis.
And their killers, whether the PLO, Hamas or ISIS, into the new Jews.
Nasima Begum claimed that Israel’s resistance to Islamic terrorism was “the Holocaust all over again,” with “Palestinians” as the victims and “Zionism scum” as the perpetrators.
The Anne Frank Trust UK may find this sort of explicit wording vulgar, but it’s no coincidence that the same ideas have manifested themselves at the Anne Frank centers in Berlin and Frankfurt, at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and now in the UK. It’s what happens when the story of the Holocaust is reframed in terms of general principles detached from the Jews.
Or as the Communists who rewrote Anne’s story had her say in the play, “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer.” The fictionalized version of a dead Jewish girl declares to applause: “Sometimes one race, sometimes another.”
Transforming the Holocaust into a general story about intolerance and prejudice all too easily becomes a partisan story whose broader lesson is the moral supremacy of leftist virtues.
And those virtues are routinely used to call for the death of Israel and the murder of Jews.
Rewriting the Holocaust as a struggle between the left and the right is itself Holocaust revisionism because it ignores the Soviet mass murder of Jews, the Hitler-Stalin pact and the collaboration of western Communists, including Lillian Hellman, in that Communist crime.
Hellman, had defended the Hitler-Stalin Pact and participated in the Communist-front “Keep America Out of War Committee,” making her a Nazi collaborator, and yet was allowed to play a role in transforming the story of a murdered Jewish girl into leftist agitprop.
While Hellman was suppressing Anne’s Jewishness, the Soviet Union was suppressing the Jewish elements of the Holocaust. True Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust were banned in the Soviet Union. Any discussion about the mass murder of Jews was tightly controlled. Even while it was covering up the Holocaust, the Soviet Union launched a propaganda campaign against the newly reborn State of Israel whose key elements, including the apartheid smear, are still widely in use among leftists, including those operating at Anne Frank centers, today.
Before Islamists were shouting, “Death to you Zionist scum,” Communists were shouting it.
The Soviet regime’s favorite taunt though was slurring Zionists as “fascists” or “Nazis”. A Communist regime that had massacred Jews and collaborated with the Nazis originated the smearing of Israel, of Zionists, and of Jews as Nazis. The latest such incident at an Anne Frank Center is the long legacy of the leftist hijacking of the Holocaust to justify the murder of Jews.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
This article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.