We live in a time when truth has become a distant echo and more emotionally satisfying, but false narratives dominate.
Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, we’ve seen this happen in real time. Almost immediately, those attacks were not just doubted but portrayed as fictitious. Some quickly minimized them or claimed that no evidence existed of the horrors of that day, or that Israel murdered its own citizens to make Hamas look bad. This was despite overwhelming video evidence that Hamas itself proudly recorded and broadcast.
Even as Israel was still gathering human remains, the narrative had already switched to the perceived suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
When the victims were Jews, the truth was less important than finding narratives that would preserve people’s ideological worldview. The erasure of Jewish suffering had begun. This inability simply to recognize Jewish suffering, to allow for a moment’s empathy, is a moral failure, but it is also a danger to all of us.
In 2014, when the Islamic terror group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 young girls from a school in Nigeria, a worldwide #BringBackOurGirls campaign mobilized to raise awareness of this horrific crime, including notable participants like Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. Beyoncé even had a section of her website dedicated to the movement.
Yet when Hamas kidnapped 251 people, most of them Israelis, no comparable worldwide campaign emerged outside the Jewish community. Instead, posters of kidnapped Jewish children were ripped down around the world.
Reem Alsalem, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, posted tweets expressing doubt about the accounts of sexual violence against Israeli women, even though a March 2024 report by U.N. Special Representative Pramila Patten found reasonable grounds to believe systematic sexual violence had occurred. Last month, Alsalem would not even look Israeli hostage Ilana Gritzewsky, a survivor of Hamas’s sexual abuse, in the eye while Gritzewsky testified before the U.N. Human Rights Council.
This campaign to erase both Jewish suffering and empathy for the victims contributes to and is a factor in today’s record levels of antisemitism, manifesting not only in physical assaults, but in intellectual and historical ones as well.
At a Boston school, a principal apologized to seventh-grade students after Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and Lebanese students said they felt excluded and unsafe following a lesson on hatred against Jews, arguing their own histories and identities were overlooked. How does this make any sense?
This campaign to erase Jewish suffering contributes to today’s record levels of antisemitism.
Indeed, even the Holocaust, one of the most documented events in history, has come under assault. The Australian Education Union recently stated that the subject is harder to teach because of the current Middle East conflict. Classrooms have become “emotionally charged,” the union said, with students from diverse backgrounds making it more challenging. Since when have current events been allowed to alter historical facts?
The Holocaust was the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish people in nearly two millennia. Yet there is a concerted campaign to erase it from historical memory, or at least remove its Jewish victims from discussion, because some people find it uncomfortable—meaning, ideologically inconvenient. Since when does teaching historical facts require an apology?
This extends to Holocaust commemorations that fail to even mention Jews. During Holocaust Memorial Day coverage in 2026, several BBC presenters referred to “the 6 million people murdered by the Nazi regime” without stating that the 6 million figure refers specifically to Jews (the Nazis also murdered millions of others).
When Canada’s National Holocaust Monument was unveiled in Ottawa, the dedication plaque omitted any reference to the 6 million Jews murdered. After criticism, the plaque was eventually replaced with one that explicitly mentioned the Jewish victims.
In 2019, the University and College Union (UCU) in the United Kingdom drafted a memo for the upcoming Holocaust Memorial Day remembering the Nazis’ victims, including Roma, Sinti, beggars, alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, pacifists, black people, disabled people, Freemasons, LGBT+ people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, non-Jewish Poles and Slavic prisoners.
What it didn’t mention was Jews. It blamed this omission on a “drafting error.” Apparently, Jews are the easiest Holocaust victims to forget.
It’s clear what’s going on. As the old Soviet joke goes: “The future is certain; it’s the past that keeps changing.”
The problem extends far beyond Holocaust memorials and education. The problem is the continued denial of all atrocities perpetrated against Jews, as if somehow Jewish victims don’t count.
This erasure of Jews, however, is not entirely about Jews. It is also about history itself and learning the lessons it teaches. If the past can be so blatantly rewritten and inconvenient realities edited out of it, then not only Jewish history but everyone’s history is at risk.
