Mark Steyn: 'The Jews Were Sort of Peripheral to the Meaning' of 'Never Again'

“Our generation will be treated far more brutally by history because these guys are all standing up there at the big ‘Never Again’ ceremony slapping each other on the back and saying what marvelous fellows they are, that’s on page 1, and on page 37 there’s the story of this weeks’ Kosher grocery bombing. It’s disgusting,” Mark Steyn tells Laura Rosen Cohen during his lengthy interview, adding:

“I think they drew the wrong conclusion from “Never Again”. The Jews were sort of peripheral to the meaning of that. I think what ‘Never Again’’ means to a continental European is never again, as they saw it, nationalism led to war. So their response to 1939-1945 was to undermine their own nationalism. At the time of the European Constitution, so-called, a decade ago, you had these apparatchiks from the European Commission standing up and warning the Dutch and the French that if they didn’t sign on to this Euro Superstate that they would be on the path to Belsen and Auschwitz.”“In other words, it’s one or the other. You’ve the European union or you’ve got ovens. That was the lesson they drew, that nationalism was bad that nation states were bad, that national identity was bad. And, as part of that, they imported the next generation of anti semites to Europe.”

Q: And that’s worked out really well for Europe?

“I think I said this to Ezra the other day on his telly show, it’s one of the blackest jokes of history, that the Holocaust enabled the Islamization of Europe and the Islamization of Europe has enabled the destruction of what remains, post-Holocaust, of Jewish life in Europe.”

Q: And this makes you wonder if the animus towards the Jews can be characterized as anything but a completely pathological, self-destructive phenomenon? 

“Somebody said, I forget where it was, I think it was the Daily Mail the other day the story about all these Jews saying there’s no future for the Jews and they’re preparing to leave and Maureen Lipman, who we mentioned earlier, I think Maureen is among them, actually she’s now saying she’s trying to figure out where you go next, which is extraordinary to me because I think about her as British as anybody and the idea that she feels driven out of her country by the malevolence and hatred.”

“And somebody responded to that, commented in that piece, said ‘oh Britain without Jews wouldn’t be Britain’, a nobody, just some nobody just in the comment section, comment 807, says ‘yeah they always say that don’t they’. That’s what they say in Poland, that’s what they say in Germany, but in the end they somehow manage either killing them or driving them out.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post prints a map of the globe titled “Where the Holocaust is taught – and not taught – around the world.” But just because it’s being taught doesn’t mean that the knowledge is being absorbed by students:

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Or as Steyn adds later in his interview, “when countries transform…you not only lose you future, you lose your past too.” A remark which dovetails well with one “random” student of history in particular, which is why “We Have to Talk About Obama’s Ignorance,” Seth Mandel writes at Commentary. And hopefully before, as Cohen quips sardonically in a follow up post at her blog, another attack of what the president and his enablers would call “Randomsemitism” occurs.

(Via 5’F.)