Pablo Iglesias during a speech./ Photo: Ahora Madrid
The Diplomat. 15/12/2016
The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE in its Spanish acronym), Isaac Querub, has sent an open letter to the leader and deputy of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, in which he asks him to make clear his “current position” on the Holocaust.
The petition responds to an article written by Iglesias in February 2009 for the blog El Gesto de Antígona, titled The Reader and the Holocaust. A dialogue with my friend Norman Radcliffe, in which Iglesias writes that “the Holocaust was, fundamentally, an administrative decision, a mere bureaucratic problem” and that “there is not much difference between the police officers that efficiently arrest migrants in our global metropolis and the guards of the SS”.
According to Querub, “the Holocaust cannot be reduced to the action of civil servants devoid of morals due to the institutionalization of hatred for their neighbours built by Nazism”. “The Holocaust was a process perfectly planned by Nazi leaders in which the lack of conscience of the individual and their void morals played a central and decisive role in the achievement of the massive and industrial murder or six million Jews, specific programme known as Final Solution”, he adds.
Podemos’s leader wrote that “there is not much of a difference between police officers who arrest migrants and the SS”
“As Nuremberg’s Court sentenced (…), in the committee of war crimes and crimes against Humanity, the fact that a person has acted by order of their government or their superiors, under the chain of command or duly obedience, does not remove their responsibility under the international law, since they still had a moral choice”, he continues.
In the opinion of the president of the FCJE, “his thought fuels those forces and movements that, to a greater or lesser extent, try, with clearly totalitarian, anti-democratic and intolerant —and, of course, anti-Semitic— intentions to empty of content and deny the Holocaust, and, therefore, it must be publicly rectified”.
Therefore, “we demand that he makes clear his current stance in that regard”, since “facing the Holocaust, the incitement to hatred and the fight against anti-Semitism there is no room for intellectual ambivalence or harebrained reasoning”, the letter concludes.
