Heritage’s fallout with ZOA over Tucker Carlson masks the deeper peril: seductive “soft-core” Holocaust denial fueling global anti-Israel narratives.
The Zionist Organization of America’s explosive ultimatum to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes was a grave strategic misstep — a case of moral fury eclipsing tactical wisdom.
By demanding Roberts denounce Carlson or risk losing ties, ZOA — a historic guardian of Zionism — ended up alienating one of Israel’s strongest intellectual allies in Washington. The move, well-intentioned yet myopic, handed attention to Fuentes, an internet provocateur whose outrageous Holocaust mockery thrives on outrage and clicks.
Let’s be clear: Fuentes is not a “hard-core” Holocaust denier like the venomous clerics of Tehran or Jeddah. He’s a clownish opportunist who turns Nazi horror into online theatre, trivializing genocide for spectacle. His mockery — likening crematoria to cookie ovens — is grotesque but unserious. The wise response is indifference, not indignation.
But while ZOA and Heritage lock horns over a YouTube sideshow, a far more insidious danger festers — “soft-core” Holocaust denial, cloaked in moral relativism and progressive rhetoric.
Unlike Fuentes’s vulgarity, soft-core deniers dress hatred in empathy. British MP David Ward lamented that “the Jews, after suffering the Holocaust, now inflict atrocities on Palestinians.” Oxford’s Andrew Wilkie echoed him, accusing Israelis of abusing “the moral high ground” from their “appalling treatment in the Holocaust.”
They never deny the Holocaust outright. They downgrade it — from genocide to “appalling persecution” — while upgrading Israel’s self-defense to “atrocities.” This subtle inversion rewrites history: Jews become the new Nazis, and Gaza becomes the new Warsaw Ghetto.
This is Holocaust denial 2.0 — sanitized, seductive, and socially acceptable. It doesn’t scream “Hitler was right.” It whispers, “The Jews learned nothing from their suffering.”
Such rhetoric doesn’t merely distort history; it poisons the moral vocabulary of an entire generation. It exploits Western guilt to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty, turning the Holocaust from the world’s gravest warning into a weapon against the Jewish state itself.
Israeli author Howard Jacobson pinpointed the manipulation: “To call Israelis Nazis is to wound Jews with their own grief — to punish them with their history.”
Even within Israel, this infection spreads. When Haaretz columnist Adira Haas claimed “no one has the right to rank suffering — Gaza or Auschwitz,” she collapsed moral distinctions that uphold civilization itself.
That is why the real battle against antisemitism must target moral trivialization, not just explicit denial. ZOA’s quarrel with Heritage is a distraction. The real front lies in classrooms, newsrooms, and legislatures — where language itself is weaponized to turn compassion for Jews into condemnation of Israel.
For the Jewish people, memory is survival. To equate Gaza with Auschwitz is to extinguish both truth and meaning. The Holocaust was not “suffering” — it was annihilation. And Israel, born from its ashes, remains the living rebuttal to both hard-core and soft-core deniers alike.
