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Seventy years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is still alive in Germany -- and apparently getting worse.

So concerned are Germany's lawmakers, they've just established a high-level commissioner post to fight discrimination against the Jewish community.

Even after decades of rigorous political education and intense, self-critical soul searching, 9% to 10% of Germans express classic anti-Semitic feelings, according to a 2017 report commissioned by the Bundestag. Many more, up to 50%, harbor more mild anti-Semitic prejudices.

I first discovered that people with disabilities were sterilized and killed by the Nazis when I was a teenager, watching the TV mini-series “Holocaust” in 1978.

While he does know that approximately 300,000 disabled people were killed in T4 and its aftermath, he doesn’t know about the direct connection between T4 and the Holocaust.

I am also Jewish. At the Karl Bonhoeffer psychiatric hospital in the Berlin suburb of Wittenau, where the exhibition “A Double Stigma: The Fate of Jewish Psychiatric Patients” was held, I learned about, as the exhibition title suggests, how Jewish patients were doubly stigmatized by being separated from other patients, denied pastoral care, and were cared for not at the expense of the Reich but by Jewish organizations.

Despite the fact that there are still so many unanswered questions surrounding the events on January 6, it's likely McConnell is more concerned that a commission will hurt the Republican Party's chances in the upcoming 2022 midterm election. That's mainstream Republicanism in a nutshell: do whatever is necessary to protect the power of the party.

Then there is Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has a track record of spewing anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, racist, and conspiratorial statements. She sunk to a new low this week when she compared the implementation of public health initiatives to steps the Nazis took as they sought to destroy the Jewish population during the Holocaust. When her comments were met with harsh criticism, Greene simply doubled down.

The rise of the far right in Europe has brought back to the surface fears that many had hoped were gone forever.

There is something chilling about the way in which some countries and politicians have treated people fleeing war and persecution.

Anti-Semitism has a way of changing over time. It mutates like no other hatred and is camouflaged in so many ways.

Cartoons, he wrote, are “gross over-caricatures designed to provoke debate and response — that’s why newspapers publish them — fodder for the marketplace of ideas.”

He criticized Kelly for shutting down the state earlier this year and argued that her mask order “would have certainly led to a resurgence in the ‘freak out factor’ with Kansans being reminded of the virus everywhere they turned, resulting in a new wave of economic malaise.”

But on Sunday, Hicks admitted that he was wrong to equate government orders to wear masks with the deaths of millions of Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany.

his leadership is sabotaging conservatism.

Trump retweeted an “America First” post featuring disgraced columnist Michelle Malkin complaining about conservatives being silenced on social media. Trump has retweeted unsavory characters before, but in this case, he added an endorsement: “The radical left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle!”

In the name of standing up for aggrieved conservatives, Trump soils the brand

mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.

During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.

The Supreme Court could not be more clear about the special importance of the First Amendment in the university setting. Cohn quotes these famous words from Sweezy v. New Hampshire:

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.

Yet even when a state agency can regulate the expression of ideas, should it? After all, most cancel culture incidents don’t implicate the First Amendment either. Employers can fire you for your speech. Social media can block any of us from access to their platforms. But in law as in culture, the question of “can” is separate from the question of “should.”

The key difference between the liberation of Auschwitz and Ohrdruf lies not in the reactions of the first liberators on the scenes but in what came after. The accounts of Red Army soldiers and American GIs are actually remarkably similar: they both speak of survivors as “walking skeletons;” they both describe the squalor the camp’s inmates lived in; they both mention the smell of death that lingered in the air and permeated far beyond the confines of the camp—which led to similar observations when locals living near the camps claimed to know nothing of what happened there to be deemed as nothing less than lies or willful ignorance

This impression was reinforced when the mayor of Gotha, the nearest town to Ohrdruf, wrote in his suicide note following his forced visit of the camp: “We did not know, but we knew.”

The difference was that Eisenhower was determined that the world should never forget what he saw. His Red Army counterparts were also quick to document what they found, but their leader Joseph Stalin was uninterested in the Holocaust as a reality. In the hierarchy of Nazi victims that Stalin created, no other group could surpass the suffering of the Soviet Union.

What I really think has happened here is that memory culture has produced two warring phenomena.

It produced a society that is paralyzed by guilt and discomfort. Germany doesn’t have emotional space and energy for any other historical responsibility other than the reality that it perpetrated the Holocaust.

at the same time, official memory culture created an unchecked arena for politicians to abuse that history. These politicians don’t reflect the views of society, but they don’t feel the need to, because they’ve created a culture in which society doesn’t have a say in this issue. And it is so sad that the Jewish people have such diverse cultural, ethnic and religious identities, but in Germany they have to subsume it into the identity of the Holocaust victim.

Sacks makes three points: that “new” atheists lack the gravitas of old ones, that religion is the only reliable source of morality, so that without faith the world would crumble, and that a plurality of faiths is a bulwark against religious “fundamentalists,” whom he sees as not religious at all.

it’s simply not true that we haven’t grappled with those “real issues.” It’s just that they don’t upset most of us as much as Sacks thinks they should

Holocaust? Really? And did the Christian ethic prevent that? Indeed, much of the Holocaust was the inevitable working-out of a Christian animus against Jews, a reflection of the eternal Jewish status as killers of Christ.

JERUSALEM — On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, a top Israeli general gave a speech saying he saw “revolting trends” in today’s Israel that he compared to Nazi-era Germany and Europe in the 1930s.

His speech comes amid revelations that an Israeli soldier shot and killed a wounded Palestinian attacker in the head,

The general’s speech may have sparked reflection in some sectors, but mostly it inspired criticism — and calls for his head.