Victimhood Envy: How The Holocaust Became Not "Inclusive" Enough
I see over and over that victimhood is a way to have unearned power over others. If you can't earn it, hey, why not wallow your way into it?

Accordingly, Brendan O'Neill writes in the Telegraph about why campus radicals take issue with -- yes -- commemorating the Holocaust:

In an era when victimhood is the key currency of politics, when feeling damaged counts for more than feeling strong or heroic, when being part of a victimised minority is all the rage, many have started to look with green eyes at the greatest act of victimisation in history.

This is why so many groups now cynically exploit the language of the Holocaust to their own ends. Whether it's PETA grotesquely describing our chicken dinners as a "Holocaust on a plate" or Muslim community groups demanding that war crimes against Muslim peoples be recognised alongside the Holocaust, everyone wants a piece of the Holocaust action.

Worst of all, some radicals now use the Holocaust against Israel itself. They accuse the Jewish State of carrying out a new Holocaust against the Palestinians. Not content with trying to crib some of the moral authority of the Holocaust for themselves, they turn the Holocaust into a battering ram against Jews.

This perverse battle of victimhoods, this ugly oneupmanship among the "oppressed", is especially pronounced on campuses. There, with entirely straight faces, plummy white middle-class girls will tell you they're victims of misogyny, and privately educated gay students will claim to be part of an oppressed minority. Being a victim is all the rage, and proving you're more victimised than everyone else is the main game.

And this is where the "some kind of problem with Jews" comes into play. To the pseudo-oppressed identitarians who run student politics, Jews can't possibly have a hard time because they're mainly white and not poor, right?

...It's the grotesque end result of the cult of victimhood: the chipping away at the uniqueness of the Holocaust because foot-stomping radicals from the Home Counties think its super-unfair that Jews get to have such an act of victimisation and extermination all to themselves.

Here are the words of a woman, a friend of mine, Elyse Foltyn, whose father survived the Holocaust, and who is married to another child of survivors. This particular blog post of Elyse's is about a school assignment on family history done by her 12-year-old twins, Lily and Abby:

In a weakened voice, Lily mumbled, "My teacher asked me which adults cared for Papa Steve when he hid in the woods and what he ate?" Lily said. "I told her I didn't think there was an adult taking care of him and I didn't know what he ate. Did Papa Steve ever tell you what he ate?" she inquired. I was mortified. Could this teacher who we have only known to be sensitive and kind truly have been so detached? Didn't she recognize that the typical questions and rules of research could not be applied to the catastrophic lives Lily described?

As Lily explained it to me, her teacher was seeking complete details on an incomplete life. She was hoping to teach our 12 year old, who is only now learning of her family's inexplicable past, how to research and analyze. In most teacher/student scenarios, this would have been an honorable and valuable lesson. However, in this situation, it was both insignificant and too late to compile this research. My father passed without ever being able to bring himself to share these specifics with us. In fact, it was merely a dozen years before he died that he had an epiphany of sorts and broke his silence. Only then did he begin sharing stories of his life during the Holocaust. Like most survivors, he didn't want to "burden his children" with this unimaginable history and pain.

...Although his European accent was always heavy, his words were barely audible each time he recollected leaving the family home with his sister in anticipation of the Holocaust destroying their town. He said he felt a hole in his heart when his parents would not join them and forbade them from taking their baby brother, Ephraim (after whom I am named), with them. He learned years later that his parents and brother were shot into a mass grave by the Nazis. On the rare occasions we spoke of all these weighty topics, my father never had an interest in telling me how he foraged for food in the woods. And, I never had the heart to ask him.

You can see how these horrors Elyse's father survived are just like how it feels to be a "victim" today on campus in America -- like by being "microaggressed" with "Where are you from?" (meaning "what's your ancestry?") or by passing a chalked message on the ground supporting a candidate you're opposed to.