Europe’s Far Right Paints Israel as the New Nazis
In the Polish Parliament, a lawmaker held up a desecrated Israeli flag on April 14, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, that had the Star of David replaced with a swastika. Konrad Berkowicz justified his action by claiming Israel is committing genocide in the Middle East. “Israel is the new Third Reich, and its flag should look exactly like this,” he said.
While Israel is fighting terrorists in the Middle East, a greater threat is rising again in Europe.
“It is hard to imagine a lower depth of contempt towards the Holocaust than this revolting act,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry posted on X.
These insane accusations are increasingly common among the political fringes and are not far off from what the mainstream teaches. Israel is repeatedly portrayed as a warmonger and a slayer of innocent children.
Berkowicz is a member of a Polish far-right opposition group, the Confederation Liberty and Independence party. In his speech to the Parliament, he said:
The attacks of Israel on the Middle East are already felt by Poles in fuel prices, but how do the children feel it—those who have already died several dozen times more than during the entire war in Ukraine.
The Jews are using a banned phosphorus bomb that absorbs oxygen from the air and causes them to die by suffocation. More smoke from this bomb gets into the lungs and burns them from the inside. They are suffocating and burning from the inside at the same time.
Israel is committing genocide before our eyes with particular cruelty.
In October 2023, Human Rights Watch, based on allegedly verified video footage and witness accounts, stated that the Israeli military used white phosphorus during military operations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
Israel denied the allegations, but that hasn’t stopped its enemies from spreading the accusation and going even further.
Berkowicz claims that Israel not only uses terrible weapons but also deliberately targets innocent children. To Europe, this places Israel in the company of history’s most evil perpetrators: the Nazis.
That’s exactly how the murder of Jews has been justified in the past.
The so-called blood libel conspiracy accused Jews of killing the innocent in their scheme to take over the world. This led to pogroms against Jews. The Telegraph compared this conspiracy theory with how the West blames Israel for “killing the innocent.” It wrote on Nov. 18, 2023:
Anti-Semitic tropes never go away, and since October 7 we’ve seen pretty much all of them in full swing—especially the blood libel. And it’s not just the baying mobs accusing Israel and Jews more generally of invading Gaza to indulge their bloodthirsty craving for the murder of innocents (Britain’s streets no longer expect the pretense of a distinction between Jews and Israel).
Rather, it is how the whole counteroffensive in Gaza is being reported, portrayed and responded to by everyone from the most esteemed media outlets (of which the Telegraph has been a noble exception) to the great and the good of international statesmanship.
Isolating Israel and the U.S.
Another example came on March 7 from a German far-right politician regarding Israel and the United States’ war against Iran: “After less than 10 days of military and political folly, the U.S. and Israel stand like hooligans before a world that has turned its back on them. … Israel has imposed a news blackout (presumably for good reason). Casualties are high, and the Iron Dome is virtually ineffective. Unrest is beginning to spread across the country. Access to shelters is now restricted to Jews only.”
I have non-Jewish friends who live in Israel, so I know the accusations are utterly false. However, his assessment that the world has turned its back on the U.S. and Israel has some truth to it, though that is more to the shame of the world than to Israel and the U.S.
Israel and the U.S. are fighting an absolutely murderous regime and its terrorist proxies. In January, the Iranian regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people. The regime even executes its own children. This regime glorifies murder and rape at home and abroad. Unless it is stopped, it will pursue nuclear weapons, wipe out the State of Israel, and continue its terrorist attacks on the West.
Where is the outrage about that?
Even the world’s highest religious office appears to side with Iran against Israel and the U.S. Regarding Pope Leo xiv’s recent feud with the U.S. president, Melanie Phillips wrote on April 13:
The pope’s refusal to support a war to end one of the world’s greatest evils has called to mind the disturbing example of Pope Pius xii during the Holocaust. In 1933, he signed the Reich Concordat, which secured for the German Catholic Church protection from the Nazis and effectively bought its silence over the extermination of the Jews. Arguably, Leo’s stance is yet more shocking, because even Pius didn’t say it was morally wrong to fight Hitler.
Will the Holocaust Happen Again?
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz posted on social media on April 14 that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demanded Israel refrain from the “annexation of the West Bank.” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich rebuked Merz, saying:
On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the German chancellor should bow his head and apologize a thousand times on behalf of Germany, rather than daring to preach morality to us on how to conduct ourselves against the Nazis of our generation—who murdered, raped, slaughtered and burned women, the elderly and children in the most horrific massacre perpetrated against the Jewish people since the terrible Holocaust. We will not accept instructions from hypocritical leaders in Europe, a continent that is once again losing its conscience and its ability to distinguish between good and evil.
Mr. Chancellor, the days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return. You will not force us into ghettos again, certainly not in our own land. Our return to the land of Israel—our biblical and historical homeland—is the answer to anyone who tried or tries to destroy us, and we do not apologize for it for a single moment.
Am Yisrael chai. [The people of Israel live.]
This is a most sobering and courageous reply.
But are those days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live truly over? Or will they return?
From the Arab world to Europe to America, the public is turning against Israel. Can a nation survive when the whole world is against it?
This is only possible if that nation has God on its side. The Bible reveals that there were indeed times when the Jewish people, one tribe of ancient Israel, did have God on their side. But it also reveals times when they did not and ended up in brutal captivity.
Beyond this history, the Bible reveals dozens of prophecies for our day that sound an alarming warning that the days of the Holocaust are coming back—and on a far larger scale.
Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in 2011 for our sister publication the Royal Vision:
The Bible is full of prophecies that apply directly to what we see happening in that explosive region. Those prophecies are lightning bolt warnings to all of us—and the Jews should be especially attentive to them. They came from God, who loves the Jews deeply and who wants to alert them to what is coming.
There are still many Jews alive today who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust in World War ii. Israel memorializes that history in its Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. Visiting that museum is about as moving as anything one can ever experience. It really brings that horrific history to life. Seeing what those poor people had to go through is so overwhelming, you feel you need to sit down once in a while—particularly when you know that the Bible warns us it is going to happen again.
The history of the Holocaust is only a sample of what is coming upon the Jews—many of them again—as well as upon America and Britain. You can practically hear the blood crying out from those victims as a warning to Israel today!
The more you look at current events, the more you realize just how close the repetition of that history really is!
God has a strong message for the Jews. It is a warning of love.
Read Chapter 6, “The Last Crusade,” in The Eternal Has Chosen Jerusalem, where Mr. Flurry explains these prophecies in detail.