The ultimate hate crime

Police in Poland have reported that the infamous sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" that stood over the entrance to the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, was stolen this week.

 

"Work will make you free" was posted at the entrance to many of the Nazi death camps in a perverse campaign to make the newly arrived murder victims believe that they were not entering extermination facilities, but that they were "ONLY" being made into slave labor.

 

However, the Auschwitz sign, even in this gallery of infamy, was the most infamous.

Auschwitz of course was the murder capital of the Nazi Empire, where at least 1 million Jews met their deaths and where countless Polish, Russian, and Czech prisoners of war were also exterminated, along with the Gypsies, Homosexuals, mentally and physically ill, and other 'undesirables' of the Nazi's.

 

Officials at the memorial quickly replaced the original sign with a copy that was made several years ago when the original was having restoration work done.

Many of the facilities in the camp are in dire condition – the barracks were not built to last 60 years, and there is significant funding shortage. The German government has pledged approximately $30 million dollars, roughly half of what is needed, to rehabilitate the facility, which receives 1,000,000 or more visitors a year.

The alarming thing about this act, so brazen, so vicious, is the reflection of what has been an alarming increase in anti-Semitism throughout the world.

Agencies that track hate crimes have all noted this. In fact, just this week, the Canadian foreign minister, in a speech regarding anti Semitism in Jerusalem, discussed the rising number of incidents in his native land. Worse, during his time in Israel, swastikas were painted on several synagogues in Toronto, home to a large Canadian Jewish population.

As I have written before, the history of the world, since biblical times, has followed a frighteningly similar pattern.

Roughly, it goes as follows. Some cataclysmic murderous event: e.g. the Inquisition; the Holocaust; the pogroms; the Crusades, etc, followed by a period of apology and guilt on the part of the offenders, than acceptance of Jews and assimilation by Jews back into the general society. This is then followed by increasing tides of anti-Semitism, usually starting with the same type of stereotypes and finally after about a century, the next "Holocaust".

 

Depending on what year you want to trace things from in Europe, it's been between 70 and 80 years since the real escalation with the publication of the Nazi 25 points in 1920; election of Hitler in 1933, the Nuremburg Laws of 1935; or even Kristalnacht of 1938.

It is thus no surprise, based on 3000 years of history, that we are entering the descending period of this cycle once again.

Except that now, things are accelerated and more sophisticated. And "Israel" has, in many instances, replaced "Jew" as the word used.