Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked each year on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some Europeans marked the day in a curious manner.
London’s Sunday Times yesterday published the cartoon below, by Gerald Scarfe, depicting a bloodthirsty Benjamin Netanyahu atop Israel’s security fence.
Then there’s Silvio Berlusconi, who, at a Holocaust commemoration ceremony in Milan, praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for “having done good” and defended Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler. Mussolini passed laws barring Jews from a variety of professions, and Berlusconi acknowledged that the “racial laws, are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good.” Because Italy’s laws forbid the defense of dictatorships, Berlusconi later clarified that he of course condemns dictatorship. You know, because that’s what needed clarification.