Hey, Hamas marchers: This is how the Holocaust started.

The thousands of benighted college students, professors and assorted tub thumpers are accusing Israel of being responsible for the war that Hamas started would have been right at home in the 1930s Germany.

They betray a a chilling ignorance of the Holocaust, in which two-thirds of European Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

Or, maybe they’ve never heard of the Holocaust. Or they’ve heard of it, but they just don’t give a damn.

Hamas’ slaughter of innocent Jews this month is not unlike the Jew-blaming in Germany that step-by-step eventually led to the unspeakable evils of the concentration camps.

Hitler’s and Nazis’ rise to power started out as a blame game. Germans, after suffering defeat in World War I, believed they were being victimized by the victorious Allies. In fact, the Allies had extracted excessive and crippling reparations from defeated Germany. Having endured a Great Inflation and a Great Recession, Germans were looking for a scape goat. They found it in anti-Semitism, opening the door for Hitler’s rise to power by blaming Jews for all of it.

From there, German Jews were punished as a group for…being Jews. Discriminatory laws targeted them. They’re were the victimizers, don’t you know, who caused Germany to lose the war, leading to devastating economic hardship. They were, for example, forced out of the school system. Shades of how today’s Jewish students now feel unsafe on college campuses. Wide-open violence against Jews began in 1938 with Kristallnacht. For the terror-filled night, read “Kristallnacht, 85 years ago, marks the point Hitler moved from an emotional antisemitism to a systematic antisemitism of laws and government violence.”

The burning of the Wiesbaden Synagogue during Kristallnacht.

Like then, the level of Jew-blaming now is openly and increasingly practiced. Even praised.

The idea of siding with “victims,” whether or not they truly are, is today’s political touchstone. The theme of anti-Israel protests are just that. And the danger is that they will become something more than “peaceful.” In Russia, videos have appeared showing rioters storming a flight from Israel to try to attack Jewish travelers from Tel Aviv. Nine protestors were arrested for assaulting police officers at Cambridge. “Over 1,400 students and staff demand Cambridge ‘sever financial ties’ with Israel.” Cornell student arrested for threatening to kill Jews. More violence at Tulane. Pro-Palestine protester calls for Jews to be 'wiped out' as Australian protests turn ugly.

---

An important read. Be sure to watch the videos:

The Pro-Hamas Left Is Warming Up For Real Violence

---

For Israel, the Hamas massacre was the worst against Jews since the Holocaust. Civilian hostages taken, including children. Families murdered wholesale. Children burned alive in front of parents. Parents executed in front of children. Beheadings.

Whatever is your perspective on the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the present war, these horrors first and foremost require condemnation.

After the Holocaust, a question repeated over and over again has been “how could this madness happen?” Today, look no further than the university classrooms where students are getting one side of the complex Israeli-Palestinian history. This kind of corruption of history is not hard to imagine considering how America’s racial history has been corrupted by the “1619 Project.” In that, “race” supposedly explains everything that has happened in America.

Exhibit A is the Harvard student groups that issued a statement said, "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence."

I strongly recommend you watch the below presentation by Peter Hayes, emeritus professor of Holocaust studies at Northwestern University. He goes into detail, providing valuable insights and new information (for me) for how the Holocaust happened. (Start about 4:50.) A lot of it will sound familiar

He explained how the Holocaust started with a public perception about a conflict between us and them. “They [Jews] are malevolent and they are out to harm us,” was the excuse.

Hayes said the Jew-bashing became an “echo chamber” where “one could not challenge ideas without fear of punishment.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That was even though 55 percent of Germans did not vote for Hitler.

Hayes told how in 1939 students in Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism were asked to list the most significant events of 1938. “The attack on the Jews made almost no impression,” he said. Not the destruction is synagogues. Not Kristallnacht. Even though these atrocities were on the front page over every newspaper

If you’re not alarmed by pictures world-wide of Jew-blaming protests, camouflaged by a “free-Palestine” costume, count yourself among the German Jews who didn’t see what was coming for them.

Dennis Byrne is a retired journalist and author who variously was an op-ed columnist, editorial board member, assistant financial editor, science and technology reporter, special projects writer and urban affairs and transportation reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Daily News. You can reach him at dennis@dennisbyrne.net.