Why is anti-Semitism a problem on college campuses? In part, it’s how the Holocaust came to be. Germans were gradually convinced that Jews were the root of evil, and Nazis then took it to a “logical” conclusion. If that happens here…

Andrew Roberts, member of the UK’s House of Lords, puts in perspective a key difference between the Nazis and Hamas — a view shaped by his late publisher Lord George Weidenfeld, who saved his immediate family from the Holocaust but lost others. “There are people who are worse anti-Semites than the Nazis,” Weidenfeld told Roberts.

He went on to explain why al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, although of course not as genocidal on the same physical scale as the Nazis, were qualitatively worse than the Nazis in their belief systems, impulses, and instincts.

George died in January 2016 but had he been alive on October 7 this year, he would have had the satisfaction of having his view, once considered controversial, very publicly justified. For whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so.

In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a notorious speech to 50 of his senior lieutenants in Posen. “I want to speak frankly to you about an extremely grave matter,” he said. “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. … I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. … It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.”

By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption. …

The sheer glee with which Hamas, by contrast, killed parents in front of their children and of children in front of their parents, was broadcast to the world. Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, but it wasn’t built into their actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been.

Roberts recounts other Holocaust history of the Germans’ cover-up effort, as well as differences in such things as how and whom they took hostages. There’s also the fact that the Nazis waited until the controlled most of Europe to begin killing Jews en masse.

Yet Hamas embarked on its genocidal attack when it only had southern Israel under its control for a few hours, and thus when it knew that the Israeli response would be instantaneous and devastating. Unlike the Nazis, who hoped that their murders could be hidden by the fog of war and complete territorial domination, Hamas grasped at their window of opportunity in the full knowledge that they would be punished for it, and soon. Whereas the Nazis assumed they would win the war and thus would never have to face retribution for their crimes, Hamas knew it was only a matter of hours away, yet still they launched their attack, caring nothing for the effect on ordinary Gazans. Their lust for torturing and murdering Jews was therefore even more powerful than the Nazis’, who waited until the front line had pushed forward before sending in the Einsatzkommando to wipe out Polish and Russian Jewish communities.

The Nazis didn’t advertise their crimes, knowing that they would not have popular support.

Here, too, the contrast with Hamas is obvious. The elimination of Jews is openly promised in the Hamas constitution, as it tacitly is in the “From the river to the sea” chant so beloved of today’s demonstrators in the West. Gazans voted for Hamas in 2005 in far greater proportions than Germans voted for the Nazis in 1932, and a good proportion of them celebrated wildly when Hamas paraded its hostages through the streets of Gaza on the afternoon of October 7.

Roberts concludes:

Hamas is—while taking into account the wild disparity in the sheer geographical and numerical extent of their crimes—qualitatively even more anti-Semitic than the Nazis were. One thing in which they are exactly equal, however, is that Nazi barbarism had to be utterly extirpated, and that goes for Hamas too.

Read the whole thing here.