Claiming antisemitism is a serious problem in Ireland, Micheál Martin and Simon Harris cited an organisation accused of major factual distortions – and whose vice president, an ex-Israel Defense Forces (IDF) general, recently had to cancel a trip to South Africa for fear of being arrested for war crimes.
Martin and Harris quoted a survey – which Irish media reported on – conducted by the Claims Conference, which has been criticised for similar work in the Netherlands that was “flawed in every way”. Its president has said "further education" is needed to stop people comparing the IDF to the Nazis.
The Claims Conference survey in Ireland recorded an overwhelming majority (92 percent) for the statement, “It is important to continue teaching people about the Holocaust (Shoah), in part, so it doesn't happen again.” A similar majority agreed with the statement, “The Holocaust (Shoah) should be taught in schools.”
Harris, Martin and Irish media – including the Irish Times and RTÉ – however focused on other parts.
In a statement on National Holocaust Memorial Day, Simon Harris said the findings of the survey were “profoundly disturbing,” warning that diminishing the Holocaust “warps into outright denial”. Taoiseach Micheál Martin meanwhile said the survey was “sobering reading”.
A similar issue appears in the Irish poll released last week
A 2023 survey commissioned by the Claims Conference found that “almost a quarter of young Dutch people deny the Holocaust”.
Professor Casper Albers, statistician at the University of Groningen,challenged the findings and said the survey’s design failed to distinguish between uncertainty and antisemitic beliefs.
“I have a hard time with the suggestion that you would be a Holocaust denier if you do not know the historical figures very well. Yet that is what is happening here,” Albers told de Volkskrant. “Such an important subject deserves thorough research. And this report is flawed in every way.”
Albers criticised how different responses were grouped together in the survey’s headline findings. In the Dutch results, 6 percent of respondents said the Holocaust was a myth, while a further 17 percent said the number of Jews killed had been exaggerated. These separate responses were later combined and presented as evidence that “almost a quarter” of young people denied the Holocaust.
Albers said this didn’t truly reflect public attitudes. He was concerned that melding answers produced figures that sounded alarming but obscured what respondents truly thought. Not knowing an exact historical number, he said, is not the same as outright not believing something happened.
A similar issue appears in the Irish poll released last week.
The Irish survey reported that 9 percent of adults aged 18-29 believed the Holocaust is a “myth”. It also found that 50 percent of this age cohort “did not know” that six million Jews were murdered during the Nazi Holocaust.
Respondents who selected figures above or below the historically accepted Holocaust death toll were classified as lacking knowledge. Wrong answers were presented as evidence that "50 percent did not know" how many Jews were murdered.
But nine percent of respondents included in that 50 percent said 20 million had died – meaning they overestimated rather than denied the scale of the atrocity.
Yesterday the government announced an additional €100,000 to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation to support Holocaust education – funding that aligns with the Claims Conference's stated priorities.
Last year the organisation's president Gideon Tayler told the Times of Israel that increased Holocaust education across Europe and the US is needed, in part, to combat the perception that Israel’s actions in Gaza are similar to those of the Nazis.
“There has been a shift to what we call Holocaust distortion or even inversion,” he said. “This refers to people saying that what Israel is doing now in Gaza is like what the Nazis did, distorting the memory of what happened for young people who don’t really know the history anymore.”
Critics of Israeli policy, like Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were imprisoned in Auschwitz and participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, have drawn such parallels, as has author Gabor Maté, a Holocaust survivor.
The Claims Conference, whose directors include members of the American Zionist Movement, which is affiliated with the World Zionist Organisation, an Israeli state body that supports and funds illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, rejects the comparison.
It’s faced scrutiny in the past over its governance and oversight, including a major US criminal case involving internal fraud at senior levels, der Spiegel reported.
In August last year its vice president Doron Almog cancelled a trip to South Africa because of a risk he might’ve been arrested for war crimes.
In 2005 he narrowly avoided an arrest in Heathrow when “British police feared an armed confrontation”.
The Israeli embassy in Britain had tipped him off he was subject of an arrest warrant for war crimes. Rather than disembark the plane he waited on the tarmac for two hours before returning to Israel.
The Department of Taoiseach and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany declined to comment.
