On April 15, the Nobel Austrian winner Peter Handke was supposed to appear on the national broadcaster of Austria Orf to talk about his new writings. Instead, he refused once again that the genocide of Srebrenica occurred, calling the BruDermord – biblical fratricidal and fragrant as a spiritual tragedy rather than a crime against humanity.
Orf resisted her decision to interview Handke when she faced criticism. He said it had done nothing wrong since the interviewer recognized the genocide in a question.
The fact that a European broadcaster would choose the denial of the platform genocide at that time is not surprising.
Europe is faced with a crisis not only of memory but of dangerous continuity. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica via Gaza, the denial of state violence against marginalized groups seeks to erase past atrocities, to normalize those current and to open the way for future.
Fratricidal as “the worst crime”
The Bosnian genocide was the first genocide broadcast on television. In 1995, painful images of Srebrenica filled salons worldwide, exposing the failure of international protection. Despite a long process of continuing war crimes through the international criminal court for the former Yugoslavia and judicial decisions involving the complicity of European peacekeepers in massacres, the refusal of the Bosnian genocide continues to be well tolerated in Europe.
While Handke is by far not the only leading public personality who is committed to it, his rhetoric clearly indicates how this crime has become armament to minimize German and Austrian guilt for the Holocaust.
Handke portrays Bosnian genocide as a tragic civil war between “brothers” – Brudermord. He rompes war criminals as victims and incorporates the denial of the genocide in a fascist story of redemption by ethnic violence.
According to him, fratricide is “much worse” than the genocide-that is to say those who kill their “brothers” must be considered as worse criminals that the Nazis who killed “the other”. By supervising atrocities in this way, Handke effectively minimizes the responsibility of the Germans and the Austrians for the Holocaust.
In this twisted story, the descendants of the Nazis can claim moral superiority, insisting that they did not commit the “worse crime of all” – Brudermord. The frightening involvement is that the Jews have never really been “brothers” for Europeans like Handke.
Serbian nationalists can see Handke as an ally in the denial of genocide, but he does not defend them – he uses them. Through them, white Europe cleanses its hands with its bloody crimes – from Auschwitz to Algeria, from Congo to Rwanda. Handke’s theological language is an alchemy of European consciousness, changing guilt on Muslims, Jews and the “savages of the Balkans”.
Anti -Semitism transplantation
Handke’s logic is parallel and strengthens the wider campaign to change the blame for anti -Semitism – and even the Holocaust – on Arabs and Muslims. In Germany, this trend was fully adopted by the State and various public institutions which – against all evidence – began to affirm that the country’s immigrant Muslim community is responsible for the increase in anti -Semitic feeling.
In 2024, the German Parliament, the Bundestag, adopted a resolution indicating that “the alarming extent of anti-Semitism” is “motivated by immigration from North African countries and the Middle East”.
The German media continue to make a “Muslim Nazi past”, with an article affirming: “Unlike Germany, the Middle East has never accepted its Nazi past.” Meanwhile, the NGOs funded by the State marked the Palestinian Nazi symbol and echoed the discredited Israeli complaint that the great mufti of Palestine “inspired” the final solution.
The political establishment of Germany now builds a revisionist moral alibi: one in which the Nazis are reinvented as reluctant and perpetrators of remorse, while the Palestinians and their Muslim and Arab allies are diffused as the bad than the Nazis themselves.
For many years, it was a marginal idea adopted by far -right parties such as the alternative for Germany (AFD). But now, AFD’s basic ideas, not only on the Nazi past of Germany, but also on immigration and Islam, have been largely adopted by the political center.
This change reflects a long -standing strategy for moving guilt. Historian Ernst Nolte, celebrated by the Konrad Adenauer Conservative Foundation with a major prize in 2000, argued that the Holocaust was a reaction to Soviet “barbarism”, putting Nazi crimes by assimilating Auschwitz to the goulag.
Nolte argued that Hitler had “rational” reasons to target the Jews and rejected the “collective guilt” attributed to Germany since 1945. Today, the AFD leader Alice Weidel echoes this position, rejecting the culture of the memory of Germany as a “cult of guilt”.
Where Nolte blamed the Soviets, today’s political establishment blames Muslims. The objective is the same: to erase German responsibility in history.
From denial to activation
The denial of the genocide is not a passive act of forgetting but an active and harmful process which perpetuates violence. The scientist of the Gregory Stanton genocide recognizes denial as the final stadium of the genocide, the one who is also a critical sign that the next one arrives.
For the survivors and their descendants, the deepening denials the trauma by invalidating suffering, distorting the truth and stripping the victims of dignity, memory and justice. These injuries extend beyond individuals, affecting entire communities through generations.
Meanwhile, the denial of genocide shields of the authors, delays repairs and blocks reconciliation, deepening social divisions. He also undermines international managers of law and human rights, reporting that even crimes against humanity can be ignored.
The denial of the genocide thus prepares the land directly so that the next genocide takes place and is accepted. We see this clearly in the way Europeans react to the genocide in Gaza, navigating that this happens at all, despite the repeated statements of the United Nations experts and the scholarships of the genocide, and continuing to provide Israel with arms and diplomatic coverage.
The Playbook developed in Bosnia is now applied to Gaza. He follows a familiar scheme: blame the “two parts”, portray the victims as attackers and attribute responsibility to a few individuals – thus hiding systematic violence. This plan is perhaps the most clearly echoed in the assertion that it is only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his two far-right ministers who are responsible for the “violence” which occurs in Gaza, thus separating the policy of the structure and escaping a more in-depth responsibility.
In the story denying the Bosnian genocide, responsibility is also reduced to a few “bad apples” in the apparatus of the Serbian state – as if the genocide was a spontaneous aberration rather than a meticulously planned crime and executed by the state requiring general coordination and intention.
Prepare for a future genocide in Europe
Europe is confronted with a deep crisis while far -right nationalism increases and middle class difficulties disappear in the middle of increasing social and economic precariousness. In many Western countries, the middle class is shrinking while what law calls for the “excess population” – composed in a disproportionate manner of Muslims – is increasingly marginalized and scapegoat.
In a period like this, the overhaul of a genocide passed against an altered population as a misunderstanding contributes to the creation of the environment for the next genocide to come. And there are already clear indications that the segments of the political class push to eliminate this “surplus population” in various forms.
The Nazi euphemism “Umsiedlung Nach Osten” (reinstallation to the east) was a grotesque excuse to expel the Jews to gas chambers. Today, European actors like the activist of the Austrian far right Martin Sellner openly defend “remigration”, a sinister echo of this fatal logic aimed at uprooting the Muslim communities.
European political elites may not yet have adopted this term, but they are busy putting various policies into practice which have the same ultimate objective – limit or reduce the Muslim presence in Europe. They built a legal regime for exclusion in the EU 2024 migration pact, plans to offshore asylum seekers to Albania or other countries, and a large injection of liquidity in Frontex, the accused EU border agency – among others – illegal overhaul.
These are not neutral measures but ideological tools of racialized elimination, masked in a liberal rhetoric. And they will only do with more violence over time.
It is not alarmism. It is a model. The erosion of rights always begins with those considered to be “the other”.
If the denial of the genocide is not urgently treated, if the Gaza genocide is not recognized and immediate measures taken to stop it, Europe risks the loop. With the expansion of the denial of genocide and the desire to give up responsibility for the growth of the holocaust, the terrain is preparing for the repetition of these horrible atrocities.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
