“Epic Failure”: Epic Liar

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” — Martin Niemöller

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day 2026, our world is drowning, as decades before, in Jew-hatred and lies of epic proportions, such as these:

• “war of choice”
• “a total disaster”
• “what a colossal failure”
• “awful war”
• “epic failure”

Purportedly describing the Iran War according to Congressional Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, whose views are based upon his unsound expectations and false premises that:

• Jihadist Iran would evaporate or self-regulate before implementing its favorite slogan for 47 years, “Death to America”;
• America should wait until the threat of Iran and its exponential surrogates suddenly strikes our unprepared nation on our soil;
• America can recover readily from tens of thousands of well-planned neighborhood, metropolitan, inner city, campus, rural, and suburban jihadist attacks simultaneously inflicted upon “the People of the Book” who possess no self-protection emergency equipment, measures, infra-structures, training, and resources to counter and combat homeland surges of armed foreign, illegal alien, and homegrown terrorists;
• Delayed self-defense is better than proactive protection of Americans;
• Millions of Americans would not be wounded or killed in delayed self-defense against implacable terrorist enemy alliance attacks emanating from Iran and its proxies-in-hate against the West, best symbolized by America;
• There will be more American deaths by proactive overseas war than by delayed self-defense under terrorist attack on the Homeland;
• There will be more economic harm to America in proactive war overseas than in delayed self-defense under terrorist attack on the Homeland;
• There is no need to prepare the American public for inevitable war through thorough training and provisions to the population of self-defense equipment and procedures, as endemic in Israel;
• Vulnerable American populations of poor, disabled, young, and elderly will be able to withstand jihadist attacks on American soil inflicted by jihadists already in America whenever they are ordered by Iranian clerics into “global jihad.”

Each year, Yom HaShoah – Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day – commemorates the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As the last living witnesses to this history rapidly disappear, this day’s importance only increases: Last year there were some 220,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide; today there are about 196,600.

This year’s Yom HaShoah comes amid an unprecedented rise in antisemitism, as the memory of the Holocaust is under attack.

An existing and deeply distressing trend has increased over the past year: Prominent neo-Nazi and antisemitic influencers continue to visit former Nazi concentration camps and other memorials to Holocaust tragedy and remembrance to desecrate and mock them, sharing videos and selfies of this activity. Several of these memorial sites have reported vandalism, verbal abuse, intimidation, and disruptive behavior, from both far-right extremists and jihadi-linked individuals – to the point where guides, reception, and administrative staff at these sites have felt so threatened that emergency panic buttons are being installed.

Oliver von Wrochem, director of the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial near Hamburg and spokesman for the association of these memorials across Germany, underlined what he called a shocking state of affairs, noting, “Across Germany, graffiti, Hitler salutes and other attacks at concentration camp memorial sites have increased massively.”

Last summer, American neo-Nazi content creator “Hermes” – real name Pijus Zemaitis – embarked on a European trip, stopping at Auschwitz, the Anne Frank House, and the infamous Wewelsburg Castle used by Himmler’s SS, and sharing videos and photos of himself mocking Holocaust victims and celebrating the Nazi regime.

A few years earlier, in 2022, Jon Minadeo, the infamous neo-Nazi livestreamer and leader of the Goyim Defense League, and his sidekick Robert Wilson, aka Aryan Bacon, visited Auschwitz to unfurl antisemitic banners ridiculing the victims and Holocaust history. The footage of their activity was then shared extensively online, by both extremist and non-extremist accounts, to the amusement of many likeminded individuals – and to the horror of others.

Just last month, on March 19, a neo-Nazi user on X (formerly Twitter) shared two photos of herself giving a Roman salute at an unidentified Holocaust museum, writing: “Meanwhile, me at a holocaust museum.”

As noted, this threat is not only from neo-Nazis; Islamist and jihadi-linked individuals target these sites as well. Recently, a 20-year-old Syrian man was convicted in Germany for his stabbing spree at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He had carried out the attack on behalf of ISIS.

But even as these outrageous attacks take place on memorials and places of historical significance for the Holocaust, an even more disturbing global trend has emerged – namely, the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the promulgation of antisemitism in general and Holocaust denial specifically. This is only one of the issues covered in the research of the MEMRI-Lantos Archives on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Project – the largest archives in the world of antisemitic content from the past quarter century in the Middle East and beyond.

This past year, the project’s research, monitoring, and translations have been devoted to how AI is being used to generate, manipulate, and disseminate distortion, ridicule, and denial of the Holocaust and its victims and to glorifying its perpetrators. It is circulated at unprecedented scale and speed, for propaganda, recruitment, and radicalization – particularly among younger audiences who lack historical knowledge.

Just as it has worked to protect its Holocaust memorials and historical sites, Germany has emerged as a leader in the fight against AI-powered antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

As one of the earliest adopters of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Germany began supporting AI-based detection efforts, such as the Decoding Antisemitism project, in 2024. In May that year, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution underlined the growing threat of AI-generated antisemitic imagery.

For International Holocaust Remembrance Day this past January 27 – the day aimed at confronting denial and distortion and safeguarding historical truth – a coalition of German Holocaust memorials, documentation centers, and historical research institutions, including memorials at former Nazi concentration camps, released an open letter. The letter sounded the alarm that the very memory that these institutions seek to protect is being eroded in real time.

This AI-generated falsified Holocaust content, they wrote, “distorts history by trivializing and kitschification,” and is designed to dilute historical facts, switch the roles of victim and perpetrator, and spread revisionist narratives. Adding that this “undermines the credibility of memorial sites, archives, museums, and research institutions,” they went on to call for decisive action to label, restrict, and remove this content. The statement went virtually unnoticed outside of Germany – but it should be read and widely disseminated.

Germany’s State Minister for Culture and Media, Wolfram Weimer, framed the fight against this use of AI in unequivocally moral terms, saying that he supported the measures called for in the letter and adding: “This is a matter of respect for the millions of people who were killed and persecuted under the Nazi regime of terror.”

“WHAT ENDS WITH MURDER BEGINS WITH SILENCE … AND WITH LIES … EPIC LIES … AND FALSE PREMISES ….”

©2026 Beverly Newman, Ed. D. All rights reserved.