The University of Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, has cancelled its academic program of a course titled “Auschwitz/Gaza. A testing ground for comparative literature”, organised by the Faculty of Philosophy, after protests from Jewish groups.
The iconography and main theme of the programme established a correspondence between Gaza, an area controlled by Hamas, a jihadist organisation that subjects its population to a regime of terror, and the Auschwitz extermination camp.
‘’They did not choose any other place or event, but precisely the location where more than a million people were murdered, with the intention of criminalising, dehumanising and questioning the legitimacy of Israel, looking to extend a similarity between the Jewish State and Nazi Germany, a behaviour defined as anti-Semitic in the IHRA Declaration officially adopted by Spain,’’ stated ACOM, a pro-Israel advocacy and reference group in Spain in the fight against anti-Semitism.
In a letter to Spanish Minister of Universities, Manuel Castells Oliván, Shimon Samuels, Director of the the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for International Relations, had called for the cancellation of the course, writing: “This very title and expected content is not an issue of ‘freedom of expression’, but a banalization of the Holocaust, which can incite to hatred and violence aganst Jews of today.”
The letter also viewed it as “an insult to Spanish republicans deported to the Nazi death camps. Our mentor, the late Simon Wiesenthal, met many in Mauthausen.”
ACOM welcomed that the University ‘’has rectified, eliminating from its academic offer a course designed only from the utmost clumsiness, fierce sectarianism, and a shameless sense of impunity, a true enormity that trivialises the Holocaust, even awarding academic credits for it.’’
‘’Unfortunately, it is another example of how in certain Spanish universities courses of anti-Israeli propaganda and agit prop are passed off as academic content,” the group said.