There is system behind the West’s denying Israel’s holocaust in Palestine
Esad Širbegović is a writer and analyst based in Zurich, Switzerland. He is also a member of the International Expert Team at the Institute for Research of Genocide Canada. In 2022, he served as the Director of the International Expert Team for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, focusing on the Srebrenica genocide denial case at the University of Vienna. Esad’s work is deeply rooted in his personal experiences and centres on the critical issues of Islamophobia and genocide
In an April 15 2025 interview broadcast on Austrian public television ORF, Nobel Prize-winning author and islamophobic genocide denier Peter Handke described the Srebrenica genocide not as genocide but as Brudermord—a biblical term meaning “fratricide.” “Genocide is a legal term,” he insisted, “but fratricide is a biblical term, and that’s it. That’s the tragedy, the scandalous.” His choice of language is neither poetic license nor rhetorical eccentricity. It is a calculated move to reframe atrocity within a theological framework that not only denies legal responsibility but also builds a hierarchy of moral crimes—one that positions so-called “fratricide” as spiritually worse than genocide.
The silence of the austrian TV show host during Handke’s denial of the genocide was deafening. This silence was not neutral – it was a political choice. It was a sign of conscious complicity not only in the denial of the genocide against Bosniaks, but also of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is genocide, but according to Handke, “fratricidal” is worse than genocide. In this way, ORF actively participated in the discursive rehabilitation of Europe’s criminal past – the denial not only of the Obmana- Bosnian Genocide, but also of the Holocaust.
This is no innocent play with words. Handke’s Brudermord framework is an ideological architecture—a trap designed to rehabilitate white Christian Europe’s legacy of genocidal violence while ensnaring Jews and Muslims alike in a moral dilemma not of their making. In his formulation, genocide becomes a “lesser” crime, a mere political excess, while Brudermord—the killing of one’s “brother”—is elevated to divine scandal. But who defines the brotherhood?
Denying Genocide, Denying People
Peter Handke continues to champion Serb ethno-nationalist narratives that deny the very existence of Bosniaks as a people, despite widespread international condemnation for his denial of the Obmana-Bosnian Genocide.
For him, even the genocide at Srebrenica is not a crime against a Bosniak nation—it is a tragic misunderstanding between kin. This narrative draws directly from Serb nationalist mythology in which Bosniaks, as Slavic Muslims, are cast as racial traitors and Ottoman remnants—a foreign contamination of an imagined pure Serb identity. In Handke’s narrative, Bosniaks are denied the very status of a people — erased from history and identity alike.
In this framework, their mass murder is not an act of extermination, but a painful, even regrettable, civil war.
Handke has long refused to describe Srebrenica as genocide, choosing instead euphemisms like “ugliness” and “tragedy.” He does not hold war criminals like Ratko Mladić or Radovan Karadžić responsible. Rather, he portrays them as victims of fate—“tragic protagonists” swept along by the tides of imperial decline and modern malaise. In doing so, he erases both legal culpability and moral agency, embedding atrocity into the story of European destiny.
This perverse romanticization finds echoes in European fascist fantasies. In Handke’s writings, the violence of the 1990s is not an aberration—it is a return to ancestral order, a reassertion of ethnic “truth” through blood and soil. Genocide, in this vision, is not a crime.
Genocidal rape camp Vilina Vlas and the Contempt for Victims
Handke’s contempt for victims of genocide has long been documented.
In 1998, long after the world had learned of the atrocities committed in Višegrad—where entire families were locked in houses and burned alive—he chose to stay at Vilina Vlas. Once a site of genocidal violence, this former rape camp had witnessed the systematic torture, rape, and murder of over 200 Bosniak women and girls.
Some were thrown off balconies. Others took their own lives. Today, the spa is grotesquely advertised as a wellness retreat on Google Maps, erasing its past even as monuments to war criminals rise nearby.
It was no accident that Handke stayed there. In his travelogues, he questioned the veracity of these atrocities, aligning himself with the revisionist project of Serbian ultranationalism. While international forensic teams were exhuming mass graves, Handke was raising a glass with the inner circle of Radovan Karadžić. His visits to Višegrad and Srebrenica were not acts of literary witnessing—they were pilgrimages of allegiance.
The Mothers of Srebrenica—a association of women who lost sons, husbands, and brothers in the genocide—have condemned Handke’s actions and his Nobel Prize as an insult to justice. Their pleas have been met not with remorse but with arrogant dismissal. Handke has never once engaged them, never acknowledged their loss, and never apologized.
He even said: “Especially these so-called mothers of Srebrenica. I don’t believe a word they say, I don’t believe their grief.”
In their eyes—and in the eyes of survivors across Bosnia—he is not a misunderstood writer. He is an accomplice.
Remove Kebab, Remove Memory
One of the most chilling aspects of Handke’s far-right entanglements is his relationship with Novislav Đajić—convicted in Germany for participating in the massacre of Bosniak civilians and later turned into an internet meme by white supremacists under the banner Remove Kebab and referred to as the Dat Face Soldier.
Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the Australian man responsible for the Christchurch mosque attacks, had the phrase “Remove Kebab” written on one of his guns. In his manifesto The Great Replacement, which takes its name from a far-right conspiracy theory by French writer Renaud Camus, he called himself a “kebab removalist,” mocking and glorifying violence. Just minutes before the attack, he livestreamed himself in his car while playing the song associated with the same hateful message.
Not only did Handke reportedly serve as Đajić’s groomsman at his wedding, but he also made him a protagonist in his 1999 play Die Fahrt im Einbaum. There, the war in Yugoslavia is depicted not as a campaign of genocide, but as an international conspiracy against Serbs.
From Srebrenica to Gaza: A Theology of Denial
Handke’s framework is poised to be expanded when the time is right — toward Palestine. In this Brudermord logic, the genocide currently unfolding in Gaza is not genocide at all, but a tragic “fratricide” between Semitic peoples. Just as Handke stripped Bosniaks of their national identity, Palestinians will be denied the status of a distinct people by framing them as “brothers” of Jews. This move collapses political oppression into a biblical parable, dissolving responsibility into divine tragedy.
But this rhetorical sleight of hand directly contradicts international law. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention, genocide is a core crime—alongside crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Nothing—not theological metaphor, not poetic license—stands above it. It is considered the “crime of crimes” precisely because it aims to destroy entire peoples. Handke’s attempt to elevate Brudermord as a higher spiritual offense is not only morally perverse but legally incoherent. There is no category in international law that supersedes genocide. His framing is a deliberate move to obscure legal culpability through mystification.
This rebranding serves a double purpose: it shields Israel from present-day legal accountability, while setting up a future moral inversion. Because if Brudermord is worse than genocide, and Jews are said to have committed it—while Austrians and Germans merely committed “ordinary” genocide—then the Nazi descendents(Nunzis) can claim spiritual and moral superiority. The grandchildren of the perpetrators recast themselves as the true guardians of divine order.
And it doesn’t stop there. In this twisted genealogy, Muslims become the real culprits of the Holocaust itself. The groundwork has already been laid by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who infamously claimed that the Palestinian Grand Mufti gave Hitler idea to exterminate Jews.This grotesque historical revisionism provides the perfect alibi: Austrians and Germans no longer bear full responsibility for the Shoah—they were, in this logic, manipulated by Muslims. The Brudermord narrative thus functions as a theological trap—one that flips the moral ledger, turning perpetrators into victims, and Muslims into the true heirs of guilt.
Austria’s Complicity: Denial as Continuation
The Austrian state has long demonstrated its inability—or unwillingness—to reckon with the meaning of genocide. Though it passed a resolution acknowledging the Srebrenica genocide, it also celebrated Handke — President Alexander Van der Bellen hailed him as a hero and role model. This signaled something more insidious: a state-sponsored endorsement of genocide denial masquerading as literary courage.
On April 15, 2025, ORF once again gave Handke a platform—this time to proclaim his theological genocide denial on national television. By doing so, Austria’s public broadcaster legitimized not just denial, but a new strategy of erasure—one rooted not in facts, but in scripture. This is not merely a failure of historical memory. It is an act of complicity in transforming Austria into a theocracy.
Austria’s own laws forbid the trivialization of the Holocaust under the Verbotsgesetz and criminal code. British historian David Irving was famously imprisoned under these laws. The Austrian government even cites examples of Holocaust trivialization involving vaccines and Hitler memes as gross offenses. Yet Peter Handke faces no consequences for publicly claiming that Brudermord is a higher crime than genocide—a move that implicitly trivializes the Holocaust by theological comparison.
Why the double standard?
Because the narrative serves a function. It allows white European Christian societies to extricate themselves from the moral stain of genocide by reinventing themselves as custodians of sacred brotherhood. It offers a myth in which their crimes are reclassified as historical misfortunes, while those they once persecuted—Jews and now Muslims—are cast as tragic violators of a biblical taboo.
Denial Is the First Stage of the Next Genocide
Genocide denial is never just about the past. It is the precondition for future violence.
Peter Handke embodies the values of white Europe—values steeped in genocide. Why else would he be awarded the Nobel Prize, if not for his explicit and literary glorification of violence against Muslims in Europe?
Handke’s theology of Brudermord is not just wrong. It is dangerous. It creates a moral framework in which the worst crime imaginable is no longer genocide, but some higher biblical transgression—one that Untermenschen can be accused of, and that Europeans, by their christian virtue, are incapable of. In Holocaust they did not kill their brothers! This is the divine law supremacy trap. It is a slow-motion inversion of memory, morality, and law.
Divine law supremacy is often weaponized to justify acts of terror against minorities and religious communities. Handke now turns this logic toward a form of supreme genocide denial—supreme in the sense that it simultaneously denies the genocides of Srebrenica and the Holocaust, along with all other genocides, by reducing their status beneath that of the so-called “fratricide” (Brudermord), thus stripping them of their status of being supreme — crimes beyond which none are more grave.
And in this inversion, truth dies not with a bang, but with a beatific whisper: it wasn’t genocide—it was just a tragedy among brothers.
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