A Jewish Prime Minister spoke at Auschwitz:
“We will always remember what the Nazi Amalek did to us, and we won’t forget to be prepared for the new Amalek, who is making an appearance on the stage of history and once again threatening to destroy the Jews,” Netanyahu said in a possible reference to Iran.
A Jewish President spoke at the Bundestag:
The German parliament heard a translation of the speech, which was carried out in Hebrew. Peres said the Kadish prayer in honor of the Holocaust victims, which include his grandparents, who were burned alive in their town’s synagogue.
An Arab Israeli Member of the Knesset understood what a real genocide looks like:
“I knew exactly where I was going,” He said and added, “But being here, faced with the embodiment of human evil on the one hand, and the unperceivable misery of the victims on the other hand, things take on a different meaning. Everything is mixed into a human catastrophe.”
The United Nations chose today as the day to reject the Jewish origins of the eastern half of Jerusalem:
Mansour also accused Israel of attempting to alter the character of east Jerusalem, and said the “annexation of east Jerusalem” had been carried out in violation of Security Council resolutions.
And of course, the anti-Semites of the world didn’t stop just because today is the international day to remember the murder of six million Jews while on course to try to eliminate entirely Judaism from the world. A cemetery descration in France. Jews are leaving a Swedish city after dozens of anti-Semitic attacks.
To them, and to all the Jew-haters of the world, I say this: Here we are, and here we remain. You tried to kill us. You failed.
Let’s live.
Of course, the Arab response to the Holocaust usually is: 1. It never happened; and 2. Hitler should’ve finished the job.
Dan Simmons, the science fiction writer, was asked to contribute to an anthology about the year 3000. He wondered what commonality would exist between the years 2000 and 3000. After all, a visitor from the year 1000 would find modern life almost completely incomprehensible. Then it came to him: The one certain continuity between 2000 and 3000 is that in the latter year someone somewhere would be trying to kill the Jews.
However, the unspoken assumption, to which I subscribe, is that there would be Jews to try to kill. I sometimes take comfort from the realization that in five hundred years the only people who will remember Yasser Arafat, for example, will be Jews, because he will be another on a long, long list, those who “in every generation” tried to kill us.