Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day has begun and I find myself searching for the proper way to express my thoughts about the day.
It is of critical importance, this day. It is a time to reflect upon the horrors of the past so that we do not forget that they can happen again. One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we have ample examples from past and present times of the barbarism that man can exhibit towards other men.
There are a number of issues that surround this day that concern me. As more time passes and more survivors die it becomes easier for the world to forget and for the deniers to try to make their case.
I have often wondered how the deniers can claim that six million did not die and that it was a smaller number of only a few hundred thousand. Either number is incredibly hard to digest, to fathom, to understand. Is there any less horror in saying that only 100,000 lives were intentionally snuffed out.
The answer is no. But it would be wrong to allow the horror of those days to be diminished and wrong to those who perished and those who survived. So it is critical that we confront those who make these claims and show that they are false.
While I was trying to determine what I wanted to include in this post I reviewed what I had done in the past and noticed that I had mentioned Ahmadinejad several times. I don’t mean that in the context of having mentioned him several times in a post, but that I did so in more than one year.
Ahmadinejad was/is a constant in these posts, a Holocaust denier and antisemite who has called for the destruction of Israel. History has taught us that when someone in a position of power makes these sorts of outlandish threats you need to pay attention.
You don’t make label it as being flowery political rhetoric or make any sort of excuses for it. It would be dangerous and foolhardy to ignore these remarks or take them as anything less than a declaration of his intentions.
There are too many examples of what happens when people remain silent. Africa burns and the world ignores its screams. Darfur now, Rwanda earlier.
If we are to take the lesson of never again seriously we need to apply it today and tomorrow. The world has a very short memory of just how brutal we can be to each other.
Watch and be dismayed. May we never see such things again.
Crossposted on Random Thoughts- Do They Have Meaning?
“May we never see such things again”
Amen.