Ep. 79: Zero tolerance for empty words of Holocaust remembrance
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Hello, and welcome to Jonathan Tobin. I'm JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin. Thanks for joining me for another discussion on the most pressing issue. Please like, subscribe, and give us good reviews when you listen to the show. Now let's get started. In the 20 years since it was created by a vote in the UN General Assembly in 2005, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day has become a staple of the world community's calendar. It has even been embraced by the organized Jewish community.

which is always eager for acceptance from established institutions. It was established even though the Jewish world already had a Holocaust Day. Yom HaShoah observed in the spring Israel's memorial independence days. More than 15 months after October 7, 2023, it's time to reassess that decision. Why? Shouldn't we encourage more Holocaust commemoration and education programs? Doesn't the creation of a day say,

world for remembering the slaughter of six million event the recognition it deserves as well as making it less likely that the horror of the shoah will be repeated as it turns out the resounding answer is an emphatic no the leaders of the same

with indifference, if not support, for the mass murder and atrocities committed against Jews during the border infiltration and ensuing murderous assault on southern Israel by Hamas terrorists and other Palestinians on October 7th, 2023, will dutifully line up on January 27th to take part in these commemorations. They will say how horrible the Holocaust was. Some of them will use the familiar refrain of, never again.

In doing so, they will count themselves as the sort of responsible, compassionate, and high-minded people who deserve not only to control powerful institutions like the United Nations and its manifold agencies, but also to tell the rest of us how to think and live. This is another example of how much of the world likes dead Jews, but is utterly intolerant of dead ones, who are prepared to fight for

these ceremonies, there will be not a word said about the Nazis of our own day who wish to fulfill the goal of the genocide of the Jews. And by that, I don't mean the hateful, though small, isolated, and politically powerless neo-Nazis that dwell in the fever swamps of the far right in Western societies.

Instead, I'm referring to Hamas and other Islamist terror groups that have as their goal the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet and the genocide of the 7 million Jews who live there. Hamas's actions on October 7th were part of an attempt to realize that genocidal goal. But rather than standing alone, they are reinforced by a powerful, widely supported international anti-Zionist movement.

That movement is deeply integrated into the same institutions like the United Nations that used January 7th, the date of the liberation of the concentration camp in 1940, to conduct ceremonies about the Holocaust that make a mockery of victims and the fight against anti-Semitism. This is the same international movement that has spent the last 15 months drumming up hatred for Jews in Israel.

More than that, they have, with the assistance of a small minority of Jews who are estranged from any sense of Jewish faith, to false genocide in the Gaza Strip, indoctrinated in the false leftist doctrines of critical race theory and intersectionality. They have accused Israel of being a settler-colonialist and apartheid state. In their view, it logically follows that...

and Israelis are guilty of being white oppressors. Again, we are told by these supposedly enlightened intellectuals that every form of resistance, such as the barbaric orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and wanton destruction that took place on October 7th, is not only justifiable, but laudable.

Prior to the existential war for Israel's existence that began on that Black Shabbat, it might have been possible to make a coherent argument in favor of cooperating with and using the January 27th ceremonies as a way to promote awareness of global anti-Semitism. But these commemorations are not assisting in educating the world about where tolerance leads. Truthfully, it must never be.

acknowledged that their primary purpose is to provide cover to those who wish to make a distinction between the mass slaughter of Jews in the last century and those who are attempting it in the present one. The growing trend of universalization of the Holocaust has long since gotten out of hand. Scholars, self-styled human rights organizations, and those who are eager to make use of the history

of the Jewish people for their own purposes have seized on the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews as an all-purpose metaphor for what they deem to be bad behavior. Those who promote such unification claim to do so out of contempt. They desire to use the Holocaust as an example of how to combat hatred so as not to isolate it as a distinct event in history that can't be applied as a lesson to other countries.

In doing so, they deliberately misunderstand the nature of antisemitism. It is not garden-variety bigotry or unpleasantness directed at people who worship differently, but hatred, coupled with a political program employed to empower those who use. Examples of real genocide exist, such as the mass killings in California.

of 1970 by the communists, or the slaughter of the Tutsi tribe by Rwanda's Hutus, or even one now being perpetrated by Uyghur Muslims in China. But these tend to fall by the wayside in contemporary discussions on the subject. The Holocaust, however, is unique.

It was the culmination of 2,000 years of anti-Semitism, a virus of hatred that unfortunately did not die out when the Allies entered the death camps and then defeated the German Nazis and their collaborators. It lives on in groups like and all those who echo their genocidal goals on American college campuses with chants like from the and global contemporary anti-Semitism.

engage in slandering Jews and spreading lies about their actions and about Israel. They seek to delegitimize Jews that are similar to those of the Nazis who preached about a powerful Jewish cabal that engaged in conspiracies to undermine and harm non-Jews. That is why Israel is the object of such hatred and a worldwide movement that doesn't oppose its offenses as the worst on the planet, but also

uniquely evil entity. They also claim that Jews wrongly weaponize anti-Semitism and even the Holocaust to attract sympathy and whitewash their crimes. That is exactly the sort of tactics that Nazi ideologues use to justify their actions.

After October 7th, the attempt to make a distinction between the current war on Israel and the Jews and what happened during the Holocaust is not only outdated, but intellectually and morally bankrupt. Suffice it to say, whenever it is held, must take into account the fact that Israel is currently fighting an existential war to prevent another Holocaust. Any event that proposes

commemorate the slain six million men, women, and children and the fight against the Nazis without doing so is a f***. Like other forms of Holocaust education that universalize the memory of Nazi Germany's effort to wipe out the Jews, International Holocaust Remembrance Day may now be doing more harm than good. ...nations that has been anti-Semitism for decades. But we are now at the...agency...

have not only helped perpetuate the war against Israel, but allowed its employees to take part in the October 7th atrocities and its facilities to be used to imprison Israeli hostages. You cannot be neutral about Hamas and the war against Israel and the Jews. Anyone who tries to play that game should be exposed as an ally who sees genocide as one of their useful issues.

There should be zero tolerance for Holocaust commemorations that do not acknowledge that a genocide will continue in our own day, and that those who falsely accuse Israel of genocide to justify that war have no place at such ceremonies. Thanks for listening. Please remember to tune in every day for Jonathan Tobin Daily Edition and every week for Think Twice, my full-length JNSTV program.

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