“The Nationalist approach, favored by conservatives since Ze’ev Jabotinsky (of blessed memory), holds that Jews can only rely on each other (and a few Christian friends). It’s a gun in Jewish hands versus an open hand to humanity.
“After 5,000 years of Jewish history, and especially the last 87 years of world history, you’d think we would have learned.”
This is the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by troops of the Red Army. It’s also International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The enormity of the crime is staggering. At Auschwitz and its satellite camps, 1.1 million were murdered, almost one million of them Jews. Altogether, 6 million Jews were killed in the course of World War II — one out of every three Jews on earth.
The slaughter was systemized, mechanized, automated and relentless – from trains to gas chambers to crematoria.
It was based on the Nazis’ utopian fantasy — that evil Jews (all Jews, really) were the chief obstacle to human progress, and the road to paradise lay across the graves of G-d’s holy people.
Hitler believed that in killing the Jewish people, he was killing the G-d of mercy and morality – the G-d the Jews introduced to humanity.
The Third Reich may have died in the fires of Berlin in April/May 1945. Its cause lives on:
• In a recent poll, 1 in 20 Britons said they believe the Holocaust never happened, which (coincidentally) is the same as Britain’s Muslim population (5.2%).
• In America, 22% of Millennials say they never heard of, or aren’t sure they’ve heard of, the Holocaust. Is it so surprising? U.S. schools, K-through-12, are extended day care. Instead of spending on Holocaust memorials, we should buy textbooks covering the WW II-era.
• After the fall of Nazi Germany, the center of international anti-Semitism has shifted to the Arab Muslim world. “Mein Kampf” and the “Protocols of the Elders of the Elders of Zion” are still bestsellers in the Middle East.
• The torrent of Jew-hatred coming out of the so-called Palestinian Authority rivals Goebbels and Streicher. Practically every Palestinian who kills a Jew gets his own little monument in Ramallah or Gaza City.
• These are the creatures the international community expects Israel to cede strategic territory to for their terrorist state, so they can plan the annihilation of the rest of Israel.
• Thanks to Muslim immigration, it’s no longer safe for Jews wearing kippahs (skullcaps) to walk the streets of many European cities.
• Dwight Eisenhower ordered the troops he commanded to walk through the death camps they encountered. He wanted as much of it as possible to be observed and documented, because, he said, “The day will come when some son-of-a-bitch will say this never happened.” The sons of bitches are here. The day is now.
As Daniel Greenfield wrote in a 2014 article (“The Universalist Holocaust”) on his blog, there were two Jewish responses to the Holocaust – universalist and nationalist.
The liberal Universalist response holds that the safety and survival of the Jewish people lies in what it calls “teaching tolerance.” That all we have to do is change human nature, so no one hates, no one envies, no one lusts for spoils, and we can all join hands and sing “Everybody’s beautiful in his own way.”
The Nationalist approach, favored by conservatives since Ze’ev Jabotinsky (of blessed memory), holds that Jews can only rely on each other (and a few Christian friends). It’s a gun in Jewish hands versus an open hand to humanity.
After 5,000 years of Jewish history, and especially the last 87 years of world history, you’d think we would have learned.
