RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/a-hollow-holocaust-remembrance-day/?_se=

Those who support a ceasefire to allow a genocidal antisemitic movement like Hamas to commit more slaughters of Jews shouldn’t pretend to mourn the Six Million.

It’s an important date on the international community’s calendar. Every year, the United Nations and many other institutions and organizations hold ceremonies on Jan. 27 commemorating the Holocaust. It’s long been clear that much of the world did so without actually thinking seriously about what allowed the Nazis’ campaign of extermination of European Jewry to succeed as well as it did. Nor do most of those going through the motions of mourning the systematic murder of 6 million Jews or making empty promises about “never again” think much about how a supposedly civilized people like the Germans, with the help of various collaborators from other nations, convinced themselves that it was not only acceptable to kill that many people but justified to do so.

But this year, perhaps they shouldn’t bother to pretend to care about the subject. After the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7 and, even more importantly, the reaction of much of the civilized world to what happened, the meaninglessness of most of what passes for the commemoration of the Shoah by the international community and the West has become painfully obvious.

It goes beyond hypocrisy

To describe those who are indifferent to the mass slaughter of Jews today but still prepared to mouth words of indignation about those killed by the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s as merely hypocritical is insufficient.

The willingness of the world, including many of the educated elites in the West to dismiss the importance of the crimes perpetrated in southern Israel three months ago, to be effectively neutral about the murders, rapes, torture and kidnapping committed by Hamas and the Palestinians—or actually to take the side of the murderers, rapists, torturers and kidnappers—isn’t just shocking. It’s a seminal moment in modern history that not only illustrates the moral bankruptcy of a significant segment of contemporary opinion but also provides an explanation for how the Holocaust happened. As hard as it may be for us to accept, this demonstrates that Holocaust commemorations or even education programs about the destruction of European Jewry in the mid-20th century either don’t make people less likely to support more Holocausts; even worse, all this might be counterproductive.

The surge in antisemitism throughout the West in the aftermath of Oct. 7—with mobs marching in the streets of major cities and on college campuses proclaiming their support for the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet (“from the river to the sea”) and for terrorism against Jews in Israel and everywhere else (“globalize the intifada”)—and the support such positions have received in much of the corporate media was surprising to those Jews who thought such sentiments were only held by marginal extremists. Nor can they be explained as an understandable reaction to a supposedly disproportionate Israeli response to terrorism or as sympathy for Palestinians caught up in a war that Hamas started.