*Editor’s Note: This article was originally published regarding Yom HaShoah in 2019 but remains acutely relevant.
I approve of setting aside a day for remembering the Holocaust. Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to ensure that “Never Again” be forever true.
Yet, this year I did not attend a Yom HaShoah memorial. Superficially, I didn’t do so because my brother came in for a rare visit from out of town on that day. There was a deeper reason, though, for my hesitancy to join this annual display of sympathy for dead Jews.
To put the matter bluntly, too many people who attend annual Yom HaShoah commemorations aid and abet those who claim that Arabs are the new Jews; that Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto; and that Jews are the new Nazis.
(Of course, if Jews were Nazis, Israel long ago would have done to the Gaza Strip what the Nazis did to the Warsaw Ghetto: raze it to the ground and kill everyone in it. Want to know who the real modern-day Nazis are? Ask the Kurds. More than 200,000 of them were massacred by Arabs in the Anfal Campaign in the 1980s. And who do you think has been committing genocide for decades in Darfur? Hint: It isn’t Jews.)
Among the folks attending Yom HaShoah services are rabbis and activists who have repeatedly attacked President Trump for such “crimes” as recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; moving America’s embassy there; defunding Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority as long as it continues to reward murderers of Jews; closing the PLO’s Washington office; and defunding the anti-Israel hate organization called UNRWA.
I have no doubt that at least some members of J-Street and Jewish Voice for Peace, and other useful idiots, attend these Holocaust memorials as well. They’re best buddies with Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Organization, Arab Student Union, and other Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front groups.
Even before the days of President Trump, these Jews didn’t think twice about voting for people who insist on endangering the state of Israel. They’d vote for Obama, Hillary, or a clone repeatedly if possible. But they come out yearly to show solidarity for the memory of six million slaughtered Jews. There! We’ve done our Jewish duty!
And what of the post-Holocaust six million Jews who now live in Israel (half of whom descend from families that fled Arab and Muslim lands)? Well, in the worldview of these people, if they don’t cave in to all the Arabs’ demands, whatever happens to them is apparently their own fault.
After all, seeking to live in a country that isn’t nine miles wide at its center is apparently crazy and unreasonable. A Judean – a Jew – living in Judea? Expansionist Zionists!
So while I lost family in the Shoah and care about it, I’ve seen too many Jews (and non-Jews) shed phony crocodile tears of sympathy for dead Jews while finding it difficult to empathize with living Jews trying to survive in Israel. I’ve had enough.
I encourage others to attend Holocaust memorials. But I also ask that people living outside Israel give serious thought before insisting that Israelis further expose their necks to those who would behead them in their sleep – and then get rewarded with a lifetime pension by the allegedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas.
I hope the Yom HaShoah Memorials on May 1 went well. I also hope that all future Yom HaShoah memorials address the question of how to prevent six million Jews living in Israel from being massacred like those massacred in the Holocaust.