Today is Yom HaShoah, the Jewish holiday commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. It’s particularly appropriate to take a moment to remember those victims this year; the day before Yom HaShoah, a UN Conference allowed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver an address vehemently critical of Israel and which, in its original draft, referred to the Holocaust as “ambiguous and dubious”.
Of course, the Holocaust is neither ambiguous nor dubious. From remember.org, anyone with a computer can take a virtual tour of the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, and the German government, far from trying to evade its responsibility, has made Holocaust denial a crime. In no other criminal case in human history have so many people doubted a defendant who not only confessed, but said over and over, generally uncoerced, that she wanted no one, anywhere, ever, to doubt her guilt, and punished those within her power to punish who denied her guilt.
It is remarkable that point needs to be made – and it probably does not need to be made to those educated in Western classrooms, or to an audience reading an English-language blog (though even in parts of the West, teaching the Holocaust is now controversial, even, ludicrously, offensive). In much of the world, however, it needs to be said over and over. So today, take a moment, remember, and if you’re a person of faith, say a prayer for the victims of the greatest crime in modern history.
I’ll get back to pirate-blogging tomorrow, schedule permitting.
