What Purpose International Holocaust Remembrance Day?

From Caroline Glick, at JPost, "International Holocaust Remembrance Day’s fatal flaw":

On the surface, it is very moving to see half of the members of Knesset at Auschwitz marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But in a larger sense, it is not at all clear why this is necessary.

The Jewish people have Yom HaShoah V’Hagevura, our own national day of mourning for the genocide of our people in Europe.

More importantly, we carry the legacy of the Holocaust inside of us.

Every day, at some level, we experience the ulcerative loss of a third of the Jewish people in the hell of Europe, because we feel the hollow absence of the victims.

The six million murdered have become 10 million descendants who were never born. And we miss them.

We remember them too, every day, when we look at our children and thank God we can protect them.

Israel does not need this extra Holocaust memorial day. And before we send another delegation of elected officials to Auschwitz next January 27, we need to ask whether this extra day serves any positive purpose.

In November 2005, Israel was one of the co-sponsors of the UN General Assembly resolution that made January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. At the time, Israeli politicians and American Jewish leaders extolled the resolution as signaling a new era of UN relations with the Jewish state.

Consider for instance that a week before its duly mandated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the UN ushered in 2014 as the Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The occasion was marked among other things, by the January 20 opening of a yearlong exhibit at the UN Headquarters in New York portraying Israelis as Nazis and Palestinians as Jews.

Since 2005, anti-Semitism has risen throughout Europe, as have levels of anti-Semitism among Europhilic Americans.

Jews throughout Europe feel under assault, and unprotected. The situation is so bad that Jews don’t even bother reporting most of the anti-Semitic attacks they suffer.

The more closely we consider events the more clearly we see that ironically and obscenely, Holocaust memorializing in Europe is enabling anti-Semitism.

Europeans use the focus on the Holocaust to pretend that European anti-Semitism began with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 and ended with their defeat 12 years later. In truth, the Nazis’ rise to power was a natural consequence of 1,600 years of European Jew hatred.

From the time of Roman Emperor Constantine, persecution, expulsion and massacre of Jews was the norm, not the exception, in European life.

Hitler and his colleagues were adored not despite their hatred of Jews and their organization of German politics around the dehumanization of Jewish people. They were supported by the Germans, and by the majority of the people in the European lands they conquered because of their anti-Semitism and their dehumanization of Jews.

This Jew hatred did not die in Auschwitz.

As Ruth Wisse explained in August 2010, political anti-Semitism was resuscitated immediately after the war ended with the establishment of the Arab League. The League’s sole purpose was to reorganize anti-Semitic politics around denying the Jewish people their legal right to establish a sovereign state in their homeland.

In other words, with the establishment of the League in March 1945, the just-ended physical annihilation of European Jewry was replaced by the campaign to deny Jews political freedom and independence in our land.

Rather than combat this affront to international law and to the Charter of the United Nations, Europe, along with the rest of the world, sought to appease, and so facilitated and encouraged Arab anti-Jewish aggression.

Continue reading.

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