{"id":38924,"date":"2015-01-27T12:45:15","date_gmt":"2015-01-27T17:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=38924"},"modified":"2015-01-27T12:48:44","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T17:48:44","slug":"need-holocaust-memorial-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/need-holocaust-memorial-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We All Need Holocaust Memorial Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ausch_slide\"This article originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph<\/a>.
\n<\/em>
\nToday, Holocaust Memorial Day, will mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year we will also remember the 12 people killed in the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the murdered policewoman and the four customers in a Jewish supermarket, shot as they were shopping on the eve of the Sabbath.<\/p>\n

The journalists and the policewoman were killed because of what they did: satirising the prophet Mohammed and guarding the public. The Jewish customers were killed because of what they were. They were Jews. Seventy years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is alive and well and has returned to Europe.<\/p>\n

Do we need Holocaust Memorial Day? That was the question Tony Blair, the then prime minister, asked leaders of British Jewry in 1999. It had been proposed that we have one for the UK and he wanted our opinion. We explained that we did not need it as Jews. We already have Yom ha-Shoa, our own memorial day, which falls soon after Passover in the Jewish calendar. Every Jew literally \u2013 or figuratively \u2013 lost family in the Holocaust. For us Yom ha-Shoa is a grief observed.<\/p>\n

But yes, we said, for the Holocaust was not just a crime against Jews and other victims \u2013 Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the handicapped and Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses among them. The Holocaust was an assault on humanity. Primo Levi, when he wrote his Auschwitz memoir, did not call it, If This is a Jew. He called it, If This is a Man.<\/p>\n

Jews were hated because they were different. The classic statement is Haman\u2019s remark to king Ahasuerus in the book of Esther that there is a people scattered among the nations \u201cwho keep themselves separate; their customs are different from those of all other people\u201d (Esther 3: 8). Anti-Semitism is the paradigm case of dislike of the unlike. For a thousand years Jews were the archetypal Other: non-Christians in Christian Europe, non-Muslims in a Muslim Middle East.<\/p>\n

But we are all other, different, unique. That is what makes us human. A society that has no room for difference has no room for humanity. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. Wherever you find anti-Semitism, there you also find a threat to liberty. No free society was ever built on hate.<\/p>\n

Today anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab and Muslim world. Jews have been accused of almost everything: controlling America, dominating Europe, manipulating the economy, running the media, perpetrating 9\/11 and all subsequent terrorist attacks, creating Aids, Ebola, the 2004 tsunami and global warming.<\/p>\n

Four different myths have been created about the Holocaust. The Iranian version is that it didn\u2019t happen: it was invented by Jews to further the aims of Zionism. Another is that it half-happened, and the pity is that Hitler did not finish the job. The third is that it happened and the Jews deserved it. The fourth is that it happened but now Jews are the new Nazis and Palestinians the new Jews.<\/p>\n

This matters greatly, because anti-Semitism is only incidentally about Jews. It is fundamentally about a certain kind of cognitive dissonance within the cultures that give rise to it. It happens when their own self-image is contradicted by the world outside. Judeophobia was born around the year 95 when the Gospel of John called Jews children of the devil. It did not become murderous for a thousand years until 1096 when Crusaders on their way to liberate the Holy Land stopped to massacre the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz and Cologne, initiating centuries of Christian persecution of the Jews.<\/p>\n

That was when Christians woke up to the fact that they had been overtaken by Islam. Nazi anti-Semitism started after Germany\u2019s defeat in the First World War and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Muslim anti-Semitism \u2013 as opposed to the negative statements about Jews in the Koran and Hadith \u2013 began in 1924 when the Ottoman Empire fell. Four years later the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism were born.<\/p>\n

Anti-Semitism makes cognitive dissonance bearable by turning the question, \u201cWhy has this happened?\u201d into the question, \u201cWho did this to me?\u201d If it is someone else\u2019s fault, not mine, I can preserve my self-respect. I become the victim not the perpetrator. Crimes against humanity then become holy deeds, done to avenge my people or my faith. That is what turns ordinary human beings into Crusaders in one age, Nazis in another, and suicide bombers and terrorists in a third.<\/p>\n

As long as students are taught at madrassahs that Jews are the enemy of humankind, extremists will be condemning Islam, a noble faith, to self-inflicted injury for generations to come. To be free, you have to let go of hate. There is no other way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, will mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year we will also remember the 12 people killed in the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the murdered policewoman and the four customers in a Jewish supermarket, shot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":132804,"featured_media":38926,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy We All Need Holocaust Memorial Day - OU Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/need-holocaust-memorial-day\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why We All Need Holocaust Memorial Day - OU Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This article originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph. 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