My Problem With Yom HaShoah…Holocaust Memorial Day by Gerald A. Honigman
May 1, 2019 was Holocaust Memorial Day, this year–Yom HaShoah.
I’ve attended most commemorations over the years and thus obviously agree that it’s good to have a day set aside for remembering the Holocaust.
Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to see to it that “Never Again” will be a truism forever by defending Israel, its right to thrive–not just survive–in relatively secure, far more defensible, real borders than those imposed upon the reborn Jewish State by the United Nations armistice lines in 1949. Those made Israel smaller in width (9-15 miles) at its strategic waist than the size of some Texas driveways–at least according to President George W. Bush. I’ve also fought for relative justice for allpeoples, Jew and non-Jew alike, with my pen, via other media, and additional means of communication and education for over half century now.
This year, however, I did not attend.
In honesty, however, there was another reason, eating away at me for quite some time, for my hesitancy to join once again in this annual public display of sympathy for dead Jews.
Putting it bluntly, there are too many people attending annual Yom HaShoah commemorations who leave the program and then, either consciously or unconsciously, aid and abet those who claim that Arabs are now allegedly the new stateless, oppressed Jews; Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto; Jews are the new Nazis; and so forth. Hey, just ask Adolph–er, Pat–Buchanan to elaborate upon this, if you need more “evidence.” It’s one of the few things he and the Lefties have in common.
If that latter statement had even an iota of truth to it, Israel would have solved its Gaza problem long ago. Instead of wasting bombs and missiles on empty buildings, carefully trying to target the exact Arab perpetrators of assorted atrocities, and playing a tit-for-tat game with Hamas, it could have easily done what Nazis did in the real Warsaw Ghetto to end the Jews’ month long Passover 1943 uprising: level the whole area, exterminate all the people, and so forth. Every Jew alive was targeted for extinction—both there and wherever else the Nazis and their collaborators operated. The ghettos were the collection points where Jews from surrounding areas were often herded prior to being sent to the extermination camps
If interested, just ask the Kurds and other non-Arab peoples in the region who the real new Nazis are: over two hundred thousand Kurds massacred by Arabs in the Anfal Campaign in Iraq in the 1980s–over 5,000 men, women, and children poison gassed to death in Halabja alone, with many other Kurds killed by Iraqi Arabs both before and after as well. A similar story can be told in “Arab” Syria. Read a copy of Professor Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf’ Against the Kurds (Amsterdam, 1968), for starters. And who do you think has been committing genocide for decades in Darfur and against other black Africans in the Sudan? Hint: It wasn’t Jews.
You see, I’m sure that among folks attending Yom HaShoah services were at least some rabbis and congregants who’ve repeatedly attacked an admittedly imperfect President Trump for such things as his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and 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; defunding the anti-Israel United Nations hate organization, UNRWA; and supporting Israel’s claim to what UNSC Resolution 242 called for at the end of the 1967 Six Day War–it’s right to a fair territorial compromise in the disputed territories, giving it more secure, defensible, and real bordersrather than forcing it to return to the suicidal armistice lines of 1949 which made it into a forever vulnerable, compacted sardine can of a state. That’s what the settlement and partial annexation issues are mostly all about.
I also have no doubt that at least some J-Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other Hebrew Arabs’ 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, other Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front groups, and Left of Lenin organizations as well.
While I want Israel to strive, as much as possible (without endangering itself), to be a “light unto the nations” as the Bible states, and not emulate the intolerant mess which surrounds it, such folks as those above hold Israel up to impossible expectations and standards that are not demanded of anyone else. They join the United Nations, “Progressive” professors on campus (often products of their own temples), and numerous others who routinely use one set of lenses to scrutinize, dissect, and judge Israel, and a completely different set to study the rest of the nasty, repressive, oppressive neighborhood in which it lives.
I’ve sat at the same tables over the years at events hearing or participating in discussions of too many of these same Jews attending Yom HaShoah commemorations. Even before the days of President Trump, they didn’t think twice about voting for people in high office who insist on grossly endangering the sole, minuscule, resurrected risen Phoenix of the Jewish nation. They’d vote for Obama, Hillary, or a clone repeatedly if possible. But they come out yearly to show solidarity for the memory of the slaughtered six million… There! They’ve shown their Jewish duty!
As for the new post-Holocaust six million Jews in Israel (half of whose families fled from “Arab”/Muslim lands)?
Well, if they don’t cave in to all the demands that Arabs have for the creation of the Arabs’ 22nd state–second, not first, in the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine (Jordan sits on 80% of the original land since 1922)–then whatever happens to that new six million, I guess, would be brought on by themselves.
Not to mention that these same folks likely travel further on shopping trips to the mall than the 9-15mile width that Israel was made by the 1949 armistice lines they insist Israel return to–what the current settlement andpartial annexation issues are largely all about. Crazy, unreasonable thought, right? A Judean–Jew–living in Judea…Expansionist Zionists!
To sum things up, while I too lost family in the Shoah and care about the tragedy of others, I’ve seen a very disturbing pattern for decades now in which Jews and non-Jews alike prefer too often to shed phony crocodile tears of sympathy for dead Jews a la the Holocaust, but find it difficult to empathize with the imperfect live variety, trying to survive in Israel. I mean, after all, the rest of the neighborhood in which the resurrected Jew of the Nations exists has so many models of ethical perfection…
Sure…and as I like to say, I’m also the Passover Bunny.
So, while I still encourage others to attend Holocaust Memorials, I also ask that people living away from the dangers Israelis face–regardless of Israel’s size–here in America and elsewhere to give serious thought before insisting that Israelis further expose the necks of their children to those who behead them in their sleep–and then next get rewarded for that “heroism” with a lifetime pension by Israel’s allegedly “moderate” peace partners of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah and the PA.
I hope the Yom HaShoah Memorials on 5/1 went well, and that they not only honored our innocent martyrs, but also addressed what’s needed to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. Too often these eventsdon’t do that, and this is frequently not covered adequately in the following Israel Independence Day celebrations either–probably to not disturb the comfort level of the folks discussed above, the current counterparts to those mentioned in the “Revisiting the Cattle Cars” link below.
This following, well-documented article provides important, less known facts and about the Shoah that many folks (i.e., those above) coming to the memorial events probably would rather not hear about…Why? Because events described in it, while dealing with the Holocaust in the 1940s, have too many parallels todayhttp://www.geraldahonigman.com/blog/2012/05/25/revisiting-the-cattle-cars-3/
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