![]() This teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other - this is where it all begins. The enduring lesson of the Holocaust and the genocides that followed is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of a state-sanctioned ideology of hate. Lesson 2 - THE DANGER OF STATE-SANCTIONED INCITEMENT TO HATRED AND GENOCIDE: THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PREVENT IT And so the abiding imperative: that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other's destiny. As both the Talmud and Koran teach us, whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe - just as whoever has killed a single person, it is as if they have destroyed an entire universe. For unto each person there is a name - unto each person there is an identity. For as we remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust - first defamed, demonized and dehumanized, as prologue or justification for genocide, then murdered - we have to understand that the mass murder of millions is not a matter of abstract statistics. The first lesson is the importance of remembrance itself. Lesson 1 - THE IMPORTANCE OF HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE This year, in the immediate aftermath of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international Magna Carta of human rights born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, and the Genocide Convention - the "Never Again" Convention which has tragically been violated again and again - we should ask ourselves: What have we learned, and what must we do? For the Holocaust is uniquely evil in its genocidal singularity, where biology was inescapably destiny, a war against the Jews in which, as Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel put it, "not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims." On this United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day, words may ease the pain, but they may also dwarf the tragedy. NOTE! Consider delaying until first div on page If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.pubads()) (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers - it began with words - The Jerusalem Post
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