On January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we honor the memories of the 6 million Jews and millions of other innocent victims whose lives were tragically taken during the Holocaust over sixty years ago. Those who experienced the horrors of the cattle cars, ghettos, and concentration camps have witnessed humanity at its very worst and know too well the pain of losing loved ones to senseless violence.
But while this is a time for mourning and reflection, it is also the time for action. On this day, we recall the courage, spirit, and determination of those who heroically resisted the Nazis, exemplifying the very best of humanity. And like these courageous individuals, we must commit ourselves to resisting hate and persecution in all its forms. The United States, along with the international community, resolves to stand in the way of any tyrant or dictator who commits crimes against humanity, and stay true to the principle of “Never Again.”
By remaining vigilant against those who seek to perpetrate violence and murder, we honor those we lost during one of the darkest periods in human history. And we keep their memory alive for generations to come.
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3 Responses
How dare he dismiss meticulously pre-planned genocide as mere ‘senseless violence’!! The victims of the Holocaust were not ‘tragically taken’, they were deliberately hunted down and viciously murdered. If Obama is allowed to get away with at best horrifically sloppy language or at worst something much more malignant, I shudder to think where we go to from here…
No. 1: I think you are being way to picky about President Obama’s statement. A handful of words, or paragraphs, cannot cover every aspect of the horror of the Holocaust. The gedolim, philosophers, social scientists, politicians and others have spent more than 65 years trying to understand the horror, and they have barely scratched the surface of the enormity of what happened in the Holocaust.
I am thankful that the current US president, and all his predecessors since the end of the Holocaust, have kept alive the memory of the enormous crime committed by one of the most advanced countries of the civilized world against the Jewish people and continue to be be determined to save the world from a repeat of such a horrible crime.
Would you be so picky about the president’s statements if the same words were spoken by a US president whom you liked?
#2: Whilst a handful of words can most certainly not ‘cover every aspect’ of what occurred in the Holocaust, even a single word – when spoken by a person whose position supposedly calls for him to know better – has the potential to cause damage, sometimes irreparably. By referring to the genocide against the Jewish people as ‘senseless violence’, that actually denies the fact that it was totally pre-meditated and precisely organised over many years by many, many people. To me ‘tragically taken’ is something you would use for someone say killed l’a in an accident, an innocent unintended victim of war perhaps – not those the deliberate targets of state, industrialised mass murder against defenceless civilians… call me picky if you will but with the opportunity to prevent the next one chas veshalom sitting squarely on his lap he doesn’t seem to be doing too good a job of that either