The death of Nobel Peace Prize winner and iconic Auschwitz inmate Elie Wiesel last weekend has heightened his sense of urgency. Survivors are running out of time to teach the march’s lessons: never forget and never again.
Never forget what happened to the Jews, for in Wiesel’s words, that would be to kill them a second time. Never again will Jews be slaughtered without a vigorous defence by Israel. And more broadly, never again should humanity stand by as innocent people are murdered by their neighbours, their occupiers or their government.
Except the world has stood idly by many times since the Holocaust. It stood by as Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in Rwanda, and it is doing so again as Syrian President Bashar Assad targets hospitals and primary schools with missiles.
Trudeau’s government has been sensitive to the plight of Syrian refugees, bringing 25,000 to Canada within four months of his party’s election last fall. But that number is minuscule compared with the more than one million refugees and migrants who poured into Europe last year alone.
But a backlash is growing. Last March, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo publicly announced her country was closing its doors to refugees.
Openly racist and anti-Semitic groups parade in cities across Europe, while governments like Szydlo’s remain muted.
So what does the March of the Living mean in the face of rising xenophobia and nationalism — the Shoah’s deadly twin ingredients?
It’s a question [March of the Living Holocaust survivor Nate] Leipciger asks regularly. And which Trudeau may well ponder.
No mention, of course, about the reality that most of the Jew-hate in today's Europe is being perpetrated by Muslims, and that European Jews are leaving for Israel in droves not because of the rise of the new Right, but because of the surging number of Muslims and their anti-Jewish "xenophobia."“The world has not changed,” Leipciger says. “That’s the tragedy. We haven’t learned anything.”
No, that would definitely conflict with this false "Muslims are the new Jews" narrative.
And the fact that Trudeau is using the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors to serve his own delusional agenda: the phrase "morally bankrupt" captures it best, I think.
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