HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY

Last week, 27 January 2021, was Holocaust Memorial Day, the day set aside in Ireland each year to remember the victims of the greatest and most heinous crime in History, Jews, non-Jews, actors, homosexuals and bohemians of every description were systematically murdered by the Nazis in a series of unspeakable gas-chambers and mass extermination camps. The Nazis of course did not start with mass extermination, they started with abortion and then embarked along the path aimed at wiping out every descendant or associate of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the son of the Living God, the Redeemer, the King of the Jews from the face of the Earth. The Holocaust is a heavy subject, an unbearably heavy subject and RTE, Anne Cassin and Nationwide are to be commended for the approach they adopted in covering the topic by broadcasting an uplifting programme about the life of a second generation Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, now an art dealer married to an Irish lady, as well as reporting on the modern legacy of the Jewish community in Cork City (now sadly declined). My only criticism of this very tasteful programme and presentation is that it tended to give the impression that anti-Semitism and the factors that led to anti-Semitism belonged to a distant and dormant past. Even a cursory glance at the news reveals that such is most definitely not the case. Israel’s position in the Middle-East remains fraught and is constantly under threat, not just from terrorists on the ground, or missiles built in Iran, but from the capitals of Europe, Berlin, Paris and Brussels where the survivors of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich found and took refuge following their military defeat at the hands of the Allies (US, UK and Soviets) at the end of the Second World War, a War which has never concluded when it comes to addressing the perils facing Jews, Judaism and all believers in monotheism, including Christians. It is tempting to consign the ghosts of the Holocaust to History and to honour the countless dead. But Evil did not die or perish in Hitler’s bunker in the Spring of 1944 and it is vital, crucial even, to see anti-Semitism in all its forms and manifestations as the supreme, long-term, most enduring and most pernicious of all Evils. The Angels of Death of the Holocaust are asleep and only barely asleep at that. It behoves us all, especially those charged with responsibility in Government to ensure that nothing is done to encourage their awakening. The capitals of the so-called EU27 are all too prone to the calls of the resurgent cries and tendencies of anti-Semitism. The decisions of Macron to decorate the notoriously anti-Semitic Petain and to tour Nazi war memorial sites along with Chancellor Merkel bodes ill for the future. Our own President Higgins should most definitely NOT have attended an official German Holocaust commemoration ceremony last year in the company of and alongside the German President. Diplomatic niceties and current EU commercial considerations should not be allowed to get in the way of the appropriate marking of what was and remains the greatest crime in all History! In addition, it is still not too late for RTE to apologise for the comments made by then President Mary McAleese on Morning Ireland when visiting Auschwitz when she compared the treatment of nationalists by unionists in Northern Ireland to the unspeakable fate suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis of the Third Reich.

Maurice James, Barrister at Law, United Nations (1373) counsel