“Nor will they speak about the situation of the Palestinian people in occupied territories, France’s responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda, Britain’s responsibility for the disaster of partitioning India, and the detention camps where members of Kenya’s freedom movement were tortured, the American responsibility for the mass slaughter of communists and leftists in Indonesia, or the genocide against natives in Canada, the US and Australia.”
— Eitay Mack, the descendant of Auschwitz concentration camp victims,
on why he wouldn’t be attending events in Jerusalem
commemorating the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation
Chapter 13: Holocaust
The holocaust of World War II, perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews, Gypsies (Roma), Soviets, Polish nationalists, prisoners of war, gays, the disabled, and religious fundamentalists was a horrible, horrible atrocity. Approximately 6 million Jews and a total of about 17 million people whom the Nazis considered undesirable and expendable were exterminated.
We shall never forget because we will forever be reminded.
There are at least seventy permanent holocaust museums or monuments in the United States alone. Of course the most significant is the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
Canada has five dedicated sites. In Toronto there is a Holocaust Museum and separate education center. There is a holocaust sculpture in Edmonton, a museum in Montreal, a monument in Ottawa, and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
There are holocaust monuments in at least thirty-five other countries including Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay.
While the Nazis were committing their atrocities, on the Pacific front the Japanese were murdering an estimated 10 million Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Western prisoners of war. Of this total, an estimated 6 million killed were Chinese. Two hundred thousand Chinese were believed to have been slaughtered in the Nanjing Massacre of 1938 when the Japanese invaded that Chinese capital. Most of the women and girls were raped first.
There is not one memorial or monument to the victims of this Chinese/Asian genocide in the United States or Canada.
In the 1930s, the Soviet regime starved as many as 7 million Ukrainians. It was called the Holodomor. In the 1960s, 3 million Indonesians (people from Southeast Asia) were killed by their own government and army with the ambivalence if not encouragement of the United States. The victims were Chinese nationals and communists. In the 1970s, 3 million Cambodians (Southeast Asia) were killed by the Khmer Rouge dictatorship led by a man named Pol Pot.
One won’t find any memorials in the United States or Canada to those who were killed or maimed so monstrously in the Far East. Yet there seventy museums and monuments dedicated to the Jewish holocaust and we are constantly reminded of it eighty years after the end of World War II.
Asian-Americans make up close to 6 percent of the US’s population. The Jewish population of the United States is approximately 3 percent. Americans were involved in the war on both fronts, so they saw atrocities on both fronts.
Is it cynical to suggest that the Jewish holocaust provides the cover for Israel to continue committing its own atrocities eight decades down the road?
Noa Landau wrote a story in Haaretz on January 21, 2020 with a headline that should surprise no one: “Netanyahu to Use Holocaust Forum to Boost Support for Israel against the ICC.” The ICC is the International Criminal Court. The subtext read: Prime minister “will attempt to secure backing for claim that court has no jurisdiction in Palestinian territories, as they are not a sovereign state.”
Yes, that is correct: deny them a state, terrorize them, and then say there can be no punishment because the victims don’t have a nation:
