Monday, January 27, 2025 at 12:21 PM

Ever since I was a child, I was fascinated with the Holocaust and its victims, and also with its implications for society in general. Reading and watching newsreels emphasized to me, and provided a more detailed picture of the plight of a defenseless people, whose only crime was being Jewish. The horrors and the near extinction of a race, being carried out by a madman and his henchmen, were almost unbearable to fathom. The slow and cruel slaughter of children and their parents made me have a very soft spot for the nation of Israel, and for Jews in general. As I grew older, I learned that throughout history Jews were always blamed for everything, from the plagues in the Middle Ages, to economic hardships suffered by the countries in Europe. Whenever a king was in trouble, Jews were their whipping horses. They were persecuted, denied citizenship, deprived of their hard-earned money and rights, and deported!

Today, Monday, January 27 is Holocaust Memorial Day! It seems so ridiculous and ironic that we are supposed to be remembering all the horrific suffering, torture, and death suffered by innocents, while the same genocide is now being perpetrated by the descendants of these same European Jews, who are now in charge of the state of Israel, against innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank! To make matters worse, religious extremists are conducting terror attacks against the people of Gaza and the West Bank, doing everything possible to drive them off their lands!

I have withdrawn my steadfast support for a country that has learned nothing from their history, but has instead doubled down on the persecution and annihilation of another race, a people who were in the land of Palestine before most of these settlers were, thus they are called settlers. I’m not going into religion and all the other nonsense about who owns what. WWII gave us the state of Israel, which in my opinion was a good thing. Giving respite from suffering and near extinction, and a home to Ashkenazis who had just suffered the worst losses under Hitler, and those like-minded in other parts of Europe!

I have blamed Netanyahu and his right-wing extremist government for the total destruction of Gaza and the murder of almost 50,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children and innocents. I also blame the people of Israel for allowing a minority to take them down this road to genocide and starvation and disease and displacement!

Today, leaders of the more prominent European countries are all memorializing that horrible tragedy of 80 years ago, with wreaths and speeches and the words of comfort to the descendants of this horrible stain on human history. Meanwhile, Gazans are returning to a barren, post-apocalyptic state that seems uninhabitable! Israel is finally allowing food and medicine and water to flow back into that wasteland, the one they created! Where is the remembrance for the people of Gaza? Where is the outrage against this war on a defenseless people because of the barbarism of Hamas, who should be held accountable? Where are the promises of, never again?

Never again? That was Israel’s mantra after their undeserved and horrible sufferings. Now I understand that never again was meant for them only, no one else. The oppressed are now the oppressors, and they have license to do whatever they feel like—they just blame their actions on terrorists, while they keep on killing women and children!

So, forgive me for not feeling the same way about the Holocaust as I’ve always felt. There has been a sobering realization that Israelis did not learn from their Holocaust experience, and are now inflicting that same terror on their cousins in Gaza, and on the West Bank!

Ironic, isn’t it? Ironic indeed!

Glen