When I first learned about the Holocaust – really learned about it, in all its ghoulish details – I was 16 years old and on an exchange program in Stuttgart, Germany. As a rather sheltered and naive Western Canadian teenager, abroad without my family for the very first time, I really wasn’t prepared for what I was about to learn.
When I did, I was terrified. I was shaken to the core.
It was a week or so after I had arrived in this strange new country. I was homesick and trying to find my footing, when I was invited on a school trip with the teenage daughter in my host family, who was a little older than me.
There I was, at a Holocaust museum in former Nazi Germany, learning about the depths of human evil. I was led by a tour guide who witnessed the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and a class full of students whose parents would have been young children during the Second World War. My classmates were two generations removed from the actual Nazis who carried out the extermination of the Jewish people.
As I walked through the museum, I saw children’s shoes, letters they had written, and images of them being taken away on cattle carts.
I remember reading and re-reading the placards describing concentration camps, gas chambers and firing squads and feeling beside myself with terror and grief. How could humans be so evil? How could these people have committed such unspeakable crimes? I looked around at the blond-haired, blue-eyed students I was standing with, and I remember feeling like I was living in some kind of a dystopian horror movie. I wanted to get on the first plane back to Vancouver.
“Germans didn’t know the extent of the campaign until it was too late,” I was told. “Nobody knew about the gas chambers.”
I remember struggling with these concepts, particularly wondering how this could possibly have happened in our modern world and system of Western liberal democracy. How did humanity lose itself so quickly and so fully?
I remember how sure I was that it could never happen again.
And yet, here we are. On October 7th, 2023, the modern world got another glimpse into the depth of human evil. We witnessed a Holocaust-inspired pogrom, streaming live on Telegram and TikTok.
Armed gunmen went door to door, murdering any and every Jew they could find. Fathers, mothers, elderly grandparents, children, toddlers, babies. They raped teenage girls, dececrated dead bodies, beheaded soldiers. And now, we’re learning, they beheaded babies too.
I saw early comparisons saying that October 7 was Israel’s September 11th. I don’t tend to like these sorts of comparisons, that “900 dead in Israel is the equivalent of 25,000 dead in the United States.” In my mind, one dead civilian is the equivalent of one dead civilian.
Now that the full scale of the horror is being revealed, however, I think the truth is even worse.
This isn’t 9/11, it’s a continuation of the Holocaust. And shockingly, in a few ways, Hamas are even worse than the Nazis.
- Hamas broadcasted their atrocities for the world to see. They were proud of their barbarism, they did it out in the open. They wanted the world to know. Even the Nazis hid their evil, and many Germans didn’t realize the extent to which Jews were being exterminated until after the war had ended. Palestinian terrorists had no such desire to hide their evil deeds.
- The West is funding this horror show. During WWII, Western Allies fought united against the Nazis and used every dollar at their disposal. In 2023, Hamas is funded directly from Western aid coming from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as indirectly, via Iran but thanks to the billions upon billions of unfrozen cash delivered by the Biden Administration in the vain hopes of reigniting Obama’s disastrous nuclear agreement.
- During the Second World War, the West was united in their resolve to defend freedom and defeat facism in Europe. In 2023, we saw brazen crowds of Jew-hating fanatics waving flags in support of the pogrom. We saw academic excuses being made and prominent Muslim groups and activists singing their usual “both sides”, “cycle of violence” and “Israel is always to blame” mantras. These individuals, either willfully blind or just plain evil, showed us who they really are, and showed us the deep failure of Western pluralism.
The last few days have been difficult, and demoralizing. Realizing that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident in history – a glitch in an otherwise peaceful and liberal society – but rather an ongoing story.
It’s particularly distressing that in the West, we see this Jew-hatred up close and personal. Thousands of fanatics took to the streets in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Edmonton, joining fellow travellers in London, Rotterdam, Sydney, New York and Chicago to name a few, to showcase their unwavering support for Arabs in Palestine. “By any means necessary” as one sign read.
Slaughtering children is a necessary means of resistance, they say, while waiving Swastikas and chanting “gas the Jews.” (This is not hyperbole. These things happened over the weekend).
Are these protesters a “fringe minority”? Or do they represent the popular opinion of Muslims in the West and the “woke” decolonization crowd? Only time will tell. Either way, as Sean Spear of the Hub points out, it’s testing the limits of Western pluralism.
Now is not the time for a conversation on a complicated history. Now is not the time to critique Israel’s flawed government or its heavy-handed approach to national security.
Instead we must unite, grieve for humanity, and stand together in our steadfast support for the Jewish people and their right to self-determination in their homeland.
Israel has vast support from across the political spectrum, and around the world. In this moment, it has more support than perhaps at any other point since the Holocaust. It has a very long leash to decimate the threats on its doorstep and destroy the perpetrators who carried out those evil attacks.
Every other conversation is a conversation for another day.
