The Lessons of the Holocaust for the Obama Generation

Yom HaShoah has come and gone again. A day for looking back at what has happened and a day for looking away from what will happen.

In Skokie, millions of dollars have been spent to build a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, even as Iran is spending its millions on building another kind of memorial to the Holocaust, in the form of nuclear technology that will be used to finish that piece of history that Ahmadinejad claims never took place.

It is of course an easy thing to build a memorial. You hire the architect, raise the money, buy the land and then cut the ribbon. It is a much harder thing to do something about the need for those memorials in the first place. That is what learning the lessons of the Holocaust is about. Yet instead of learning the lessons, the American Jewish community has thrown itself into memorializing a horror that they could have helped prevent, if they had shown the guts to stand up to the icon of liberalism, FDR.

But it is of course easier to buy another memorial. Easier than looking into your hearts and asking yourselves whether two generations later, the majority of the American Jewish community is still too cowardly to stand up to a liberal icon in the White House... when the lives of millions of Jews are on the line.

The reassurances from American Jewish leaders that Obama means well, that he will not sell out Israel and that he cares should sound familiar. The American Jewish leaders of the 30's and 40's echoed the same sentiments. Even as FDR's Asst Secretary of State was busy pressuring Costa Rica not to take in Jewish refugees, even as the St. Louis was turned back and its passengers were sent to the gas chambers, even as every effort made to aid or save Jews from the Holocaust was frustrated and shut down with the active complicity of the liberal American Jewish leadership who were loyal to FDR uber alles.

The same people who refused to join the 100 Rabbis on the march to the White House, who denounced the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry and who let Jewish refugees in the ghetto of Harbin starve to death rather than undermine FDR in any way-- went on to light candles and issue their hypocritical sanctimonious statements of mourning for the dead. The dead that their decision to choose liberalism over the blood of their brothers helped to kill.

When FDR finally died on the throne, the same people would go on to lionize Harry Truman as a great friend of the Jews. Never mind that the man refused to even allow any Jewish person inside his house, including his own biographer. The next generation of American Jewish leaders would do the same for President after President leading up to Clinton, who armed and built up a terrorist state inside Israel's borders. And naturally Obama, the newest liberal icon in the White House. Our new "best friend".

More candles have been lit. More memorials have been built. But the lessons of the Holocaust continue to go unlearned.

The Holocaust was not a unique event in Jewish history. It was only unique as far as the technology used by the Nazis gave their massacres and planned genocide a scope and range that was mostly unprecedented. Mostly, but not completely. Since Rome worked to ethnically cleanse Israel, transforming it into Palestine with the help of Arab mercenaries, the cycle of atrocities has repeated itself over and over again. Generation after generation. Culture after culture. Nation after nation. The Holocaust was simply the biggest, best planned and grandest massacre of Jews to this day. It was not a break with Jewish history, it was a continuation of Jewish life in exile.

The most important lesson of the Holocaust is that the details of how it happened don't really matter. Had Hitler not come to power, had Germany not turned National Socialist, the Holocaust would have happened anyway. Stalin had one planned too before his death. Had it not been Hitler or Stalin, it would have been someone else. It still might be.

The Holocaust did not happen because of intolerance or fascism, as most liberals would like you to believe. It happened for the same overriding reason that any person or group of people is murdered. Because the Jews lacked the means of defending themselves against it.

There have been two Jewish responses to the Holocaust, on the one hand promoting tolerance and assimilation and on the other hand the State of Israel. Tolerance has done nothing to prevent the hatred and murder of Jews. In many cases it has actually served to promote it. Assimilation is little more than a secularist Masada, a proclamation of "we'll destroy ourselves, before you can destroy us." The State of Israel stands as the only meaningful response to the Holocaust.

Rather than building stone memorials and going back to business as usual, the State of Israel is not only a living future for the Jewish people, it is a response to the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust. The Holocaust happened because it could happen to a people who couldn't defend themselves. The State of Israel with its armies and borders was the best physical defense against it happening again.

Today the two responses to the Holocaust are battling out to the death, Tolerance and Assimilation vs the State of Israel. And the State of Israel is getting the worst of it. The teachers of tolerance blame Israel for the failure of their own ideology, manifest in the rising hatred of Jews around the world. If Israel wouldn't exist, somehow Jews wouldn't be hated, their thesis goes. As if Anti-semitism had been discovered lying around in a dustbin sometime after 1948.

But it is tolerance meanwhile that is killing Israel. The left has pushed Israel to the wall, because it represents the inversion of their ideology, it represents the reality that the best hope of the persecuted is not in multiculturalism or in tolerance classes, but in taking responsibility for their own safety and survival. And now a new Pharaoh of Liberalism has taken the throne in the White House.

Obama's reign represents a chance for American Jews to redeem their inaction during the Holocaust or be damned for choosing liberalism and a second Holocaust.