Today, January 27th, the world officially commemorates the six million Jewish men, women and children brutally murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust. We remember this darkest chapter in human history, when a European country decided to adopt a policy and a program to exterminate every last Jew, mobilizing the full power of a modern developed industrial state to implement this incredible nightmare.
The mass murder of the Jewish people did not happen in a vacuum. For centuries antisemitism had been all too prevalent across Europe. Unchallenged, it grew and festered and then exploded. This oldest of hatreds had unquestionable longevity. Its roots stretch back to the ancient world. It was ever-present throughout the middle ages. And yet, it exploded with full force in the modern era.
And if people thought that following the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka, humanity would finally learn its lesson and rid itself of antisemitism, that it would throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs, well, they were wrong. Dead wrong.
In the twenty-first century, the disease of antisemitism continues to contaminate and spread. It can be found alive, kicking and pernicious on North American university campuses, in South Asian madrassas, among European elites. Antisemitism exists in the affluent West and in the developing world in the East.
It is the official policy of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which unabashedly and proudly says day in and day out: our goal is to murder another six million Jews, to eradicate the Jewish State of Israel.
A vaccine to safeguard against the antisemitism virus has yet to be found. It is said that some things never change.
But I can tell you what has changed. We the Jewish people have changed.
If at the time of the Holocaust, the Jews were homeless, stateless, defenseless, begging others to protect us – no longer. Today we are firmly rooted in our ancient land, free and strong in our independent state.
As prime minister of the country that was reborn after the Holocaust, the country that provided a homeland for the survivors, a state that rose from the ashes, a state in which the Jewish people regained their sovereignty and independence, I vow never to forget the tragic past and never to allow the Jewish people to once again be defenseless against the forces that seek our destruction.
Never again isn’t a slogan. This is our policy and this is our mission and we will always carry it out.
