Holocaust Day reminds us to oppose all hate crimes, no matter where they occur | Opinion
International Holocaust Day on January 27 is not just about six million Eastern European Jews who were sent to the gas chambers and murdered between 1941 and 1945.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum along with most rabbis and Jewish leaders denounce and condemn all forms of “religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief” throughout the world.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is about acknowledging every holocaust, every genocide, every mass tyranny that is carried out upon anyone, any group, based on skin color, religion, gender identity and ethnic background.
The Jewish people do not have a monopoly on the centuries of persecution and atrocities.
No one group, no one person can claim that the hate and violence towards them is any more tragic than another’s. This boasting only spurs on acts of violence against others, including Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims, LGBTQ+, and Native Americans. This list is not all-inclusive.
By emphasizing only one religion, only one event, the horrors of the past and the injustices of today are trivialized and invalidated.
The realty of all those crimes that happened, and are still happening, must not be glossed over and sanitized.
Hitler was just one of the many dictators of the past with the list of tyrants growing each day. These autocrats masquerade as religious leaders or elected officials, grandstanding with their worthless “facts” and “solutions” to non-existent issues that they fabricate. They want to forbid teaching about race in schools and demand that books be banned. These men and women want to destroy generations of people that were, and still are, being exploited in order to secure their own prominence.
We all need to call out those charlatans, be it a religious zealot or a government official, who uses public events and social media to sway others in believing and acting on those lies.
Our society today is in the same peril as the Jews were in Germany in the 1930s, the Black Americans in pre and post reconstruction, the same lies against LGTBQ+, the same falsehoods about reproductive rights — all the same lies that people use to obtain power
As one Louisville rabbi recently said, January 27 is a teachable moment to remember all hate speech and all violence that is perpetuated against religions, races and genders, those acts committed in the past and those that continue to this day.
We all need to remember and use these holocausts, the slavery, the mass murders, as ‘teachable moments’ in our homes, with our families, in our schools, in all branches of our government and on our streets whenever we see injustice being perpetrated on another.
We must call out “polite racism” and outright bigotry. We must protest the brutality against others and understand that hate speech escalates into hate violence.
Honi Marleen Goldman is a local grassroots organizer, Hon. Mary Lou Marzian is the past Kentucky House Representative for the former District 34, Hon. Tina Ward-Pugh is the former Ninth District Councilwoman and recent candidate for Jefferson County Clerk, Maria A. Fernandez is a local attorney, and Rosalind Welch is a community activist in Kentucky.