Netanyahu on Holocaust Remembrance Day: "We are no longer … powerless without protection"

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu with Holocaust Survivors, Jerusalem, January 27, 2016

Today, January 27th, that the UN adopted as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marks the Liberation of Auschwitz by Russian forces from the 100th Rifle Division of the 1st Ukrainian Front. They found among the 5,000 survivors children from the evil Dr. Mengele’s ‘twin’ experiments. The troopers hugged them and gave them chocolates then attended to the needs of the other survivors of the Nazi Final Solution.

Nobel nominee, Italian Jewish partisan, the tragic Primo Levi was among those liberated that day.. Future Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, then 16 years old, left with 60,000 camp inmates earlier in January 1945 on forced marches from which, less than 12,000, including him, survived. He was liberated by US Army troops at Buchenwald in April, 1945.

Over 1.1 million were murdered, 1 Million of them Jews in this Nazi SS death factory in Southern Poland that the West knew about but never launched bombing attacks to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria. Over 430,000 Hungarian Jews met their deaths there in the period from May 2 to July 11th, 1944. All while US Army Air Force bombers dropped bombs less than five miles away at the Buna artificial rubber works where Levi, a chemist by training worked as slave labor. Bombs that Wiesel cheered on when they inadvertently fell in the death camp in September 1944. t was left to the brave Jewish women who smuggled in explosives so that the Sonderkommando could destroy Crematorium 4 in October 1944 that forced Himmler to stop any further murders and order destruction of the complex..

 Another 5 million Jews didn’t survive.  They were murdered in unspeakable ways in the einstazgruppen slaughter in Russia, death camps in Poland, Germany and occupied Europe.  Their fate in the Final Solution was ratified by the SS at the Wansee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1942. The objective of the SS Conference was to make Europe judenrein.  Among the Six Million European Jews murdered were 1.5 million children.  The Jewish children those Russian troops encountered at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 were among the lucky survivors.

Breaking Israel News noted the various commemorations, especially in those in Manhattan,Washington and Jerusalem. Shoah survivors. They paid particular attention to what Israeli PM Netanyahu said at a gathering of Shoah survivors:“We Are No Longer a Powerless People Begging for Protection”.  The BIN reported:

World leaders and communities throughout the globe will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, January 27, with ceremonies, memorials, and events intended to honor victims of the Holocaust and World War II.

While Israel remembers the Holocaust on the Hebrew date of the 27th of Nisan, which usually falls out in May, it is commemorated internationally on the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, which occurred 71 years ago in 1945.

Among those set to recognize the solemnity of the day is American president Barack Obama, who is scheduled to attend a ceremony at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. The ceremony will honor four people considered Righteous Among the Nations – non-Jews who risked their lives to save or help Jews during the Holocaust.

One of the men being honored is US Army master-sergeant Roddie Edmonds, from Tennessee, who, along with his soldiers, was imprisoned in a German POW camp during World War II. When asked to identify the Jewish soldiers under his command, Edmonds refused, responding, “We are all Jews.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted the significance of Obama’s decision to attend the event, pointing out at his Sunday cabinet meeting that the American president has not visited the Israeli embassy in the US for many years. He called the event a “testament that the US-Israel relationship…is very strong and stable”, despite recent tensions between the two allies.

In his own remarks on the occasion, Netanyahu said that preserving the memory of the Holocaust was more important than ever in a “period of resurgent and sometimes violent anti-Semitism.”

“It is commemorations like this that remind us all where the oldest and most enduring hatred can lead,” he said. He warned, however, that in Europe and elsewhere, “Jews are once again being targeted just for being Jews,” drawing attention to hatred against individual Jews, the collective Jew and the Jewish state.

“Israel is targeted with the same slurs and the same libels that were leveled against the Jewish people since time immemorial,” he said in his statement. “The obsession with the Jews – the fixation on the Jewish state – defies any other rational explanation.”

Netanyahu pointed out that despite horrifying human rights violations perpetrated by ISIS, North Korea, Iran and Syria, the UN Human Rights Council condemns Israel more often than all of them put together. “Some things just don’t change,” he said.