Simon Wiesenthal, Holocaust survivor turned Nazi hunter, has passed away at the age of 96. In a time when many would have preferred to forget and ignore the Holocaust, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to finding those responsible and bringing them to justice.
The evil spirit of the Holocaust is not as far in the past as it should be. The vile attitudes of anti-Semitism still exist in our world today. Wiesenthal may be gone, but his work will continue so long as injustice and anti-Semitism plague our world.
RIP
Unfortunately, prejudice and bigotry against Jews, and many other peoples, does not show much sign of abating. One thing that would help is if our own self-serving leaders stopped diminishing the term holocaust by using it to further a particular agenda. I’m thinking mostly of Clinton and his cohorts using the term during the Balkan wars, which were civil wars and most certainly not genocide, but others have taken the same liberty. Genocide is what happened to the Jews and Roma in Nazi Germany, to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks decades before that, and other groups through the ages. Watering down terminology is a dangerous path to take as we eventually become immune from the true horror of something like a holocaust, making it that much easier to forget.
To (Truth filtered through) Reality:
What do you call incidents such as Srebrenica when 9,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by Serbian nationalists. There were other massacres of Bosnia Muslims Or when hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus in Rwanda.
Inter communal conflict does not directly contradict genocide. Remember that the Dashnak Armenian nationalists carried out massacres of Turkish muslims in such places as Van before the brutal Turkish response emerged.