An Israeli Speaks

As a writer, I prefer to give my own words, rather than rely on others. It is rare that I agree with a politician, even more rare that I will ask to borrow his words, to make them as if they are mine. Such is the case with the words of the Minister of Information and Diaspora, Yuli Edelstein:

 The purpose of the anti-Semites is the same – to deny the common humanity of the Jew, to single him out, to scapegoat him. 70 years ago, this worked perfectly…Today, as the snow sets for the 70th time on the killing fields of Europe, where each garden, each meadow, each plowed furrow are fertilized by the ashes of my people, I come here in the name of my government, of the independent Jewish nation, to assure our friends, to make a promise to our enemies and to warn the indifferent:

When we say ‘Never again’, we mean it. We will not wait for another conference with baited breath and forlorn hope. We will not beg for compassion and sympathy. We will not be made to live with constant threat of another Holocaust.

We hope that this hour never comes. We hope that the civilized world has learned the bloody lessons of appeasement. We hope that the moral majority of humanity will rise above the selfish calculations of profit and loss, the petty politics and the cowardice masked as caution. We hope that any threat to civilization will be defeated by force of universal moral fury and sustained pressure, not by bombs and bloodshed. Today, as we come together to remember the millions of victims of Nazi barbarity and of the world’s indifference, I ask you to help us to keep this hope alive and to make it true.

Let us all – Jews and Gentiles – take a stand together against tyranny and barbarism, let us destroy them before they’ll swell with power, fed by the wealth of their lands and the blood of their victims. Let us deny them, in the words of Winston Churchill, those ‘lights of perverted science’ with which they plan to unleash a new Dark Age – first on their own captive peoples, and then on the rest of the world. Let us say to them, from here – we remember. We are vigilant. We are determined. We are united. We say to them together– never again.

 We are vigilant. We are determined. We are united. We say to them together– never again. Yes, above all else, yes…

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