Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, created by the United Nations – as Tal Keinan points out – to remember and honor the 6 million Jews and millions of others murdered on orders of the Nazis who ruled Germany from 1933 through the end of World War II in 1945.
 
Unfortunately, too many Americans not only don’t remember, thanks to our inept public schools, they never learned about the Holocaust in the first place ~
 

Keinan expanded on the importance of never forgetting the horrors of ethnic genocide that mankind is capable of – and reminds us of the need for continuing vigilance ~

(A)anti-Semitism isn’t a short-lived scourge that existed only during the brief period when the Nazis held power. Hatred of Jews has afflicted people of diverse ethnicities, religions and political views for 2,000 years. It should surprise nobody that it afflicts some leaders today.

 
I flew fighter jets in the Israeli Air Force for 18 years. Many of my missions targeted Hezbollah surface-to-surface missile launchers and their crews. The missiles they fired were almost invariably aimed at Jewish civilians in Israel – my neighbors, my children.
 

The terrorist missiles were fired in the service of overtly anti-Semitic, genocidal ideologies. This is still the case today. The only reason these particular anti-Semites have not been as successful as the Nazis is that a Jewish army now stands between them and their intended victims.
 
This has sadly not been the case for the rest of Middle Eastern Jewry over the past century. Jewish populations from around the region have disappeared.
 
The ancient Jewish community of Baghdad in Iraq – more than 1,000 years older than Islam itself – was violently persecuted and then expelled in its entirety.
 
Even Judaism’s holiest cities – the old city of Jerusalem and Hebron – were ethnically cleansed of 100 percent of their Jews during Jordan’s 19-year rule in the West Bank that ended in 1967.
 
There are virtually no Middle Eastern Jews today outside of the one Jewish state of Israel, which absorbed nearly all of the region’s 1 million Jewish refugees. It is Jewish sovereignty, and the Israel Defense Forces, that have kept these Jews alive […]

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Dr. Martin Luther King – a devoted friend of Israel and the Jewish people, whose memory America has honored with a national holiday – said it best when he condemned all forms of hatred: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”