Who is protecting us?
WJC
Executive Vice President Maram Stern in the German newspaper
Juedische-Allgemeine.
It sounds
like a rhetorical question: Is it okay to insult the elderly? Or to mock and
threaten Holocaust survivors? Of course not, any reasonable person would agree.
There are laws, there are rules. But laws and rules are only as good as their
implementation. The sober answer in reality is you can do it all, even when
you re not allowed to, because there are almost never any consequences.
Everything is lacking, from prevention and education to prosecution.
The current case of Lily Ebert makes this particularly clear. The Auschwitz survivor, a venerable 97 years old, started working with her great-grandson Dov Forman to provide information about the Holocaust on the social media platform TikTok. Recently, when she simply wished her followers a peaceful weekend during the Hamas attacks on Israel, she was met with a wave of hate and insults from anonymous people on th
“I also can no longer abide the talk anymore that "both sides" have to give in. There cannot be two sides when it comes to antisemitism. There cannot even be neutrality," writes WJC Executive Vice President Maram Stern.
Across Europe, antisemitism is sharply increasing 10 Feb 2021 share this on
.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th was commemorated with many worthy events in countries around the world, albeit while observing COVID-19 social-distancing measures. But can people, who are justifiably worried about their futures because of the pandemic, honestly believe that because 76-years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, antisemitism is no longer a problem?
I do not think so. Right now, conspiracy myths that were believed to have been debunked long ago are reappearing. Victims of the Shoah are mocked without consequences; at demonstrations in Germany and Austria against social-distancing requirements, coronavirus deniers waved banners reading, Vaccination makes you free, invoking the infamous German phrase cast in iron over the gates of Auschwitz, “
Commitments made on Holocaust Remembrance Day must also extend to Iranian threats against the Jewish state 01 Feb 2021 share this on
Below is a full
translation of an op-ed written by WJC Executive Vice President Maram
Stern inJüdische
Allgemeine.
A few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, when politicians
from all over the world publicly committed to the idea of Never
again, one country stands out. In Iran, its parliament is currently
discussing a law that would oblige the government to annihilate the State of
Israel by 2040.
The singularity of the Holocaust forbids us from making frivolous
comparisons with Nazism, but in this case the comparison must be made because,
"Skeptics may object that too many of the measures are non-binding and hence perhaps difficult to enforce, but their ramifications will indeed be felt," writes WJC Executive Vice President Maram Stern in Die Welt.