TEL AVIV – Radical Muslims and liberal elites continue to perpetuate the anti-Semitism witnessed during the Nazi regime, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday night at a ceremony for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Seventy-one years ago the Nazi regime was stopped, but the anti-Semitism and the lies didn’t die with Hitler in the bunker in Berlin,” Netanyahu said.
“Today millions of people in the Muslim world read and hear terrible lies about the Jewish people. They are told that the Jews are descendants of monkeys and pigs. They are told that Jews drink the blood of their enemies from goblets.”
While radical Islam and the Arab world are guilty of incitement against Jews, Netanyahu said, “in recent years it has been joined by incitement that is no less poisonous from the Western world – British parliamentarians, senior Swedish officials and opinion makers in France.”
Today’s anti-Semitism has made for some strange bedfellows, Netanyahu said. “The elites who represent human progress have partnered with barbaric fundamentalists, the persecutors of women and gays, destroyers of cultural treasures.”
“They spread propaganda against us, the only democracy in the Middle East which maintains the values of progress and human dignity.”
Netanyahu also attacked the UN for a recent UNESCO resolution that wholly ignored any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. “An international body rewrites history,” he said. “That is voluntary ignorance. It is addiction to the lie and its dissemination throughout the world as fact. Precisely as the haters of Israel have done over the generations.”
He called on Israel supporters around the world to “fight against the propaganda against Israel on social networks,” and h said the only antidote way to anti-Semitism is to “fight the lies, increase our strength and build our country.”
“In the virtual world, it is easy to spread the most primitive propaganda using the most advanced technologies,” he said. “But it is also possible to use those same technologies to disseminate the truth. Those technologies are in the pockets of all of you.”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin also gave an address at the ceremony.
“In another generation, there will not be anyone left living among us who survived that hell, and who could say, ‘I was there, I saw the horror with my own eyes,'” Rivlin said.
“It is time to conduct some soul-searching before you. We must admit that we were wrong. Holocaust survivors have never received the respect they deserved. Even today, the State of Israel does not take every measure it can in order to take care of the Holocaust survivors.”
“I came here today on behalf of the people of Israel, on behalf of the State of Israel, and I ask each and every one of you, before it is too late, for forgiveness,” he added.
Holocaust survivors lit remembrance torches at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum where the ceremony took place.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.