Roger Froikin @rlefraim wrote, "THE UNIQUENESS OF THE SHOAH (HOLOCAUST)
Tuesday is Yom HaShoah.
Yes, this is not the date that the World Community uses to commemorate the Holocaust AND FOR A GOOD REASON Because the Shoah has special significance for one people - 1)
the Jewish Nation. Simple? It is because only the Jewish people, spread throught the world were targeted to extinction, though not an enemy of anyone.
There is no more horrible example of how evil humans can be. 2)
There has always been, through human history, the sad fact of cases where one people tried to drive out another or even to massacre another. Struggles over land, over hunting territory, wars between enemies where the threat posed by the loser was to be eliminated forever.
3)
It is somewhat understandable that a nation would want to eliminate an existential threat from another people.
But the Jewish People have not presented any threat to any other nation, to any other group in any other nation.
4)
Jews wanted to live anywhere they could, to work, to prosper, and add to the places in which they lived. Period.
BUT, there has always been the push, in European Christian and Muslim culture to slander and demean those who would not conform and 5)
more so toward the Jews and Judaism whose survival seemed to be an affront to religions that demanded conformity to their beliefs and claimed universal truth.
The Holocaust was the mechanization and cumulation of 2000 years of bigotry and taught hate.
6)
The Shoah of the 1930’s and 1940’s was unique.
It was intended to dehumanize, hunt down, and exterminate a whole people that never presented a threat to anyone.
7)
On the contrary, Jews were an asset to every country in which they lived, yet the designers of the Holocaust (and I mean since 1933, not just since the Wannsee Meeting) were the product of 2000 years of teachings that slandered Jews and 8)
Judaism and left a legacy of irrational hate that a dictator or those that needed a scapegoat or a rallying call for haters, could use for political ends. It was the ultimate in perverted bullying. 9)
So it is not something to be referred to flippantly, to be compared to things that cannot be compared, as to do so it is devalued and cheapened, and the loss of 1/3rd of our people gets brushed off as just another bad thing in history." 10)