In the jam-packed ballroom where the Zionist Organization of America held its annual gala dinner this week, the Holocaust was breaking news, a developing story, tomorrow’s banner headlines, an ongoing catastrophe that is somehow happening simultaneously, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Although there was no mention of the Holocaust in the program handed out to participants, it was the underlying theme, the common thread, the text and the subtext that connected the speakers to each other and to their attentive listeners. Small wonder that people in the audience were handing out black and yellow pins resembling the “Jude” patches worn by Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and on them the inscription, repeatedly uttered as a sacred vow from the podium, of “never again”.
It wasn’t just an analytical comparison between Europe in the 1930’s and the state of the world 80 years later that characterized the evening, nor the repeated comparisons – not completely groundless, one has to admit – between Adolf Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There was palpable peril, a clear and present danger, an inevitability, almost, of a Jewish genocide in the making as “millions of Jews are on the precipice of losing their lives” as US Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, once a leading candidate to be the Republican presidential candidate, preferred to put it.
Glenn Beck, the main guest of honor and the clear-cut local hero, held the crowd in enraptured silence for over an hour as he travelled seamlessly between then and now, between the Weimar Republic and present-day America, between the Nazi regime and the Caliphate that “will destroy Israel and the Western way of life”, between World War II and World War III, between the Dutch boy whose warnings of impending doom were ignored even as his grandfather was pushed on the train heading East and those today, like Beck himself, who understands that “the time is now”, that there are only 18 months left to change the world and that “when the window closes - you’re gone,” as he told his Jewish listeners.
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/for-more-and-more-jews-the-holocaust-is-breaking-news-1.397296
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