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An Act of Remembrance - and a Remembrance to Act
[National Post-Canada] Irwin Cotler - The genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the industry of death, but because of the state sanctioned ideology of hate - the teaching of contempt of the other. As the Canadian courts affirmed in upholding the constitutionality of anti-hate legislation, "the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers - it began with words." Today we are witnessing a state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, whose epicenter is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, which denies the Nazi Holocaust as he incites to a Middle Eastern one. This is not only an assault on Jewish memory but a violation of the prohibition against the public incitement to genocide. Never again will we be silent in the face of evil. May this International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but let it be a remembrance to act, which it must be.