|
Trending Topics
|
The Mission of the United Nations Is All-Out War Against Genocide
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Israeli President Reuven Rivlin - Israeli President Reuven Rivlin addressed the UN General Assembly on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday: "In the valley of death of Europe it was the Jewish people who were the victims of a methodical, brutal, perverted and murderous extermination. Six million people, one third of my nation, about a million and a half of them children, were killed, slaughtered, suffocated, gassed to death, buried alive, burnt, massacred, died from hunger, from thirst, from disease, and other gruesome kinds of death, in the most horrifying crime ever committed in the history of the human race." "Now, in our own time, when the fundamentalist viper is raising its ugly head, we must remember that evil is not the property of any specific religion....My father, Yosef Yoel Rivlin, of blessed memory, devoted his life to translating the Quran into Hebrew, believing in the importance of dialogue and the cultural significance of the Quran for all the children of Abraham. As my father's son, I too believe implicitly that neither the West, nor the Christians, nor the Jews are at war with Islam." "Islam encompasses, under its enormous wings, victims of persecution and of terrorism, while at the same time it also serves as the banner of the attackers. The victims consist of hundreds of thousands of Muslim men and women, together with Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and Druze, each one of them a helpless victim of vicious barbarity, of wicked terrorism that has nothing at all to do with the religion or with the words of the Prophet. It is our duty and our responsibility to fight without mercy against the attackers; just as it is our duty and our responsibility to protect all the victims." "'Never again' is not just a pledge by the survivors, and also not a pledge by the world only to the members of the Jewish People. 'Never again' is, first and foremost, the very essence of this United Nations organization, it is its mission, it is the primary and principal rationale for its existence."