COMMENTARY: Denying Bigotry Doesn’t Make It Go Away

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Some recent actions of the United Nations General Assembly and the Virginia House of Delegates provide proof that the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and the shame of 250 years of slavery in America continue to haunt the world’s collective conscience and memory. On Jan. 26, […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Some recent actions of the United Nations General Assembly and the Virginia House of Delegates provide proof that the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and the shame of 250 years of slavery in America continue to haunt the world’s collective conscience and memory.

On Jan. 26, 103 U.N. members unanimously adopted a resolution condemning Holocaust denial. The U.S. introduced the statement that called upon all countries “unreservedly to reject any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, either in full or in part, or any activities to this end.”


The resolution also called upon the global community to create educational programs to guarantee that future generations will learn the facts of the anti-Jewish genocide long after the remaining Holocaust survivors have died.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon voiced “his strong desire to see this fundamental principle respected both in rhetoric and in practice.” French President Jacques Chirac, whose country has economic ties with Iran, was much more blunt: “(Holocaust denial) is a crime against the truth, the absolute perversion of the soul.”

Yet the need for such a resolution more than 60 years after the destruction of Nazi Germany and the conclusion of World War II is a bitter commentary about the realities of today’s world.

The passage of the resolution was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on Jan. 27, 1945, but U.N. delegates were fully aware the action was a direct response to last December’s obscene Holocaust-denial conference in Iran. That vile spectacle, similar in many ways to a Hitler-led 1930s Nazi party rally, was convened by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has continually called for the physical destruction of the state of Israel.

Dan Gillerman, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, wryly noted, “The president of Iran is in fact saying: `There really was no Holocaust, but just in case, we shall finish the job.”’

Only Iran formally disassociated itself from the U.N. resolution, but 88 other countries _ many of them Arab or Muslim _ abstained from the vote, a whopping 46 percent of the total U.N. membership; truly a tragic statistic.

A week after the U.N. vote, the Virginia House of Delegates in Richmond unanimously adopted a resolution expressing “profound regret” for the Old Dominion’s key role in the African and Caribbean slave trade that began in 1619 and did not end until the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.


Four years ago, Virginia House GOP leaders reintroduced an earlier ceremony of saluting the Virginia flag and reciting a pledge of allegiance composed by a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Critics of the pledge called it a throwback to the state’s racially segregated past, and the ceremony ended in 2004 when Democratic members of the House of Delegates refused to participate.

Like the U.N. resolution, this year’s action in Virginia was also linked to a significant anniversary: the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony by white settlers.

Immediately after the resolution was adopted, its chief sponsor, Delegate A. Donald McEachin, a great-grandson of a slave, said: “There is a beautiful product at the end. Virginia had nothing to do with the end of slavery. It had everything to do with the beginning of slavery.”

But sadly, even in 2007 an official apology for human slavery was not without heated debate and ugly words. Del. Frank D. Hargrove sparked a controversy by telling blacks they “should get over” slavery.

Hargrove, a descendant of the Huguenots who suffered religious persecution in France, added, “Are we going to force Jews to apologize for killing Christ?” That remark sparked fierce negative reaction from Christian and Jewish political and religious leaders who cited the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the recent statements of other Christian church bodies that also rejected the ancient deicide canard.

Hargrove backpedaled from his biased statements about blacks and Jews and became a key sponsor of another resolution that urged Virginians to commemorate “Juneteenth,” the date when Union troops freed the last slaves in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865.


Denying or minimizing the sins of the Holocaust and slavery doesn’t make either go away _ it’s an invitation for even more hatred, bigotry and prejudice.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

KRE/PH END RUDIN

Editors: To obtain a photo of Rabbi Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

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