The famous Holocaust scholar Elie Wiesel once stated, "The universe of concentration camps by its design lies out if not beyond history. Its vocabulary belongs to it alone." Like most young Jewish people, I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, always hearing about the brutal suffering that the Nazis imposed upon the Jewish people from the older people that surrounded me. My father was born in 1939 and remembered what happened then very well, as if it was yesterday, as relatives of ours fled Nazi Germany and told us what happened upon their arrival in America.
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For this reason, I believe the Holocaust is a unique historical event and always get incredibly angry when people try to trivialize the brutality of the Holocaust by turning other historical events into a "holocaust." No, I am sorry. There is only one Holocaust and it was perpetrated against the Jewish people, and no one else. The level of the Nazi brutality was so horrific that it has no parallel in human history.
While Jews during the Spanish Inquisition could escape death through conversion, under Nazi rule, that option was closed to them. In fact, even having one Jewish grandparent was enough under Nazi rule to designate one to be slaughtered.
Throughout the history of humanity, there was no other genocide that was cruel to this level. Yes, the Rwanda Genocide was also very cruel and barbaric, as was what the American colonists did to the Native Americans and what ISIS did to the Yezidis and Christians. I have much sympathy for the victims of these horrific genocides. However, it was still no holocaust. It should be stressed that it is absolutely forbidden to call any other historical event "a holocaust." No self-respecting individual should do that. Yet unfortunately, in recent times, there are those who defile the sanctity of the memory of the Holocaust and turn other historical events into a holocaust.
In recent times, an article was published in The National Interest that argued the following related to Israel's support for Azerbaijan during the Second Karabakh War: "Many Armenians – and ordinary outside observers – focus on the moral argument: The victims of one Holocaust not only turning a blind eye toward but also selling weapons to the potential perpetrators of another."
Such arguments are a blatant insult to the Jewish people. Some could even call it anti-Semitic. What happened during the Second Karabakh War was not a "potential holocaust" in the slightest. After all, Armenians were not packed like sardines into trains, nor was their hair shaved off nor were numbers engraved into their bodies. Nobody turned Armenian body parts into soap. In fact, killing Armenian civilians was not even the strategic objective of the Azerbaijani government. Rather, they merely sought to reclaim lands.
As the Russian empire evaporated in 1918, the Armenians who remained in Azerbaijani territory took advantage of the power vacuum left behind and massacred tens of thousands of Azerbaijani men, women and children in Guba city. The precise number isn't known, but 60,000 is the minimum believed to be slaughtered by Armenian militants.
The time has come for people to stop desecrating the memory of the Holocaust. Our people have suffered enough and should not have to tolerate such blatant anti-Semitic disrespect. Six million Jews did not perish during the Holocaust merely so decades later, commentators could transform regular wartime suffering into a "potential holocaust" in a vile attempt to defame the State of Israel for seeking to promote friendly relations with a moderate Muslim country, who is our eyes and ears in Tehran. Any decent human being should respect the memory of the Holocaust in the history books and refuse to participate in such propaganda.
Rachel Avraham is a political analyst who works for the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research, Public Relations and Human Rights. She is the author of "Women and Jihad: Debating Palestinian Female Suicide Bombings in the American, Israeli and Arab Media."
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