On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is tempting to simply recount the ways “holocaust” and “genocide” have been bastardized to be used against Israel and Jews by people who proudly proclaim their intention to kill every last one of us—Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
While groups like the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) echo the false claims that Israel is committing genocide.
The same tropes are used against the United States as Donald Trump, with his policies being compared to Hitler and the Nazi regime. For instance, a disgusting political cartoon showed Jews being herded into cattle cars for their trip to the concentration camp above a drawing of what appear men—perhaps deportees from the United States—boarding an airplane for a trip back to their home countries. The comparison couldn’t be missed.
Comedian Larry David penned a screed in The New York Times last week about fellow comedian Bill Maher’s dinner with President Donald Trump called “My Dinner with Adolf.”
And former Vice President Al Gore said recently, “I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” But Gore did it anyhow.
You know there are more, but for the moment, let’s stick with the current lesson of the Holocaust: how Western governments have allowed Jew-hatred, sometimes disguised as anti-Israelism and hatred of the West, to proliferate.
As I wrote in a piece last year about Kristallnacht, “Never again” is a pledge of Jewish defiance and Israel its embodiment. From the physical borders of the state and from Entebbe to Amsterdam, wherever Jews are threatened, Israel has taken on the role of defender of the Jewish people. If one is an optimist, “Never again” was also a way for the European community to verbalize that it understood the magnitude of its crimes in World War II. Repeating the mantra, Europe pledged it would never let it happen again, and its allies—primarily, the United States, Canada, Australia and others—were partners in that pledge.
The first is right, admirable and proper. The second is either untrue or a broken promise.
But liberal, democratic Western governments have become cowardly and are unwilling to defend the liberal, democratic principles they promote on paper. They talk the talk. King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands said “Never again” and apologized for the Amsterdam pogrom last year, but so what?
Every major city in Western Europe has seen hordes of radicals marching, calling for the destruction of Israel and often for the killing of Jews. In Australia, on the other side of the world, “Gas the Jews” was written on signs in Sydney.
In major American cities, Jews are attacked—sometimes as individuals identifiable as Jews by their clothing, sometimes when they gather in groups. Jewish communal buildings and some American universities are dangerous places for Jews as well. Jewish-owned or kosher food establishments have been vandalized in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
It isn’t about Israel. It is about Jews and the wider Western construct, as made clear by pro-Hamas, anti-American graffiti in Washington.
Nothing but Western liberal cowardice explains it.
Canada in 2025 has joined the antisemites in spades. A report by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism in October 2024 documented a 670% increase in antisemitic incidents in Canada in the year after the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as compared to the prior year. These incidents included “violent attacks such as shootings targeting Jewish institutions and arson attacks targeting schools, synagogues and other community institutions.” Jews make up a little more than 1% of Canada’s population but are victims of 70% of religious hate crimes.
The Trump administration has made it clear that radical, Islamist voices on college campuses will not have free rein with their visas. The colleges that support them, to the detriment of the civil rights of Jewish and pro-Israel students, will not have free rein with taxpayer money.
Harvard University is moaning about the cut in taxpayer funds while it sits on a $52 billion endowment fund. More than $1 billion was cut from Cornell and $790 million from Northwestern universities amid civil-rights concerns. Federal funding to other universities like Brown, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania has also been cut. Student visas have been revoked, including for Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, among many others. Both claim to be nice guys. But both were prominent figures in Columbia’s coalition of anti-Israel protesters, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD).
The U.S. State Department said that CUAD-led protests on campus included the harassment of Jewish students, an unauthorized protest encampment, building takeovers, clashes with police and property damage. CUAD has called for the “eradication of Western civilization,” distributed Hamas material on campus, backed calls for “violence against ‘Zionists’ ” and said that “violence is the only path.”
According to the New York Post: “In two separate videos filmed at the Columbia campus, Mahdawi can be heard leading a crowd in a chant of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ ”
So, who is being castigated? Canada for descending into the swamp or the Trump administration for taking up the challenge of defending Jewish students and American values?
This is the lesson of Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025.
