One week after the Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, we pause to remember the Holocaust. Why should we care? Isn’t that a Jewish thing from the dusty pages of the past? God’s plans for justice and love on planet Earth intricately involve his chosen people and the spiritual enemy of God will do anything to stop it.

The Horror

On January 27, 1945, soldiers from the Allied armies were astonished as they opened the gates to the Auschwitz Death Camp. Twenty square miles of the city were designed for the internment and murder of Jews (and a few others). Seven thousand fragile prisoners greeted the liberators at the gate. Six hundred prisoners did not make it to the gates; they had been shot by the fleeing Nazis in a last attempt to kill as many Jews as they could. The secrets of the Nazi horrors were only just coming to the light of global awareness. Holocaust Remembrance Day is now memorialized every January 27th (yesterday), the day Auschwitz was liberated. Six million Jews—2 out of every 3 European Jews—lost their lives in the Holocaust. We must not forget.

You may still ask, “But isn’t that the past?” Germany had represented the flowering of modern civilization. How could they stoop to the mire of hell? They were the epitome of humanity, guided by reason and liberated from the tyranny of religious superstition. They had substituted God with science. Through technology and the harnessing of scientific observations, Europe sprinted headlong into the future. The human race needn’t live at the mercy of earth, sky, or fate any longer; we can now control our own destiny and shape our own future through eugenics and racial purity. It was an age of endless optimism in technological advancement based solely on human reason without accepting God and his inconvenient limitations.

Yet science without ethics and progress disconnected from the lessons of history is capable of great evil. The Fuhrer Hitler employed the imaginations of ethnic superiority, the tools of imperialism, and the passions of Christian anti-Semitism brilliantly. [If you want a terrifying and technical account of how these merged, read Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism.]

Auschwitz has rightly become the symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by the Germans in 1940 because of its proximity to infrastructure. It turns out the German mobile killing units, Einsatzgruppen, couldn’t kill undesirable Jews, Gypsies, and Communists fast enough. Bullets were too valuable to waste, and the process of murdering entire towns was too psychologically taxing on the killers.

Through camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka, the Germans had industrialized the process of murder to ruthless, machine-like efficiency—surprising, cruel, menacing efficiency. It took the killing squads about two years to murder over a million Jews. It took only eight weeks to deport Hungary’s Jewish population and murder 565,000 of them.

What do we learn from this?

The moral lesson here is this. If the enlightened German people were capable of this, then everyone is capable of this. Every generation must be vigilant against the potential for this human evil. Racism and vilifying the “outsider” are as old as Cain and Abel. In 1994, close to 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan genocide. We’ve done it before, and we are capable of doing it again.

Ideologies and religious systems are just as capable of tyrannizing people, not based on race or nationality, but on what people “believe.” The Jewish people have suffered under Christian anti-Semitism and Islamic sharia law for over a millennium. For an introduction to the topic of Christian anti-Semitism, read Dr. Michael Brown’s book, Our Hands Are Stained With Blood.

The Uniqueness of Jew Hatred

There is something unique to the hatred of Jews that eclipses all other hatreds, both in ferocity and longevity. The Holocaust is just a crescendo within a long storyline. The severity and mystery of Jew-hating are difficult to escape and impossible to explain. Indeed, it has deep spiritual roots. It makes no rational sense since the Jew is, after all, one of us.

Israel and the Jewish people represent humanity. The Jew is one of us, and none of us, in the same way that Abraham came out from the nations and was separate. To be Jewish is to be of the people and set apart from the people. They represent uniqueness and separation. They are the best and the worst of us. They are the unworthy and the chosen at the same time. They represent God’s gracious plans to call and bless people, not because we deserve it, but because he is loving and faithful.  

Yet, looking at them, we see a mirror pointing to our own hearts. Our jealousies, judgments, stereotypes, bigotry, and need to control are projected upon them. They become our scapegoat. The Germans called them vermin because that’s what was in the German heart. The medieval Church called them Christ-killers because that intolerance was in their heart.

The presence of anti-Semitism is one of the thermometers to measure how humane or intolerant, godless, or God-honoring a society is. How does a society treat the outsider? The exceptional? The disparaged and unworthy? The human heart has always been filled with prejudice, stereotypes, and division. Rationalism and education can soften its impact, but it is, at the core, a sickness in the heart. Like the influenza, it is a sickness we need to treat seasonally. For more on this, read our article Fight the New Infection, anti-Semitism.

Something Shifted After October 7th, 2023

On October 7th, 2023, Hamas crossed the Israeli border in a wave of terror and mutilated, massacred, raped, and savagely filmed the indiscriminate torment of over a thousand innocent Jews and foreigners. Radical Islamic terror organizations like Hamas continually promise to rid the earth of the Jews and then act on their demonic promises. We’ve previously discussed Islam’s lethal dose of anti-Semitism in our article Israel, Hamas, Jihad, and Justice.

The international response has been practically silent. The lack of support on American campuses has been haunting. Some Jews are asking if the golden age of American Jewry is over. Listen to a candid but hopeful interview with Rabbi David Wolpe. The Boycott, Sanction, and Divestment movement is an economic platform for racial discrimination against Jews and Israel. The intimidation of Jewish college students on the campuses of our most elite Universities is disturbing and perverse. It is discriminating against individuals based on a group identity. If you think the Holocaust is only an event in the past, then you haven’t understood this enduring spiritual evil and how it is manifesting, at the moment, through the contemporary Islamic agenda. Evil, prejudice, discrimination, and ideological imperialism are all real and active forces in the world and must be contended against.

So, what do we do?

Firstly, Christians need to understand our own history and theological marginalization and hatred of the Jews. We need to change our language and dismantle our own prejudices and spiritual superiority to reflect our Jewish Messiah’s intercession, humility, and forgiveness for his own people. Remember that Jesus is Jewish. Hatred of the Jew is hatred of our own savior’s family that he died to save. To not weep over the Holocaust is to fail to appreciate the depth of our own sin towards our brothers and sisters and to fail to perceive what the savior’s kingdom is all about.

Second, Christians need to be aware of Islam’s agenda currently masquerading as a “liberate the oppressed Palestinian” narrative. Underneath the movement, there is the insidious “blame and punish all Jews” solution. Hamas is not interested in peace. They are racially and religiously discriminatory and care only to destroy Jewish lives and the Jewish state.

Thirdly, the international community needs to call the Palestinians to a higher ethical, moral, and financial standard. The Palestinian leadership is the primary oppressor of the Palestinian people. Blaming Israel for everything has nursed an almost incurable victim mentality that is destroying their people from within. The international community has enabled this dysfunction by investing unspeakable amounts of foreign aid without accountability. This money has been squandered into rejuvenating terror campaigns instead of building infrastructure to help their people. Loving the Palestinians starts with stopping the Jew-blaming.

Fourthly, Christians must have the courage to speak out on behalf of truth. In Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s book, The Spiral of Silence, she investigates how the social cost of speaking rises when people fail to speak out. As the price rises, fewer speak out, which causes the price to rise further. In that way, the Christian German community remained mute in the face of the Jewish catastrophe.

Discrimination and racism are a restless evil that infects humanity. It’s not a problem of the past; as long as there are people on earth, it will endure. Jew hatred is a unique and enduring form of evil that must be remembered, recognized, and contended with today. The severity and mystery of Jew-hating are difficult to escape and impossible to explain. At its core, it is a restless and ancient evil that seeks to destroy God’s plan and God’s chosen people. Through Abraham’s seed, God plans to bless all nations. We build God’s kingdom of love and truth by standing against the evils of Jew-hating and supporting the unique identity and gifts God has given that people group.

Tags: evil, hatred, jealousy, racism, jewish, shoah, bigotry, october 7th, holocaust, anti-semitism, yad vashem, radical islam, bds, pro palestinian, jew blaming