Dear Sir,

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking 78 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp.

Reflecting Israel’s advocacy, in November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the date of January 27 for annually commemorating the memory of the Jewish and other minorities slaughtered during the Holocaust.

Also called the Shoah, the Holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored murder of six million Jews and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War. Reprehensibly, two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population perished, including 1.5 million children. (Sources: Yad Vashem, US Holocaust Memorial Museum.)

Regrettably, a vital lesson missed from “humanity’s darkest hour” is the societal danger from unrestrained hatred. Here history proved Jews were the proverbial canary in the coalmine then of the toxin of the Nazis’ ethnic hatred. For in 1933, the emerging danger posed by Adolf Hitler to the world was unclear. But, as noted by The Jerusalem Post, “when Jews became unsafe in Hitler’s Germany, that was a very clear sign of the toxins of hatred seeping into the world – toxins that tragically went unnoticed until too late, and which eventually engulfed humanity in a war that led to the death of 60 million people”.

This brings me to this letter’s objective: I am respectfully requesting that The Royal Gazette adopts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism already used across the world. For, amid the rising tide of vitriolic online expressions of racial hatred, this resource serves as an essential definitional tool for determining contemporary manifestations of both Jew and Israeli hatred.

Finally, and unlike media censorship surrounding the 1943 Bermuda Conference, Bermuda’s media can play a role in thwarting online expressions of antisemitism.

TONY REID

Pembroke