Never Again

After 3,000 years of anti-Semitic hatred, pogroms, genocides, and a Holocaust that nearly exterminated the Jews, how can anyone fault Israel and the Jewish people for defending themselves?

Today, October 7, 2024, marks the one-year anniversary of the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Predictably, media platforms are flooded with conflicting messages, some defending but most denouncing Israel and the Jews. Astonishingly, vast swaths of liberals and progressives, who previously supported Jews and Jewish causes, and who pronounce themselves as defenders of the defenseless, protectors of the downtrodden and discriminated against, and champions of minorities oppressed by majorities, have lost their moral compass—along with their minds—and turned against Israel and the Jewish people…and in some cases even celebrating the rape, torture, and murder of innocent Jewish civilians in the name of “social justice,” which is neither social nor justice.

I am not Jewish. I have no personal stake in defending Jews or Israel. But I am an historian (and a rational empathetic human being), and I wrote a book on Holocaust denial—Denying History—which took me deep into the 3000-year history of anti-Semitism, pogroms and genocides, and especially into the Nazi attempt to complete what so many before had so passionately desired, namely the complete and utter extermination of the Jewish people. While I recognize the value and validity of criticisms of the Israeli government and its policies over the past 75 years—no different in principle from criticisms of any sovereign nation—monitoring social media over the past year I am sickened by the unmistakable fact that it isn’t just fringe neo-Nazi skinheads and oleaginous Jew haters who, while denying the Holocaust, wish Hitler had “finished the job”. Today, millions of mainstream liberals and leftists cannot seem to discriminate between murderous terrorists and innocent civilians.

(If your propensity is to flip the script and accuse Israel of failing to discriminate between Hamas terrorists and innocent Palestinians, keep in mind that Hamas invaded Israel, and that is the consequence of starting a war. If you don’t want to face the consequences, don’t start a war. Would anyone in their right mind accuse the allies of failing to discriminate Nazi soldiers from German citizens after Hitler invaded Poland and declared war on France, Britain, the US and the USSR? Or, if a more domestic example would help to make the point, if Mexican forces crossed the border into San Diego and murdered 1200 American citizens, would anyone object to or quibble with the U.S. military responding with full force to defeat the invaders?)

That’s where we are in 2024, a state of society I never imagined could arise again. How naive I was. There is little doubt in my mind that there are now tens, hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of millions of people around the world who, while recognizing the principle of national sovereignty and the universal application of rights to all people that include—as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the right to life, liberty, and personal security, freedom from discrimination, slavery, torture, and degrading treatment, freedom from arbitrary arrest and exile, and freedom from interference with privacy, family, and home (to name just a few of those rights violated by Hamas against innocent Jewish lives one year ago today) would deny those to the Jews and the sovereign nation of Israel.

The phrase “never again” was first used by liberated prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of the Second World War, and it was popularized by the Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane in his 1971 book Never Again! A Program for Survival.

Today, in so many words, “Never Again” means (or at least should mean):

If you rape, torture, hold hostage, murder, and otherwise try to exterminate the Jewish people again, we are going to so utterly destroy you that you will wish you never even thought of harassing us. We will turn the full power of our state—as would any sovereign nation so unjustly attacked—to assure that this will never happen again. You have been warned. Take heed. If you try to eliminate us, we will end you.

But, really, how unusual is such a declaration anyway? Recall the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his address to Congress and the American people on December 8, 1941:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Here is what Winston Churchill told the British people on June 4, 1940:

We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.

Never Again.

If words are not enough to convey the message, let your eyes scan through these photographs from October 7, 2023, and from the Nazi genocide against the Jews, and ask yourself, “would this be enough to motivate me to say ‘Never Again’…and mean it?”

Although Edmund Burke never said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” the sentiment is a poignant one, even as what he did say (in his 1770 “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents”) conveys the same message:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

And so I close with one final image, this from the liberation of the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, April, 1945, showing General Dwight Eisenhower and a party of high-ranking U.S. Army officers, including Generals Bradley, Patton, and Eddy, as they view the charred remains of prisoners that were burned upon a section of railroad track during the evacuation of the camp. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington:

The things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.