Mr. Speaker, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jews all over the world in concert with their fellow citizens commemorate crimes against humanity that are too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened; a genocidal racism in which as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel put it, “Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims”; where biology was inescapably destiny. Today we remember that the Holocaust is not an abstraction in which six million Jews and 11 million non-Jews were murdered, but where onto each person murdered there is a name, an identity.
I would like to commend l'Assemblée nationale du Québec for unanimously enacting legislation proclaiming today, May 2 officially as Holocaust Remembrance Day in Quebec. I trust that the lesson of Holocaust Remembrance Day, “Never Again” and “human rights for all”, will be the universal testament and legacy for all peoples everywhere.