Mr. Speaker, today we commemorate the 85th anniversary of the bravery of Canadians at Vimy Ridge. It is also international Holocaust Remembrance Day where Jews in concert with our fellow citizens remember the worst genocide of the 20th century, crimes too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened.
It was a genocidal anti-Semitism where, as Elie Wiesel put it, “not all victims were Jews but all Jews were victims”. The murdered 6 million Jews and 11 million non-Jews were not just an abstraction, a statistic, but unto each person there was a name, there was an identity. Each person was a universe.
As scholars of the Holocaust recently warned, we once again see an eliminationist anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head. As the supreme court reminded us, the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers. It began with words.
We trust that the legacy of Holocaust Remembrance Day, of never again, of justice for all, will be the universal testament and legacy for all peoples everywhere.