UNITED NATIONS – The president of Israel compared the brutalities of ISIS and the Nigerian group Boko Haram to the Nazi genocide, declaring the world must "fight without mercy" the terrorists who kill under the banner of Islam.
President Reuven Rivlin invoked the prophet Jeremiah, the Armenian genocide and today's atrocities in Syria and Nigeria in a wide-ranging address at a United Nations ceremony marking the international day in commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust.
He delivered his speech in Hebrew, declaring, "Only in one's mother tongue can one speak one's own truth."
Rivlin recounted the story of a member of the Jewish underground who, during the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915, asked who would be next after the Armenians and if the prophet Jeremiah wept for the Armenians, too, or only for his own people (Jeremiah 9:1).
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History answered the first question: The Jews were next.
As for the second question, "Shall we weep only for own nation's tragedy" or "for the tragedy of wounded children from Syria; for the tragedy of the young men and women from Europe, from the Middle East, from Africa and from Asia?" Rivlin asked. "This question still awaits an answer."
For the past 10 years, the U.N. has commemorated the victims of the Holocaust on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The snow emergency in New York caused it to be delayed this year.
Rivlin said the day is not just about the murder of Europe's Jews.
"There has been no atrocity in the history of the human race to compare in its viciousness, its scope and its magnitude, with the Holocaust of the Jewish People. However, the slaughter of nations and of communities was not born in Nazi Germany and did not cease with the opening of the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Buchenwald."
Today, Rivlin said, "the fundamentalist viper is raising its ugly head."
He said "evil is not the property of any specific religion," country or ethnic group.
"Islam encompasses, under its enormous wings, victims of persecution and of terrorism, while at the same time it also serves as the banner of the attackers," he said. "The victims consist of hundreds of thousands of Muslim men and women, together with Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and Druze, each one of them a helpless victim of vicious barbarity, of wicked terrorism that has nothing at all to do with the religion or with the words of the prophet. It is our duty and our responsibility to fight without mercy against the attackers; just as it is our duty and our responsibility to protect all the victims."
Finally, Rivlin challenged the members of the U.N. General Assembly to live up to the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
"We must ask ourselves honestly, 'Is our struggle, the struggle of this assembly against genocide effective enough?'" Rivlin posited. "Was it effective enough then in Bosnia? Was it effective in preventing the killing in Khojaly? Of Afghans by the Taliban? Is it effective enough today in Syria? Or in the face of the atrocities of Boko Haram in Nigeria?"
"As I conclude," Rivlin said. "I would like to return to the words of the ancient and sorrowful Jewish Yizkor memorial prayer for victims of the Holocaust: 'Judge of the earth, please remember the rivers of blood shed like water, the blood of fathers and sons, the blood of mothers and their babies.' … May the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, and the memory of the persecuted and the tortured be engraved upon our hearts forever."