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An annual remembrance of the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps was protested on Monday by Palestine flag-flying activists, who confronted and shouted at attendees.
Is anything sacred anymore?
Be informed, not misled.
An annual remembrance of the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps was protested on Monday by Palestine flag-flying activists, who confronted and shouted at attendees.
Thousands of people attended the 36th ‘March of the Living’ event on Monday. It's normally a silent march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the German death camps built in occupied Poland during the Second World War. These are key sites of the Holocaust. Among those at Auschwitz yesterday, Germany’s Die Welt broadsheet newspaper reports, were 55 survivors of the Holocaust, survivors of the October 7th Israel massacre, and relatives of those taken hostage by Hamas.
The march was protested by Palestine activists, with slogans shouted and some marchers confronted. Organizers of the march say the counter-protesters saw the event as a ‘perverse’ opportunity to “express their hatred against Israel and the Jewish people”. This serves as a “timely reminder of the importance of Holocaust education and remembrance”, they said.
An organizer of the counter-protest cited by the Associated Press, Omar Faris, is quoted to have said: “Through this protest, we want to say that we bow down to the victims of the Holocaust too… At the same time, we demand an end to war, an end to genocide.”
The Times of Israel published this headline:
At Auschwitz march, participants rally around concern over hostages and antisemitism.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the March of the Living sees unprecedented political action with calls for the release of those held in Gaza, as well as some anti-Israel provocation.
The Times reported, "The counter-protest, loud as it may have been, was dwarfed by the official event, with nine activists shouting at an estimated 8,000 attendees. It reports the protesters accused Israel of causing “another genocide,” shouting: “Are you not ashamed of what your government is doing?”
Is nothing sacred anymore?
The Times says, "A shofar call rang out at Auschwitz on Monday, signaling the start of the annual commemorative march by thousands of Jews to Birkenau, part of the former Nazi death camp, situated about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away.
Yet instead of the solemn silence that usually characterizes this moment of the March of the Living through the camp near Krakow, the shofar prompted a burst of chants by dozens of students from Canada.
“Bring them back,” chanted members of the Canadian delegation, sandwiched between the Belgian and the Panamanian ones, as they began to march. They held up posters of hostages held by terrorists in Gaza, and the chants spread across the delegations, triggering applause from participants.
The Times of Israel explains, "This strong focus on the aftermath of October 7 at the start of this year’s Holocaust commemoration event at Auschwitz, held on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, continued to define the event throughout."
It continues, "It reflected both Israel’s centrality to how Jews commemorate the Holocaust, and the incorporation of the trauma felt by many Jews over October 7 into the greater, defining one caused by the Nazi genocide."
This year’s March of the Living, in which some 8,000 people participated, “holds profound significance, as the horrors of the past intertwine with the present ongoing nightmare faced by […] Israel,” Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, the president of International March of the Living, said in a statement.
En route to the ceremony, protesters with Palestinian flags and a sound amplification system staged the first anti-Israel rally in the March of the Living’s 36 years of existence.
They accused Israel of perpetrating “another genocide,” speaking from a parking lot overlooking the halfway point of the march.
Is anything sacred anymore?
When something as horrific as the Holocaust is used as a platform for political activism, it should give pause to all of us and cause us to wonder if anything is sacred anymore?
In 1997, Celine Dion recorded an unreleased song titled "Is Nothing Sacred Anymore? It was later released.
Even if the deepest relationships are not sacred anymore, she asked, "What can be sacred?"
The first verse:
If a love as strong as ours
Couldn't make it all the way
Can anything make sense at all?
If a love so deep and true
Couldn’t stand the test of time
Then Mount Everest could slide and Jerusalem could fall."
She asks, "Is a promise something people used to keep?"
Takeaway
When Trump was president and Gen. John Kelly was his chief of staff, Kelly made these comments, lamenting that nothing was sacred anymore.
“When I was a kid growing up,” he said, “a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That’s obviously not the case anymore. Life, the dignity of life, was sacred. That’s gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well.”
The cynical reaction of the media to the general’s remarks about the sacredness of a soldier’s death only confirmed the truth of his observation. It seems there is nothing that cannot be turned into talking points for the liberal agenda.
In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx observed the effects of this Enlightenment mentality when he wrote about capitalism’s tendency to destroy the sacred. “All that is sacred must be profaned,” he said. In a world where nothing is sacred, he believed life would and should be entirely de-sanctified. True to his militant atheism, Marx did not see this as a negative development but rather as something that would facilitate the condition of equality and equity. Inclusion.
The suppression of the sacred comes from a denial of spiritual values and ideas that elevate humanity and teach that there are things that are more precious and sacred than life itself.
As our country moves away from recognizing God in our culture and elevating ourselves to god-like beings, much like the Greeks and Romans before us, we will discover that nothing is sacred except what I want and when I want it.
We will come to believe Auschwitz and Birkenau are not sacred reminders. Marriage, which is only between a man and a woman, won't be sacred anymore to the secularists. They will call any relationship "marriage."
An unwanted baby? Dispose of it while it's still in the womb and call it women's health care.
The most radical reason nothing is sacred is that the present culture does not recognize that there should be things dedicated or set apart for the service and worship of God.
This implicit denial of the Lordship of Jesus Christ logically leads to the suppression of the sacred in daily life.
Where God is not loved and worshiped, there can be no surprise that nothing else is sacred. Where God is blasphemed, as He is today, it should not be shocking that people hate each other. Where God and his law are mocked and despised, it is only natural that morality, too, will be expelled from the public sphere and that society will fall to unimaginable depths.
Only when we bow to the Lordship of Jesus Christ can anything be sacred.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Prayerful.