Soc.Culture.Jewish Newsgroups Frequently Asked Questions and Answers URL: www.scjfaq.org/faq/15-01.html

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Question 15.1:
Why do Jews seem to treat the Holocaust as their tragedy alone?

Jews don't, and in fact, a hefty percentage of articles on the Holocaust go out of their way to mention the number of gentiles murdered, as well as soldiers and civilians killed in the war itself.

Jews focus upon it for several reasons: (1) It destroyed a third (1/3) of world Jewry, almost all of European Jewry, and obliterated the entire European Jewish culture. (2) It was directed primarily at Jews--Hitler himself wrote that his real war was against Judaism and the idea of absolute morality, the antithesis of amoral nationalism. (see his discussions with his friend, Hermann Rauschning) (3) It happened just 50 years ago, which is recent.

It is important to mention other attempts at mass extermination or national destruction, such as Armenian, Cambodian, East Timorese, Kurdish, Native Americans, Stalin's purges, etc.

One should also mention other large scale injustices such as Black African enslavement in America, but to make clear that even if it is not the same as the Holocaust, it's still a moral problem.

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