President Barack Obama said that an attack on any faith is an attack on all faiths. Obama was speaking last evening at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.He is the first sitting president to speak at the embassy. On that occation four people were recognised posthumously for protecting Jews from harm during the Holocaust .The honors were bestowed by Yad Vashem, the world’s Holocaust education and research center, based in Jerusalem.
The United Nations has designated yesterday as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945. Six million Jews were killed by Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust.
Obama said the Holocaust is unique, “a crime without parallel in history,” but he also sought to extend his concerns about confronting intolerance toward other faiths as well.
“It means taking a stand against bigotry in all its forms, and rejecting our darkest impulses and guarding against tribalism as the only value in our communities and in our politics,” he said. “It means heeding the lesson repeated so often in the Torah: To welcome the stranger, for we were once strangers, too.”
Obama was introduced at the event by Steven Spielberg, the Oscar-winning director of the Holocaust film “Schindler’s List” and the founder of a Holocaust history foundation.
@Agency report.
