Diplomats from over 60 countries took part in an event marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem on Thursday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed participants and emphasized that the international day for remembrance "is a very important day on which we fulfill our duty to never forget." "As we remember the victims and this crime, we must never forget the roots of our greatest disaster -- the insatiable hatred for the Jewish people. This hatred culminated in murder, but it began with intolerance. The Holocaust is behind us, thank God, but the hatred and intolerance that drove it is not. "Anti-Semitism, which is the world's oldest hatred, is experiencing a revival in the enlightened West. You can see this in European capitals. ... The rise of anti-Semitism, the resurgence of anti-Semitism that is happening, and few would have imagined that this would be possible a few years ago," Netanyahu said. "It's true that governments have shown responsibility, and on the whole have taken this up, in Eastern Europe and in Western Europe alike," he said, "but it is also true that this hatred is bubbling, coming out of these cracks, coming out in the open again. Yet, as disturbing as this is, the greatest danger that we face, of the hatred for the Jewish people and the Jewish state, comes from the East. It comes from Iran. It comes from the ayatollah's regime that is fanning these flames and is outright calling for the destruction of the Jewish state." Netanyahu criticized the hypocrisy of countries who decry racism and homophobia but do not speak out against Iran's stated intention of wiping out Israel. "I want you to think about a regime that openly declared its intention to eliminate every black person, every gay person, every European. I think the entire world would be outraged, and rightly so. But when a regime merely calls to wipe out every Israeli -- which is what they say day in day out, their most prominent leaders, they say it -- what do we encounter? A deafening silence. "I'm talking now not only in political terms. I'm talking about every person in the world, any person of conscience who'd speak out about the resurgence of the same attitude that decades ago openly said we're out to destroy the Jewish people and today the same attitude that says we're out to destroy the Jewish people of Israel or we're out to destroy the Jewish state -- it must encounter forceful, consistent, powerful resistance, in words and also in deeds. "We will never forget the victims. We will never allow another Holocaust to take place," he stressed. Netanyahu said the Iranian government should remember that "the regime that spawned the Holocaust ended up in the dustbin of history. That's a lesson for Iran. It's a lesson to every enemy of the Jewish people and the Jewish state." "As Prime Minister of Israel, I will not be silent, I haven't been silent, and we don't intend to be inactive either. We don't merely intend to speak out but we will take all the measures we need to defend ourselves, and we will take all the measures necessary to prevent Iran from getting the means of mass murder to carry out their horrible plans. ... We cannot and will not be silent in the face of Iran's stated aim of destroying Israel. Netanyahu said he took comfort in the many foreign leaders that visit Yad Vashem. "We go through the halls, we see the exhibits; they're visibly shaken. And when we come out, I say to that leader: ... You know, as prime minister of Israel, I have one job -- to make sure that we will never need more institutions like Yad Vashem. And that's what we all have to be committed to," he said. Later, senior Yad Vashem official Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto displayed to those in attendance the personal diary kept by Ruth Kalka from 1942 to 1945. Kalka kept the diary while interned in the Czestochowa ghetto in Poland and later when she fled the Nazis. The diary was donated to Yad Vashem as part of its "Gathering the Fragments" campaign. In Austria, Chancellor Christian Kern reminded citizens of their country's role in the Holocaust and urged them to ensure its horrors are never repeated, ahead of an international day of observance for Jewish and other Nazi victims. In a statement, Kern said that Austria's history "breeds the eternal duty ... to be alert against all racist and anti-Semitic tendencies." Kern spoke Thursday, a day ahead of the liberation 72 years ago of Nazi Germany's Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland -- an event now internationally commemorated annually as Holocaust Remembrance Day. Austrians overwhelmingly welcomed the country's annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938. Proportionately, more Austrians than Germans were members of Hitler's National Socialist party, and many of his henchmen were Austrian.
