Today is Yom HaShoah....

The day when Jews memorialize those who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Horribly enough, as the victims and eyewitnesses who remain die off and the living memory dims, as it becomes less common to see elderly people with numbers tatooed on their arms, the forces that want to deny that the Holocaust ever happened get stronger and more insistent. Particularly in academia in the West and in the Islamic world.

To me, the most heartwrenching exhibit in the Museum of Tolerance is a picture of a pile of shoes.Children's shoes from Auschwitz, taken from their owners by the Nazis before they were herded naked into the gas chambers...or worse. I want to weep with sorrow and anger whenever I think of it...so I try not to.

After the camps were liberated, General Eisenhower saw to it that these places of horror were filmed and the atrocities documented. As he wrote in `Crusade in Europe' Eisenhower foresaw a time when it would be convenient in certain circles to deny that the Holocaust happened, and he felt he had a moral responsibility to document it for all time.

Not only for the victims...but to ensure that it never happened to anyone else, ever again.

In that valiant and worthy goal, General Eisenhower failed, through no fault of his own.

Today, as I look at what is happening in Darfur and listen to the threats emanating towards the Jews of Israel from Iran, I think about this, and what it could mean for our own time.