Today the world marks the 70^th Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was reluctant to write about this, a nightmarish subject characterized with such gravitas, the heaviness of which still haunts survivors and their families. Visitors report that like manifest evil it weighs down the very atmosphere at various sites of former concentration camps all across Europe with the ghosts of those victimized by the darkest side of what one human being is capable of doing to another. Words like atrocities and genocide fall short, are too sterile. Only documentary photos we want to turn our faces away from can convey adequately the horror and suffering endured by millions of innocent men, women and children just because they were Jews. That’s it. They were Jews – artists, merchants, writers, doctors, farmers, craftsmen, grandparents, little school children and old folks (the list is endless) all gone up the chimneys or discarded like trash in mass graves. Six million souls who might have changed the world with their unique talents and skills, and love. But the injustice of their fate could in fact change the world, if we remember, if we say over and over, “Never Again!” But the future may be out of our hands.

The lessons of the Holocaust are obvious, but the world is not learning. Israel and Jews around the world are once again an easy target of hatred. Just weeks ago, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard said that, “The destruction of Israel is non-negotiable.” Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has outlined a nine-point plan for the elimination of the Jewish State. Sadly but not unexpected, neither comment provoked a major outcry in the international community. Actually terrorist threats from Islamic militants driven by jihad put all of us infidels at the risk of imminent annihilation. So the shadow of the Master Race psyche seems alive enough to once again darken civilization as we know it.

In spite of countless efforts throughout history to destroy an entire race, let’s keep in mind that God’s chosen people are His forever. From a Biblical perspective though, things will eventually get worse before they get better. The Good Book in hundreds of prophetic verses clearly reveals that the ultimate destiny of the world is inseparable from God’s plans for Israel, that Jerusalem would become a “burdensome stone” for all the world, and that before the end, all nations will turn against Israel. “Then shall the LORD go forth, and fight against those nations . . . And the LORD shall be king over all the earth.” Zach. 14:3, 9. Judgment is coming for her enemies, and mercy for the house of David. Like it or not and believing the Bible or not, with every nightly news report and headline from the Middle East it appears that we are on the inevitable road to the final holocaust: Armageddon.