HMDT would like to thank the 31,339 individuals who took the time on Holocaust Memorial Day to light a virtual candle and pledged to ‘Stand up to Hatred’.
By pledging to Stand up to Hatred, we have all made a choice. We did not choose to attack, to abuse, to exclude, to stand back and do nothing – we chose to resist, to respect, to protect.
Hatred is a corrosive force, able to ruin lives, wreck co-operation, destroy communities, or races, or nations. It is present in small ways in daily life, but it is at its most lethal in prejudice, discrimination, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia.
In this lethal form it was the driving force in Nazi Germany, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in Rwanda in 100 days in 1994, in Bosnia and in other places at other times. And so it is in Darfur today.
The past is powerful, from it we can learn to protect ourselves and our communities from the forces of hatred.
