Big numbers pack enormous emotional punch: witness the 200 million dollar super lottery.

"The Holocaust [genocide] was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet." --Elie Wiesel; Newsweek Magazine, April 12, 1999 p. 37

Nobel Prize winner, Holocaust educator Elie Wiesel has defined genocide as a conscious decision and effort to kill every single member of a race or ethnic group -- every single member in the entire world. This is the first time I have known of any person of any persuasion or position to give that definition. And it certainly removes the Nazis and Hitler from the rank of perpetrators of genocide. Has Wiesel always said this? I don't know. Why would he adopt a position so easily refuted by just the presence of one Jew that was consciously allowed to live? Hitler never even tried to kill all the Jews of Germany much less the entire planet or gave any hint of such an intention. He definitely did order the death of many Jews and others bringing a holocaust of horror and death to millions, including his own countrymen. Hitler's disregard for Jewish lives and the deadly conditions into which he plunged them satisfy my definition of genocide. This limited definition brands a number of political criminals. Wiesel's definition convicts very few, not including Hitler the main object of his campaign.

In like vein, former senator Bob Dole last week raised the number of Jews killed by Hitler to eight million. Why these hyperboles? In Wiesel's case to guard the unique nature of Jewish suffering. In Dole's case, to justify the preventive war he champions. 'Genocide' has become a tool against the interests of Christian America.

How evil is a war of conquest, when the design is to kill any and all who oppose the conquest; e.g. Japan in WWII -- and why has Christian America long ago decided to forgive Japan? How evil is a civil war that is executed brutally with the only purpose being that of preventing secession; and why did the Christian South so speedily honor Lincoln (Henry Grady, thirty years after the Emancipator's death, enthroned him as the personification of America)? Are these conflicts to be considered humane because genocide was not a goal -- genocide being the one unforgivable, unforgettable, even though in Elie Wiesel's extreme impossible definition there is nothing to remember?

Ironically, Wiesel's point in his Newsweek essay is quite well taken: Serbia is not practicing genocide, as vicious as the war is. Also, his exaggeration is not as dangerous (by any measure) as the awful blood-libel objected to by Michael Medved and other prominent Jews, the libel promoted by the U.S taxpayer supported Holocaust  Museum in Washington D.|C. that accuses Christianity of trying to eliminate every Jew on the planet.
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