Yom Hashoah and the return of the permissive lie

For many non-Jewish readers, Yom Hashoah may require explanation. It is the Hebrew term for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day on which Jews and their allies around the world remember the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, while also honouring acts of Jewish resistance and moral courage.

In 2026, Yom Hashoah began on the evening of 13 April and continued through 14 April. It is not merely a memorial date. It is a day of moral reckoning. It asks not only what was done to the Jews of Europe, but what conditions made such evil possible in societies that once considered themselves civilised.

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with a descent in language, standards and truth. Jews were caricatured, isolated, lied about, blamed, and recast as the source of social decay. Long before mass murder came the gradual creation of what might be called the permissive lie: the distortions, evasions and respectable falsehoods that made persecution easier to justify and harder to resist. The lie gave ordinary people permission to minimise what they were seeing, excuse what they were hearing, or persuade themselves that the Jews somehow had it coming.

That is why Yom Hashoah matters now.

If the Holocaust teaches anything beyond its singular horror, it is that civilised societies do not collapse all at once. They erode. They learn to tolerate ugliness when it is dressed up as sophistication. They accept double standards when those standards are politically useful. They permit intimidation when it is directed at unfashionable minorities. Above all, they grow comfortable with euphemism. Hatred rarely announces itself at first in its most naked form. It more often appears as moral vanity, selective outrage, intellectual theatre, or the insistence that one people alone may be denied the protections routinely granted to others.
In recent years, that pattern has become harder to ignore.

In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total ever reported by the organisation. That should trouble any fair-minded observer. It suggests not only that hatred exists, but that many now feel newly licensed to express it. The issue is not simply extremism at the margins. It is the wider cultural environment that lowers inhibitions and grants permission.
In Canada, the warning signs have also been unmistakable. In January 2026, the federal government published National Commitments to Combat Antisemitism, explicitly describing antisemitism as a public safety threat.

That language was not chosen casually. It followed a period in which Jewish schools and synagogues had been targeted, including shootings at two Jewish schools in Montreal in 2023 and gunfire attacks at synagogues in the Toronto area in March 2026. Again, the significance lies not only in the crimes themselves, but in what they reveal: a social climate in which Jewish places of worship and education have become conceivable targets.

In Australia, the lesson is no longer abstract. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents in the year to 1 October 2025, describing a sharp and deeply disturbing escalation. Then came the Bondi attack in December 2025, in which fifteen innocent people were murdered during a Hanukkah gathering on Bondi Beach.

n the weeks that followed, Australians were forced to confront something many Jews had already understood: antisemitism is not merely offensive, nor merely regrettable. Left unchecked, it becomes violent, public and deadly. That is why the issue is not solely a Jewish concern. It is a national concern and a civilisational one. The hatred now hunting Jews in Australia poses an existential challenge to the Australia we know and hope, in time, to bequeath to our children. When a society becomes permissive towards hatred of Jews, it is advertising weakness in its own moral architecture.

For a non-Jewish audience, this is the bridge between Yom Hashoah and contemporary relevance. The day is not asking people to live permanently in the shadow of Auschwitz. It is asking them to recognise patterns early. It is asking whether we can still identify the old hatred when it returns in modern dress: as obsessive double standards, as the rationalisation of intimidation, as the sanitising of anti-Jewish rhetoric into fashionable politics, or as silence from institutions that should know better.

“Never again” is often repeated, but too often misunderstood. It does not mean that history will repeat itself in identical form. It means that the mechanisms by which a people is isolated, vilified and endangered must be recognised before catastrophe. Yom Hashoah is therefore not only about mourning the dead. It is about educating the living. It is about recovering moral seriousness in an age that too often substitutes posture for principle and theatre for truth.

To remember the Holocaust properly is to reject the permissive lie in all its forms. It is to refuse euphemism where clarity is required. It is to insist that Jews are entitled to the same dignity, security and moral concern as any other people. And it is to understand that when antisemitism rises, the question is not only what is happening to Jews. The deeper question is what is happening to us.

Yom Hashoah, then, is not only a day of grief. It is a day of warning. It reminds us that hatred need not become universal to become lethal, and that a society does not need to embrace barbarism outright to drift towards it. It need only make room for lies that excuse, soften or redirect moral responsibility.

For a non-Jewish audience especially, that is the enduring challenge of this day. Are we able to recognise the old hatred when it appears in modern dress? Can we still identify the moral danger when it is wrapped in the language of politics, culture or grievance? Do we possess the seriousness to confront it early, before intimidation hardens into exclusion and exclusion into something worse?

If we are serious about honouring the dead, we must be equally serious about defending the living. Memory, if it is to mean anything at all, must sharpen conscience, strengthen resolve, and leave us determined to ensure that the old hatreds do not rise again.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC retired from the Australian Army in 2026 after more than three decades of service. His career included operational deployments to East Timor, Bougainville, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a 27-month posting in Jerusalem as Head of Military for the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation, operating in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

He is the founder of The 2023 Foundation, a non-Jewish-led initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism through education and lived experience. Michael is the author of A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending, with his second book, When Our Light Is Tested: The Bondi Massacre and the Choices Ahead, to be released in April 2026.