NOVANEWS
‘Genocide of the Day’ founder, a medical physicist by occupation, says finding a different genocide for each day of the year is quite the challenge.
Haaretz
A Facebook page that that started as a joke sets out to educate Israelis that the Holocaust is not the only genocide. “Genocide of the Day” which briefly tells the story of a single genocide every day, proves quite the challenge to its founder Lior Golger.
“In the beginning it started out without any educational purpose,” Golger says of his decision to start the page. “The didactic intentions only came later, when I realized that there were genocides I wasn’t aware of in China and Mongolia for example. Slowly, a minimal educational intention began to form – to show that we aren’t the only people to be systematically murdered on the face of the earth.”
Up to now, the page has managed to, in some way or another, provide these brief histories for 90 days straight, but he says this has been a taxing task and now that he started a new job he has a difficult time keeping up the pace. Luckily, in the meanwhile, three more volunteer page editors have joined, including Yotam Kadosh, who works for the Committee for the Fight against Genocide, who Golger says is really active in combating these atrocities. Together they have compiled a list of genocides that spans 90 days more.
It is true that on some of these days the historical genocides in question are specific events in greater conflicts, but Golger says that “If you need to write about genocides that killed over 50 thousand innocent persons, these could be found. It’s all a matter of time. If I had the time I believe I could find an event for every day,” he says.
Golger works as a medical physicist at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. He also works part-time as a research assistant in a study of the oral Judaic teaching of Ethiopian Jewry. “Through this work I learned about the history of the Jewish People in Ethiopia and that they too suffered serious hardships,” he said. For example, he mentions the event called Kapu Ken (“The Bad Time”) during the 1880s – a period of invasion from Sudan, an infestation of locusts, cattle disease and an epidemic of cholera and typhoid fever.
As mentioned, the page doesn’t limit itself to atrocities suffered by Jews, though these also appear, for example the attacks on European Jews that took place in during the Crusades. Aside from these, the genocide of the people of east Papua at he hands of the Indonesians, the atrocities in Darfur, and countless other terrible historical events, are all described in a manner ranging from laconic reports without pathos to slightly humorous.
Golger says that if the posts on his page come off as ironic in tone sometimes, the irony is aimed at those responsible and not the victims. “We don’t mock the victims, we mock the murderers. As I see it anyone who goes out and murders millions of people in the name of some ideology, real or imagined, is deserving of contempt and mockery.”
When asked if what the experience has taught him, he responded “Just like in a certain Seinfeld episode, one of the characters say that their advantage is that they learn nothing, it doesn’t look like the situation is getting any worse nor that it is getting any better. It simply continues. People continue to slaughter one another, whether with machetes or with atomic bombs. Give a person or a group of people a machete and legitimization and they will do it. There aren’t a people that you can tell yourself ‘they weren’t involved in genocide.’”
Golger doesn’t hide his criticism of Holocaust commemoration in Israel, especially on the special focus it is given, and specifically on the pornography of murder. “When a child goes into a gas chamber with an Israeli flag on his back, I think that educationally speaking, something is messed up. I’m saying that as a Zionist. We’re not supposed to memorialize the atrocities the Nazis committed. It’s the Nazis problem that they’re Nazis. We need to commemorate life.”
The heart of the issue remains, that after rummaging through these atrocities, Golger did not find anything that makes the Holocaust stand out. “I don’t understand how recognizing other genocides cheapens the destruction of my family. I know what it means to be third generation. How can it be that the murder of my family is less significant, because there were other people who’ve died, or were murdered?”
