The Alarm is Blaring and Humanity Hits Snooze

The Lesson You Refuse to Learn

My first friend on earth and I shared a crib. We also share being the first generation born after our parents' trauma of being Jews in Europe during the Second World War. Her father was saved by a righteous woman. Mine survived because my grandmother trusted her sixth sense and fled. The rest of my father's family — from babies to grandparents — were murdered by their neighbours. People who thought themselves civilised, incapable of such things.

I don't usually talk about the Shoah (aka the Holocaust). Not publicly. My father didn't. My grandparents didn't. Maybe because silence is easier than facing an ugly reality: there are people among us — polite, educated, civilised people — who will stand by while others are destroyed. Or worse, participate.

For this year's 'Holocaust commemoration', my friend shared words that were diplomatic. That's her job. I decided that mine won't be.

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You are falling over the same stones. On purpose.

What Jews are experiencing today is not random. It is the direct consequence of humanity refusing to learn. And the Shoah was not your first chance to learn this lesson. We have been your ‘canary’ for centuries. Maybe that's why we're still here — we are humanity’s test. And you’re failing, again.

Jews have learned how to survive your periodic moral collapses. We have resilience coded into our collective memory. You don't.

When the patterns we recognise finally reach you — and if you don’t wake up, they will — you won't know what hit you. You’re too busy debating symptoms while the disease is metastasising.

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This is what institutional moral decay looks like before it kills you.

A terrorist murders someone in cold blood and you offer empty condolences. Then you descend into debate. Was it justified? Were they triggered? Some of you actually celebrate it as righteous. You engage in pseudo-intellectual discussions that attempt to rationalise the ‘value’ of different lives, as if this were enlightened discourse rather than the rot of dehumanisation spreading through your society.

Not all humans value human life equally or believe we're equal. And those claiming to defend equality and rights are often protecting the very people who would destroy both.

The Shoah didn't start with murder. It started with intimidation. With the slow theft of rights. With people living their lives because what was happening to those people didn't affect them.

Look around. Artists blacklisted. Academics harassed. Businesses boycotted — not for what they do, but for what they are. Red lines are being crossed daily. You see it. You say nothing. Maybe because you've convinced yourself the lines were never that clear to begin with.

Your politicians debate "freedom of speech" while speech actively dehumanises — not just Jews, but everyone who tolerates it. You lose your humanity every time you shrug at someone else's dehumanisation. Every time you decide it's complicated. Every time you stay silent because speaking up might cost you something.

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Your cowardice will cost you, or your children.

When you tolerate the intolerant, you're not being enlightened. You're being a coward. And while you obsess over whether something technically qualifies as "antisemitism" or whether someone's rights were violated, you miss the entire point:

Some attitudes and behaviours do not belong in a civilised society.

It should not be hard to say this. But for most of you, it is.

So you focus on symptoms — antisemitism, hate speech, freedom of expression — while the disease advances. You treat each incident as isolated. You refuse to see the pattern: The architecture of everything you inherited is being dismantled, brick by brick, and you're arguing about whether it's someone's 'right'.

The work I've been developing — what I call epistemic defence systems — was born from recognising these patterns. The same patterns that led to the Shoah. It doesn’t treat the symptoms but the disease.

The next chapter won't look like the last one. Industrial-scale murder is unlikely — unless you let the disease progress until good people are no longer the majority. But by then, it will be too late for you to mount a defence. You will have already forgotten what’s right and who is righteous enough to count on.

Jews know how to survive your failures. We've done it before. We'll do it again.

You won't.

We are your early warning system, and the alarm is screaming. You can keep hitting snooze. You can keep debating whether the alarm is really necessary, whether it's too loud, whether someone's feelings might be hurt by its urgency.

But when you finally wake up choking on smoke, don't say you weren't warned. The stones are still in your path. You see them. But you can’t be bothered to remove them. So spare us your yearly theatre of remembrance. Your solemn hashtags. Your empty 'Never Again'.

This isn't about us, Jews, it's about you. You need to fight for what you inherited, or your children will inherit ashes.