EU Parliament: Metsola (President), “to be anti-Semitic is to be anti-European”

“Every year, around 27 January, the world remembers the millions of innocent men, women and children who were murdered in history’s greatest crime. A crime intended to wipe out a people from the earth. A crime designed to inflict horror on generations. A crime that has shaped our modern European project into an embodiment of the timeless promise: never again”. The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, said this in her address to the European Parliament in Brussels to mark Remembrance Day. “It was a crime that saw 6 million Jewish people murdered, for being Jewish. That saw Roma and Sinti people targeted. That saw the LGBTI communities eradicated and so many others humiliated and killed because of their ethnicity, disability, identity, race or beliefs”, she added. “The Holocaust did not happen overnight. ‘Auschwitz did not fall from the sky’, as a survivor, Marian Turski, said three years ago. The alarm bells should have rung before”, she said. “We must speak because ours is the last generation to receive first-hand accounts from Holocaust survivors. Antisemitism still exists. I repeat what I said in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament): to be anti-Semitic is to be anti-European”.

Valentina Bombelli