The lessons of the Holocaust are very different from what Jewish assimilators imagine. That murdering people is bad was not news; no one needed a Holocaust to understand that. The world learned from the Holocaust that Jews can be killed in masses and with practical impunity. Tens of thousands of Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Croates, and the scum of other nations helped massacre the Jews: more than 14,000 personally shot Jews, while others hunted us, betrayed us to death, guarded us, beat us, mutilated us; still others managed the extermination procedures. Accomplices are sentenced in any legal system. In the Holocaust, only about 5% of the perpetrators and almost none of the accomplices were sentenced.

Anti-semites got the picture. Approving references to the Holocaust and implicit threats of repeating it became common from the first days of the massacre. The memoirs of Ukrainians who lived under the German occupation abound with quotations. The Soviet anti-semitic campaign of 1948-53 and the preparations to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia, the place the Nazis initially earmarked for us to starve in, unmistakably shows the atmosphere of popular approval of the Holocaust.

The Germans are a disciplined and logical folk. They logically developed their anti-semitism to the conclusion that they must save the world from the Jews. The disciplined Germans accepted even the aesthetically unpleasant means of the massacre. Now the disciplined Germans accept their government’s doctrine that they must feel sorry. They show every outward feature of being sorry: they apologize, they study the Holocaust, they help Israel. Their millennium-old anti-semitism did not evaporate in sixty years and is waiting to be mobilized by a less politically correct government.

Practically no other European country was taken aback by its role in the Holocaust. Poles, Greeks, the French cheerfully helped the Germans identify the Jews. No country destroyed police and municipal archives to make the identification impossible. Faced with the slaughter, no occupied country attempted to issue the Jews new documents with Christian names or to distribute blank passports. Students of the Holocaust commonly ignore a crucial question: how did the Germans identify Jews for deportation and massacres? Except in the ghettos, the task was not trivial. Many Jews looked like the local people. Either locals betrayed them to the Germans, or Jews gave themselves up to the Germans believing, understandably, that the locals would betray them anyway. The French like to speak of the barbarous Germans, but not about their own—indispensable—role in the Holocaust.

Americans—affluent, preoccupied with materialist pursuits, not very interested in religion, ideology, or hatred—were relatively tolerant of Jews. European immigrants to America largely parted with their original culture and shed the ingrained anti-semitism before jumping into the melting pot of American culture. Multiculturalism and demographic changes changed that. Blacks, first-generation Mexicans, and Muslims are poor, religiously, ideologically, or nationalistically charged, and on the lookout for enemies. Many Americans justly resent US involvement in the Middle East and erroneously identify it with the Israel lobby rather than with oil interests. Americans see that Europeans killed the Jews for millennia, perpetrated the Holocaust, yet remain respectable members of world society. Americans have no guilt before the Jews and feel they help Israel too much. The America of the current political culture will not slaughter Jews but would remain indifferent when others do.

Arabs smelled a lesson. If ethical Europeans massacred Jews with impunity and the other nations tolerated it, Arabs could do even more. Westerners might forget that in the apocalyptic war of 1948 Israel received no, none, zero help from the West. The US embargoed weapon shipments to Palestine, in practical terms, to Israel because other Arab countries supplied the Arabs. Arabs remember that. The Holocaust is burning in their hearts; they know they could repeat it, and they long to.

Murder is natural. At all times, people have killed. Weak governments do not prevent people from killing each other. Strong governments prompt them to kill ostensible enemies in job lots. Technology facilitates killing. Millennia-old cultural boundaries do not evaporate and provide the path of least resistance to xenophobia, discontent, and hatred. The world, indeed, learned from the Holocaust: learned it could kill a lot of Jews. And that knowledge will translate into the action.