…Today is the internationally recognized UN Holocaust Memorial Day which was preceded yesterday by the European Parliament including in the definition of the Holocaust the mass murder of Roma and Sinti peoples and thereby ended the Jewish monopoly on the term, the term the Jews had used to describe Jewish life and death in Europe in the 1940s.

Coincidentally, and even eerily, the very word holocaust in English was invented in the 14th century, probably by John Wycliffe, to translate the word in the Torah for the Olah sacrifice the whole burnt offering. Holo is Greek for whole with a w, and caust/fire, as in the word “caustic” burning. Holocaust was then a splendid choice of word for the Hebrew Shoah because of its roots in the concept of the Olah, the whole burnt offering, the word used to refer to the binding of Isaac. That was a human sacrifice the G-d of Israel prevented, if not the burning in the crematoria that turned Jewish corpses into black smoke…