During the initial keynote speech of the War, the Holocaust and Human Rights conference at the Air Force Academy on Thursday, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told a story to illustrate the power of language.

In 1919, still reeling from its defeat in World War I, Germany’s senior officers commissioned a series of reports on potential future threats to the state. A 20-year-old corporal and known antisemite was assigned to write a report on Jewish people.

In the four-page report, the corporal characterized Jews as an unscrupulous and money-hungry people whose presence in Germany was a “racial tuberculosis” and whose threat to the republic could only be avoided by “the total removal of all Jews from our midst.”

The report was signed, “Yours truly, Adolf Hitler.”

“He wrote that (report) six or seven years before ‘Mein Kampf’ came out, and 20 years before World War II began,” Cooper said. “He wrote it when he was a nobody. But words have consequence.”

The three-day conference is designed to expose future military leaders to “a wide range of military leaders and civilian subject matter experts covering critical topics like the Holocaust, genocide prevention and the protection of human rights,” an academy spokesperson said.

Cooper had originally planned to deliver a speech titled, “Xi, Putin, Kim Jong Un: What Tyrants and Dictators Teach Us About the Power of Faith and Human Rights.” But the rabbi, who has eight grandchildren living in Jerusalem, felt compelled to make a brief departure from the planned speech to address the recent Hamas terrorist attacks and the current war between Israel and the militant organization.

Atrocities like Saturday’s surprise attack on Israel – a coordinated, multifront assault that has resulted in 1,300 deaths, according to Israeli officials – do not occur in a vacuum, Cooper said. The rabbi recalled a comment that concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter Wiesenthal once made when asked if the Holocaust could happen again.

“He said, ‘If you have a social crisis, plus organized hate, plus technology, anything is possible,'” said Cooper, adding that Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, made the remark in 1980.

Those three elements all contributed to the deadly Hamas assault on Israel, according to Cooper.

“The Nazis always tried to eradicate the evidence of their genocidal crimes. They knew that someday there would be a reckoning,” he said. “Hamas is livestreaming – livestreaming! – the mass murder of innocent civilians.”

According to Cooper, Hamas has been waging a war of words since the 2014 Gaza war, flooding the internet and social media with misinformation in an effort to garner pro-Palestinian – and antisemitic – sentiment.

If the recent rise in antisemitic violence is any indication, the effort has had a measure of success, Cooper said. In the U.S. alone, there were nearly 3,700 reported incidents in 2022, according to the Anti-Defamation League.  

“Hatred (of Jews) is becoming mainstream,” he said.

Cooper urged the current and future leaders in the audience to refrain from sacrificing their personal ethics in the service of what others may see as a greater good.

“When you do that, you would fit right in to Stalin’s Soviet Union, to Hitler’s Germany, to Xi’s China,” he said. “You will wake up one morning and find that, unlike the people who were born in these places, you have voluntarily given up your freedoms. Some battles are worth fighting, even if you don’t win right away.”

Meredith Scott, an academy history professor and conference coordinator, echoed Cooper’s sentiments about the damage the wrong kind of language can do.

“Violence begins with language,” Scott said. “Violent language leads to violent action. When we know how to recognize it, we learn how to mitigate and stop it.”

Events like the War, the Holocaust and Human Rights Conference are intended to provide cadets with multiple perspectives that will hopefully make them effective leaders, Scott said.

“I think a conference like this is really important because it draws attention back to the fact that human rights abuses and genocides and mass atrocities continue to be perpetrated,” she said. “That’s super-important for cadets, and it’s part of their education.”

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