It is always very easy to commemorate an event. It is always easy to remember an event. It is not so easy to offer condolences, yet we manage it. But what is not easy is to remember the past and learn from it. Today, the world commemorates International Holocaust Commemoration Day – the day when we stop and remember the atrocities that humankind is capable of.

Millions of Jews were put to death in Hitler’s death camps more than 60 years ago. It scarcely seems believable when the harrowing images of human skeletons are shown to us that this is what humans are capable of doing. It is also very hard to accept that all this took place only 60 years ago – a time when we were supposed to be civilised.

Nowadays, the Holocaust seems to be pinned squarely on the shoulders of Hitler and his cronies – rightly so, they were the ones who dreamed up and oversaw the ‘Final Solution’.

But it runs deeper than that. The Holocaust was the embodiment of a sin which resides deep within humankind. That sin is deep rooted racism and xenophobia. Of course there are still racial tensions, and the lines are becoming more and more blurry with the influence of radical Islam on public opinion in the West.

Sadly, while not on the same scale of murder, radical Islam is fuelling the fire and in the process is sullying the reputation of God fearing peaceful Muslims everywhere. Terrorism is intrinsically linked to racism and xenophobia. The terrorist feeds on our fear of fear and uses religion to commit crimes against humanity. Putting people into a gas chamber and planting bombs on planes is, at the end of the day, very similar. The motivation is the same – to exterminate another race of people. That is the terrorists’ goal and they will stop at nothing.

This is why we say that it is never easy to learn from past mistakes. The images of Jews starving to death are no less harrowing than those images of people plunging to their deaths from the World Trade Centre Tower, having thrown themselves off rather than burning to death.

One would never think that humanity had the sheer badness in itself to repeat the atrocities committed against the Jews. But we do choose to blinker ourselves. Terrorists keep trying to blow people out of the sky. African peoples continue to commit murderous atrocities amongst themselves – as shown by the recent clashes in Nigeria. In China, greedy factory owners continue to keep workers on the most meagre rations and work them to death.

In Europe we also have our strife with ETA blowing up shops in Spain. The far left and the far right are also taking comfort in each other’s actions... It truly is baffling when we are talking about ever closer ties in Europe, to note that in each and every country around the continent, Nationalism, in its literal sense, seems to be on the rise.

Nationalism conjures up proud images, but history teaches us a different lesson. It is divisive and only fans the flames of racism and xenophobia. God forbid we were ever to do it to ourselves again. The Holocaust must be remembered by each and every one of us. Every day.