Netanyahu on Holocaust: 'Hypocrisy is screaming to the sky'

Sirens wailed across Israel and thousands marched at the Auschwitz death camps in Poland on Monday as the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial, warned that anti-Semitism and apathy to cruelty remain a critical global problem. He lauded President Trump for his military strike on Syria after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. But he blamed anti-Semitism for global support for Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The old-new anti-Semitism is common among some in the West and is also common in U.N. institutions," Netanyahu said. "Hypocrisy is screaming to the sky. And as for the world's indifference, has anything changed? One must admit that the answer is mainly 'no.'"

Across Israel, everything stopped for two minutes while the sirens sounded. Workers took a break and cars halted abruptly on highways while Israelis bowed their heads during a two-minute homage to the estimated 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis and their collaborators.

In Poland, the March of the Living drew about 10,000 people from more than 40 countries, accompanied by an honorary delegation of 75 Holocaust survivors up to 103 years old, The Jerusalem Post reported. The 2-mile route connects the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. The march was led by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and a survivor of the Buchenwald extermination camp.

A delegation of officials from 12 European nations took part in a commemoration at the Birkenau death camp.

"We take upon ourselves the solemn commitment to remember and to commemorate the millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the Roma Genocide as well as other Holocaust-related mass atrocities," said the group's leader, Austrian Education Minister Sonja Hammerschmid. "We shall respect the survivors still with us and honor those who resisted the evil of Nazi tyranny."

The nomadic Roma were subjected to internment, forced labor and mass murder by the Nazis.

Shmuel Rosenman, chairman of the march, emphasized that the memory of the Holocaust must be handed down to the younger generations so they don't let a similar tragedy happen again.

"Last year, the world lost Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate, and conscience of the world," Rosenman said. "Elie Wiesel, who was with us in our very first March in 1988, said, “If you listen to a witness, you become a witness."'

In the United States, Trump delivered a video message to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly that met Sunday in New York. Trump's theme: "'never again."

"The mind cannot fathom the pain, the horror and the loss," Trump said. "Six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide. They were murdered by an evil that words cannot describe and that the human heart cannot bear.”