Is there any moral precept in our society that is more often intoned than ‘Never Again’? And is there any moral precept that is so commonly violated?

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day I visited the official GenocideWatch web site and downloaded their list of genocides and politicides since 1945.

Discarding any with fewer than a hundred thousand victims as chump change, I also dropped any that could be considered continuations of an earlier conflict, or those that could be described as deaths in war. This left thirty-two cases, slightly more than one instance every two years.

This says a great deal about our society and none of it is good. As bad as simply turning a blind eye to race-murder would be, the truth is even worse.

Let’s take a random example. It is commonly believed that the West and the international community sat on its hands and did nothing at all when eight hundred thousand Tutsis were murdered with machetes and fragmentation grenades. This is not so. It is true that telegrams landed on Kofi Annan’s desk, where they were ignored, warning of the impending genocide and asking for more troops to protect the Tutsi. And it is also true that the Clinton administration tied itself in knots to avoid using the ‘G word’ and the obligations it entailed. But it is not true that the international community did nothing. No, indeed, lead by the French, troops and aid were sent to the genocideurs, and when the killing was incomplete and the Tutsi threw the Interahamwe into the Congo, the United Nations mobilised to provide food and shelter for the killers, providing food, shelter and a base for raids that continue to this day. Given that the UK pays dues to the United Nations, this means that any readers who have paid taxes will have been, without their consent or knowledge, financing an ongoing genocide.

I write this to make a point about neutralism. When the stakes are this high, no neutralist position is possible, and those who pretend to one will merely end up taking the worst side.

We live in a society where the Third Reich and the Endlosung are invoked at all times for all matters. Al Gore claims that anyone who disagrees with him is the equivalent of David Irving. The former Dutch Prime minister Jan Pieter Balkenende, warned that a failure to vote for the EU constitution was the equivalent of endorsing a second Holocaust. Yet the one thing that you cannot invoke that history for is to argue that the West should live up to its loudly proclaimed principles and actually do something.

I know that it sounds pathetic, but those principles, those statements, they are actually believed. People who were facing extermination thought those promises would be honoured, and they died for it. I will never forget the Al Jazeera clip that showed anti-Janjaweed rebels in the Sudan who had discarded their Arabic names to adopt more westerns ones such as "Colin Powell" and "George Bush". The worst thing that the former US president did was to listen to the peaceniks and submit the matter of Darfur to the UN, leaving the genocide to grind on to conclusion.

Given the forgoing, it seems that we have only two choices. We should either demand that our governments start living up to their promises, and act militarily to prevent or to punish genocide, or we should openly say that we do will not do so, and not give false and dangerous hope to the wretched of the earth. That would be a defensible position, and would at least allow us to insist that our elected Government has nothing to do with those who enable or practise this most hideous crime, and we might even be able to see some civic and private solidarity with the victims.

But to fetishise loudly and politicise the horrors of the past, while deceiving and then betraying the victims of the present, and even celebrating those who disguise the betrayal as a moral stance, is to invite utter damnation.

I use the word "damnation" advisedly. For it is not the case that the dehumanisation and persecution with the eye to the eventual destruction of a human group is confined to distant lands of which we know little – or rather it is no longer the case.

For the last decade at least, Europe and North America has been host to a metastasis of anti-Semitism. In France teachers have been quietly removing the Holocaust from their curriculum out of fear of certain students. In the streets of Amsterdam mobs have chanted "HAMAS, HAMAS / The Jews to the gas!". In 2008, in London’s old Jewish East End, Jews and others honoring this day were pelted with stones and threats for honoring it. In Berlin Jewish dance groups are similarly attacked. And in Quebec, two Jewish students were chased with a machete and cries of "****ing Jew!"

As everyone is aware, the malignant virus underlying this is the Islamic far-right, a movement that is responsible for not only promoting the ugliest kind of bigotry, but at whining that it is the victim of it too.

It is this second ability that makes many loathe to oppose it, but fortunately that is not an option (I say fortunately, because backing down in the face of fascism is also extremely undesirable). Anti-semitism, as we have good cause to remember, isn’t simply the sign that something awful will happen to the Jews, it is the sign that something completely catastrophic will happen to the entire society.

The people of the 1930s could claim ignorance in their defence; we cannot. If we are willing to turn a blind eye to a repetition, then we deserve the Nemesis that we will most assuredly receive.