During World War II, between five and seven million Jews were killed in death camps and through other means of torture at the hands of a hate-fueled Nazi regime bent on wiping out their race.

This is not the first time a vengeful group of people has short-sightedly attempted to wipe out another.

A close examination of the facts reveals the Holocaust, as the Jewish extermination campaign is commonly known, was merely a jumping-off point for the genocide that was to come in the second half of the 20th century.

The regime of the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, killed about 1.7 million of his own people in a terror campaign between 1975 and 1979.

The Indonesian military killed between 100,000 and 250,000 people of a 600,000-person population on the island nation of East Timor between 1975 and 1999.

Extremist Hutus slaughtered about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a 100-day genocide campaign in Rwanda in 1994.

Serbian forces led by Slobodan Milosevic killed about 200,000 Bosnians and raped and tortured tens of thousands more in a genocide campaign that began in 1995.

Janjaweed death squads in the Darfur region of Sudan have killed an undetermined number of people (somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000, according to conflicting official reports) in an 18-month campaign that has officially been labeled genocide by most of the international community, including the United States.

It is important to note that this is only a start to the list. I am excluding the killing campaigns in El Salvador, Panama, Argentina and Chile that all took place in the 1980s. After an even presentation of the facts, it remains a mystery why the Holocaust is the only such campaign that seems to eke its way into any sort of attention on the world stage.

Even walking around campus within the past few months, banners of “Remembering to Forget” seek to remind us of a story we have already heard many times.

We have seen Steven Spielberg’s movie. We have read Anne Frank’s diary. We have read Mein Kampf. And that was before most of us even reached high school.

Forgive the crotchety rhetorical question, but what is going on here?

The answer isn’t that difficult. Holocaust remembrance groups are simply more organized than awareness groups for any of the other groups attempting to warn the world of past campaigns.

Past university campaigns, including the Holocaust awareness campaign last semester, look to prop up this notion.

By continuing to dwell on the Holocaust, though, our society is advocating looking the other way when an equally human toll is taking place elsewhere.

Some say that forgetting the Holocaust is a form of racism.

My response: Turning your head and throwing up your hands when other campaigns take place is equally a form of racism.

Some Holocaust groups only focus on one of the least recent genocides in history. Doing so is pointless.

The motivation obviously comes from the horror of the acts committed.

If they are indeed attempting to raise awareness so a similar tragedy will never happen again, though, it seems that raising awareness about how the bleak tradition of killings targeted at races of people is par for the course of their work.

– Stephen Babcock is a junior journalism major and a member of The News staff.