Whenever the issue of gun control hits the news, I get an e-mail from my friend Ralph, a Staten Islander who is a staunch defender of the Second Amendment.

His latest missive heralded the news that a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruling had overturned Washington’s gun control law, calling it “unconstitutional.” Inevitably, Ralph identifies himself as a child of a Holocaust survivor who stressed the danger of denying citizens the right to arm themselves. I don’t have the heart to tell Ralph that New Yorkers don’t really care about the Holocaust anymore. If you’re honest, this should not sound shocking.

I often tell opponents of legalized abortion that it’s pointless to compare abortion to the Holocaust because many Americans don’t care about either unless they are personally involved. What is particularly sad is that some Jews are among those who have distanced themselves from one of the greatest human tragedies of the 20th century.

Now how would I, a Roman Catholic, know this? What I’ve seen and heard over many years has led me to this conclusion. Several years ago, I happened to tune in to a radio broadcast called “Jewish News and Views,” conducted by Shefar Hoffman. The callers were berating Ms. Hoffman for spreading what they called the myth of rampant anti-Semitism. One man said he was tired of hearing about the Holocaust, and that “we Jews ought to stop whining about it.”

I called in and identified myself as a Christian who was very much aware of widespread but hidden anti-Semitism. I was invited to appear on the show, which was broadcast from Staten Island. I took calls from other Jews who refused to believe what I had to say about this anti-Semitism because it was assumed that, as a Christian, I shared this sentiment.

Nothing could be more false. The nuns that taught me history emphasized the Holocaust as a human tragedy. We were taught to imagine the Nazis storming into our own homes and dragging us to the concentration camps.

In some of Ralph’s e-mails, he attaches hate mail he receives from other Jews. They call him a self-hater and Christian convert because he dares to suggest that Christians are more likely than liberal Jews to support Israel.

At the end of Mass on Sunday, a man came to the podium who identified himself as a Christian from Bethlehem. “Sixty years ago, we were 28% of the population. Now we are only 2%,” he said. Israeli security measures against Palestinian Arab terrorists have included travel restrictions on non-Jews. These restrictions, along with terrorist activity, have badly damaged tourism. The parish visitor brought many handcarved artifacts from Bethlehem to sell because it is so difficult to travel there. “There is no Holy Land without Christianity,” he warned.

The Christian right understands the importance of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, unlike the liberal elite and some anti-Zionist Jewish groups. In December, a number of Orthodox Jews traveled to the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, Iran, and were photographed shaking hands with the man who threatens to destroy Israel. Madness, simply madness. Did these rabbis think that by joining in condemning Israel, they would be spared in the new holocaust? What fools they are.

It’s regretful that so many who were offended by Mel Gibson’s drunken, anti-Semitic tirade last summer subsequently boycotted his film, “Apocalypto.” Hollywood naturally made sure that the film was not nominated for the best picture Oscar when it actually was a brilliant film masterpiece. What hypocrisy. Hollywood certainly overlooked D.W. Griffith’s blatant racism in his film “Birth of a Nation,” when for decades it presented a director’s award named in his honor.

There is a scene in Mr. Gibson’s film that is absolutely haunting. A man running from his Mayan hunters stumbles across a sea of bodies. It reminds one of the Nazi films of the ditches the Nazis filled with Jewish corpses. While “Apocalypto” chronicles man’s inhumanity to man in a primitive culture, how do we explain the 20th-century Holocaust? How do we explain the hundreds of thousands of Saddam’s victims uncovered in Iraq, or those in Rwanda, or in Darfur?

People like Ralph recognize the danger of forgetting the past. What will it take to remind us all that we are closer to another holocaust than we are to the end of the planet due to global warming? That is, indeed, an inconvenient truth.