It is Holocaust Memorial Day. We should never forget what happened in the Nazi genocide. I will not.
But nor should we fail to talk about the lessons and the fact that genocide should never be tolerated wherever it happens.
That, however, is what Trump is doing. As the BBC reported yesterday:
US President Donald Trump has said he wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from Gaza.
Trump said he had made the request to Jordan's King Abdullah and planned to ask Egypt's president on Sunday, too.
Describing Gaza as a "demolition site", Trump said: "You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing". He added that the move "could be temporary" or "could be long-term".
Profoundly implicit in that comment is the idea that Israel should be rewarded with Palestinian territory as the result of its genocide of many of those living there.
Holocaust Memorial Day exists to remind us that genocide is never acceptable and that those who undertake it must never be rewarded but must instead be held to account for their actions. Fascists do not take that view. I always will. This is the political divide the world is now facing again. We should not forget that.
The new Age of Aggression in which we are living must not be allowed to change our understanding of what is right and wrong, even if its proponents have that aim. They are not possessed of the moral high ground. We should never cede it to them.
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After the comic character Dennis the Menace the world now has Trump or Jump!
Even on Holocaust memorial day you have to make antisemitic political comments.
Truly despicable.
There was nothing in the slightest anti-Semitic about what I wrote. Nor is there anything anti-Semitic about my opinion. If I condemn everyone committing genocide, from China onwards right now, there cannot be. I am condemning the crime, not an ethnicity or nation or belief. It is your claim that is anti-Semitic. It is claiming preference for some Jews. That is not acceptable.
It’s Holocaust Blinkers Day for you Edward Shuman! Of course there’s been genocide in Gaza! Jews aren’t a special part of the human race that walks on water. Like other ethnic human groups they are equally as capable of engaging in genocide. I think the British, for example, were the first to use concentration camps in South Africa as part of their contribution to genocide history! In the United States the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” was another example!
Thank you.
Let’s not forget Germany’s first and successful attempt at genocide in SW Africa / Namibia. To this day, Germany denies its actions constituted genocide.
It gets ridiculous. From time to time, the German embassies in South Africa and Namibia issue statements condemning SA and Namibia for their opposition to Israeli genocide and remind the host states that Germany knows what it’s talking about, i.e. the genocide of Jews, but fails to mention SW Africa, the genocide of the Rom, Slavs etc.
The British camps were also to be found in Tristan da Cunha and Mauritius. An Afrikaner woman POW met a Mauritian in the fields near the Forbach camp during the the second Boer war. After the war ended, she stayed on the island and married the sugar field worker. They were not the only ones. Maria and Raphael are also my great great grandparents.
All Jewish people need to read the Jewish pyschologist and philosopher Alice Miller’s book (“For Your Own Good”) on why Hitler and some of the German people implemented the holocaust. Miller’s father died in the first Nazi ghetto in Poland (Piotrków Trybunalski) but Miller managed to smuggle out her mother and sister.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)#cite_note-FOOTNOTEMiller201326%E2%80%9344-6
https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/alicemiller.pdf
Thanks
I think it is a rather weak argument made by Netanyahu apologists to suggest that condemning the genocide in Gaza is in any way anti-Semitic.
I also find it rather troubling when the same Netanyahu apologists try to claim doing so on Holocaust Memorial Day is in some way especially anti-Semitic. To equate the Holocaust with being the murder of Jews airbrushes the majority of the Holocaust’s victims from memory. Yes, the Jewish people were the largest group of victims of the Holocaust and some 6 million were murdered. However, it is also really important to point out that 17 million people were murdered in the Holocaust, 11 million of whom were not Jewish.
So when we about genocide and say never again, evoking the memory of the Holocaust to do that, it is in no way anti-Semitic because the victims of the Holocaust were widespread and so were the perpetrators. It is of fundamental importance that humans understand that we can ALL be the victims of hate and, worse still, we can ALL be its perpetrators. There is no exemption from evil in the genes for past victims.
What makes the Netanyahu Government such an unusual case is that it’s very rare that an oppressed people become an oppressor. Jewish people have been oppressed for thousands of years. They continue to be oppressed most of the world over. Almost always, they have no means of reply. When Edward I expelled the Jews, the Spanish Inquisition sought them out or they were chased from Russia in the Pogroms, they had no means of reply and that was the history of the Jewish people for thousands of years. It is easy then to see why so many of us do find it challenging to think of Jewish people as oppressors themselves.
However, the Netanyahu Government, which is not particularly popular in Israel, is a fascist one and it does things that are genocidal and we have to speak out about it. Trump is a well known fascist too, which is why he proposes rewarding genocide. And just to hammer home the point of why it isn’t anti-Semitic to say this, it is a clear example of Western Governments run by bullies trying to impose their will on a weaker country. Netanyahu’s Jewish background has nothing to do with why he’s an evil bastard.
Thank you and well said.
In the late 1970s, Max Hastings was asked by the Netanyahu (Mileikowsky) family to write a biography of Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, elder brother of Binyamin (Bibi) and only Israeli fatality at Entebbe. Hastings later confessed to being shocked by the family’s casual racism, including towards the Mizrahim, Jews from Asia and Africa. Bibi N, then an army officer, said these Jews needed to be led by Ashkenazi officers.
It is not antisemitic to conden mass murder by anyone.
Nothing that happened on October 7 2023 justtifies what Israel has done since.
Nothing that happened before October 7 justifies what Israel has done.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/27/children-gaza-loved-remembered-innocent-mourn
The holocaust does not give Jews any privileges but does give us the duty to try to prevent genocide against any group.
One of the biggest groups of protesters against Israel’s actions in Gaza have been the Jewish groups. Many Jews have been appalled by what Israel has done and continues to do. Not in my name.
Jewish protestors deserve respect as they have to face accusations of treason and suchlike, often from friends and family.
Agreed
Differences and similarities between the holocaust and contemporary Gaza?
Holocaust memorial service in London did not invite non Zionist child survivors like Steven Kapos. As always the myth of Jew/Zionist equivalenceust be upheld by the Starmer government and the Chief Rabbi (who doesn’t represent a healthy chunk of UK Jews).
Thank you and well said, Richard.
Richard and readers may not be aware that an investment firm, Affinity, run out of Miami by Jared Kushner is marketing developments in Gaza. Kushner has Saudi Arabia and donors close to Starmer(‘s Labour) as partners. The firm invests in US and Israeli firms.
Not unrelated. In the early hours of Saturday, a friend / former colleague, now living in Chicago, messaged how US federal immigration officers tried to raid schools in the city. Her son’s school was not targeted, but others in the neighbourhood were. As education is a state matter, school officials denied them entry. As one can imagine, children, teachers and other staff were in distress. An e-mail was sent by the Chicago school authorities soon after the attempted raids to reassure parents and children and school officials and remind them of the procedures in place to address such matters.
A left wing activist here has warned that Reform will try similar stunts should it form part of the government from 2029. This said. McSweeney has said that Labour won’t be outflanked from the right by Reform in 2029 and looks forward to fighting on Reform’s turf.
@ Colonel Smithers
So McSweeney looks forward to fighting Reform on their own turf?
Good grief, what have we saddled ourselves with in electing Starmer and his gang of thugs such as McSweeney – who really is appalling?
I already characterise Starmer’s Cabinet as a bunch of Keystone Kops 4th-raters, so the truly sinister aspect of Starmer’s hopelessly pro-business, pro-1%, pro-Zionism “what genocide?” shambles is typified by people like McSweeney – intelligent, ruthless, biddable, and a political Al Capone operative.
We have saddled ourselves with the most useless, and, alas, most toxic government in living memory.
Thank you Andrew.
Just before Christmas, the FT featured a review of Labour’s term so far, some score settling, finger pointing at Sue Gray, and what Labour planned for a turn around. McSweeney and his team were interviewed.
Not only look forward, but relish the prospect.
An FT journalist friend and spouse of a child of Mauritian immigrants was part of the team. The journalist, who intends to start a family with the Mauritian spouse, was alarmed at the strategy that intends to scapegoat immigrants, including their spouse and children. Not everything discussed was published as the FT does not want to burn bridges.
Thank you for this message.
Holocaust Memorial Day.
Why do we observe it?
Because “NeverAgain!”?
Fair comment.
But WHAT is it that should “never happen again”?
It can’t mean “genocide”, because genocide has happened repeatedly since 1945, and it’s happening NOW, and if you protest about it, you get arrested, and if you PLAN to protest about it, or even just to give a speech about it in Switzerland, or march to the BBC in Portland Place, you get arrested. Or your university employer may (unlawfully) sack you.
It can’t mean “ethnic cleansing” because that too has happened repeatedly since WW2, and is happening now, and is even being recommended by the US President, without reporters noting that it is a war crime.
Governments can commit or support the commission of war crimes, as official government policy, and they get away with it. But CALL it genocide, and you WON’T get away with it.
I have to conclude, that what is meant by “never again” is something unacceptably narrow, that we “never again” want to see 6m Jews slaughtered by German Nazis in Europe. Well, of course we don’t – it was an abomination.
Any other place, any other race of victims, any other perpetrator, any other time, well – that depends, these things sometimes happen, and well, you know, “self-defence”, and “right to exist”, and “vital trade interests”, and “natural allies”.etc.
If you want to protest about genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes that are happening NOW, I’m sorry, we can’t allow that. And we will arrest you, because of, well. “concerns”.
But if you want to throw repeated Nazi salutes in front of the whole world, well, there are a whole number of organisations, and individuals, supposedly dedicated to preventing anti-semitism, who will willingly and hypocritically make excuses for you.
This wasn’t the message I took away from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, in 1977, when I wept my way round the exhibits and stood in front of the flame in the hall of remembrance.
But it seems to be the message that the leaders of the Western world want me to take from HMD 2025.
I first became aware of the curious a-political and a-historical quality of holocaust remembrance watching a movie about a Klimt painting, in which the representation of antisemitism in 1930s Vienna was curiously a-political – but I happened to know that at this time it was in fact a highly politicised and polarised environment – indeed it was precisely the cosmopolitan socialism of ‘Red Vienna’ that threatened and provoked the deeply conservative, catholic Austrian countryside to back the fascist Dollfuss (and indeed it was misunderstanding of this that motivated the hateful neoliberal Hayek – and hence Thatcher, the ‘Chicago Boys’, etc…).
What has been happening in Hollywood, Israel, and possibly Germany, etc, I realised, was the propagation of a false historical memory disguised as remembrance – much as the British Legion for a long time promoted British nationalism and militarism under the veil of remembrance.
Precisely by removing the holocaust from its real history – for example suppressing the fact that the first concentration camps were not for Jews, but for communists, and indeed that the Nazi association of Jews with communism was a significant part of the false rationale for its antisemitism – and insisting that the holocaust was uniquely terrible, to which no other political violence or genocidal act can ever be compared – representations have in effect removed it from real history, and therefore made it impossible for many to see its real lessons.
I worked at a nationally known state grammar part time for a few years. During one lesson in 2016, on the Milgram obedience studies, I pointed out that alongside the Jews, the political opponents, the disabled, the Roma/ Sinti (over 1 million) etc were murdered including several hundred RC priests overnight in Dachau. I was reported by a student to the head for antisemitism and investigated. My response was to print the relevant Wikipedia page and ask if they wanted to revise it? I also refused to make any apology. I did not mention I was an associate member of Jewish Voice for Labour. The student concerned was not Jewish BTW but was an arrogant person. It is so easy now to smear, contrary to fact, as seen in the Labour Party 2017-2019 and indeed in the BTL comments above.
Your position was 100% right
An interesting aspect of both this school situation and the Labour Party witch-hunts is that factual statements were seen as unacceptable – really, there were several examples of telling the truth being regarded as ‘bringing the party into disrepute’.
There are, of course, situations in which telling the truth might be unacceptable (eg. in a funeral oration) – but I would say almost always, and certainly in politics, it’s never wrong to clearly state the facts.
Will Elon Musk be apologising to Catholic Christians in the United States for his association with the AfD given the massacre of Catholic priests at Dachau? Afterall Donald Trump claims to be a Christian so his association with Musk ought to be anathema:-
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/44356/catholics-honor-the-priests-killed-at-dachau-remember-75th-liberation-anniversary
And homo-sexuals.
Another ahistorical injustice is the effort being spent to blot from memory the fact that it was the Soviet Red Army which liberated Auschwitz and that 20 million Russians gave their lives in the fight against Nazism.
I recently looked at a poll from the Arab Center Washington taken in 2022. It covered a lot of countries. It was clear that people in those countries, especially those nearer to Palestine, thought the cause of the Palestinians concerned all Arabs.
Most of those states have weak forms of democracy and managed media. Nevertheless, I have the impression that although the elites might have reasons to cooperate with the US and even Israel, they are inhibited from getting too close and alienating public opinion among those who are not going to benefit.
Since 2022 we have had the appalling slaughter in Gaza and state sponsored terrorism in the West Bank as settlers destroy property and livelihoods, even commit murder, while the IDF stands by or joins in. The weak sanctions on settler leaders imposed by Biden ( and Starmer) have been lifted by Trump. This will not be lost on the general Arab population.
In a lesser way I think this reflects what is happening here. I detect a growing condemnation of Israel’s actions among the public while the government refuses to pass judgement.
I wonder how far others agree or whether I am in a minority.
this is the poll https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/arab-opinion-index-2022-executive-summary/
Thank you, Ian.
I don’t think you are in a minority.
Agreed.
Genocide is part of the American gaze on the world unfortunately; it is how the West was won and how the country made the most of its enormous resources so quickly. It carries that gaze as it looks beyond its own borders.
Did not a certain Adolf Hitler realise this in his search for German ‘Lebensraum’?
Thank you to others who have made it clear that it is not just our Jews who have suffered a Holocaust , and that too many other countries have practised it and the lack of awareness of this does not help – it seems to reinforce that only our Jews have suffered, when in reality they are not alone in their suffering throughout history – the Armenian suffering at the hands of Turkey, and Turkey’s ‘difficulties’ in accepting what it did are particularity troubling.
Most of all, this undermines and prevents affected peoples from joining together and building an effective coalition against future Holocausts. If it is true that the victims should be heard in the revelation and prevention of Holocausts, then our Jews should stand side by side with others in a united voice who have suffered in helping to prevent more suffering, suffering to come.
When I use the term ‘our Jews’ I mean in the sense that the Jews as a people who could be your neighbours, friends, lovers, boss, colleague as much it applies to Muslims, Christians LGB&T and whatever. These are people we are supposed to live with, alongside of.
We actually belong to each other. When we forget this, the opportunity to do unspeakable things to each other arises and at the end of that road is the Holocaust. A Holocaust is a process of dehumanisation ending in death created by human beings who think that destruction is the only way to create anything new. A Holocaust has its own internal logic (read Tim Snyder) and does not differentiate between its victims as it consumes them, be they Jew, Armenian, Namibian etc.
Thank you and well said, PSR.
Your mention of how the west was won is appropriate. It’s reported that Hitler often watched westerns and films about the British in India, giving him ideas unfortunately.
Thanks for your post. I would like to add to it by saying one thing that came over for me after visiting the Crazy Horse Memorial museum in South Dakota and looking into the history of the Sioux tribe in particular is many native Americans simply didn’t understand the money culture of the white settlers who needed land they could own in order to raise crops or animals in order to sell them for money. The Sioux tribe in particular were nomadic but so were lots of other tribes who may have grown crops but exhausted the use of trees in a locality and therefore needed to move on or indeed particularly in the SouthWest of the United States subject to long lasting droughts forcing moves. Climatic conditions can therefore mitigate against a society developing a money culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Palace
Here’s another example of how the imposition of a money culture can also drive genocide in this case the discovery of gold:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
Thank you for your support CS and Schofield.
bit of a problem with the word genocide. I read in the German press that Assad’s Alawite community of Shia? are being murdered although many Alawites are/were opposed to Assad.
Genocide is a loose term. Is the murder of European Christians by Muslims less important. Again an atrocity a few days ago in Germany .
Murder of anyone of a different opinion is unthinkable
There is no probloem with the word genocide, at all. Unless you want to dny its appropriate use, that is.
Do deliberate government policies class as genocide if they lead to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of premature deaths? “Austerity Kills” may seem like a glib slogan, but not to those it effects and has effected, especially so for those who lost their lives. Due to being a slow-rate of killing and done out of the limelight, without ostensible weapons, these kinds of deaths are often deemed democide.
“Government have condemned 335,000 people to death, all in the name of some defunct economic ideology.” [2012-2019]
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2023-01-12/debates/A4887F31-75FF-4C8B-8537-F83775929E2A/UKMortalityRates
“Research by the University of York published in BMJ Open found that the joint impact of cuts to healthcare, public health and social care since 2010 found that the cuts were linked to 57,550 more deaths than would have been expected between 2010 and 2014.”
https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2021/october/austerity-cuts-killed-tens-thousands-2010-onwards
“Research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research and published in 2015 identified austerity as one of the factors responsible for a rise in suicide attempts and suicide deaths since 2008, particularly in regard to Jobcentrepolicies.”
McVeigh, Karen (12 November 2015). “Austerity a factor in rising suicide rate among UK men – study”. The Guardian. cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme
“ONS figures published in 2018 indicated that the slowdown in general life expectancy increase was one of the highest among a group of 20 of the world’s leading economies.”
“UK among worst for life expectancy rises”. BBC News. 7 August 2018. cited in op. cit.
I wish I could find an article or agency that keeps track of all these lost lives and could make better sense of them than myself.
This may be offensive to some, but it seems to me neoliberal governments have learned the lessons of the Holocaust, but the morally wrong ones. They have learned to hide state-sanctioned killing behind policy-statements that never refer to the negative-effects, behind statistics that gloss over each and every death and the effects on families, friends & communities. As a disabled person I am well aware that my fellow disablies have been disproportionately effected by austerity. We were also the group most effected by the mishandling of the on-going Covid19 pandemic. Then we might also consider the number of individuals who die due to the poor quality of their housing. And all sorts of other areas.
We are perhaps in the region of half-a-million fellow Brits killed by government policies just this century. Is that genocide?
An excellent question.
We discuss it in this household quite often – where we agree these lives are lost due to political neglect.
Very early on in the genocide, Netanyahu stated his intentions by insisting that Egypt open it’s borders to allow all the Gazans gathered in southern Gaza to evacuate, for their own safety, of course. From that point on I knew that Netanyahus intention was to ethnically cleanse Gaza. This then was doubly illustrated by the deliberate destruction of almost every piece of civil infrastructure necessary to support ‘normal’ life (as normal as living in an open-air prison can be) in Gaza over the next 15 months of the ‘conflict’. The Israelis wanted to make Gaza inhospitable for human existence and it looks like they have succeeded.
And the Egyptians knew that the Israeli forces would not allow the refugees back into Gaza, so Egypt would be stuck with a humanitarian crisis forever. So, of course, they refused to take in the Gazan refugees. The Egyptians, at this point, would have been wise to Netanyahu’s game because he willfully ignored the Head of the Egyptian Security Services’ clear warning that Hamas were about to do something big in Gaza about a 10 days before October 7th. Netanyahu brushed it off by claiming they had full hands in the West Bank. Alarm bells began to ring for the Egyptians. Then, when we hear that he was given warnings by the Americans, too and his own all-female military surveillance units (many of whom were victims of October 7th), it all begins to make sense.
And now Trump pops up encouraging the Arab nations to take in the Gazan refugees because the place needs ‘cleaning out’ due to the fact that it’s now a wasteland. He is just doing Netanyahu dirty work for him. He is no better than Biden, as far as I’m concerned. If Gaza had happened on his watch, he’d have done exactly the same. Arming the IDF to the teeth so they could slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, engage in illegal medieval-style siege warfare and lay waste to an entire country.
And how many more pensioners and others are going to freeze/starve since the tax free allowance was frozen in 20211 at £12570 ? According to the Bank of England inflation calculator that allowance should now be £15275 stripping us of £2700 every year.Definitely a heat or eat situation. Even the triple lock is threatened I read
Tax is at 20% remember
The loss is not the gross sum – but the net one
I am not saying there is no loss – but it is not what you claim