The subtext of this EDM is beyond comprehension. I cannot understand why any MP would put their name to something so perniciously offensive and based on a premise so false...
The suggestion of the EDM isn’t just that Holocaust Memorial Day is exclusively concerned with Jews, but that the very word ‘Holocaust’ is somehow exclusive of any other group of people who were exterminated by Nazis...
Both are total junk. HMD has always commemorated all victims of the Holocaust that included Jews, Roma, the disabled, LBGT, Slavs, Poles, political dissidents, Jehovahs witnesses, the list goes on...
The uniqueness of the Holocaust, of course, was the state sponsored industrialisation of the process of identifying, recording and then annihilating with intent, entire generations and geographies of human beings...
At Wannsee, Party and State officials quite literally sat at a boardroom table and discussed and consented to the construction of gas chambers and industrial ovens, with meticulous plans to process millions of people...
The horrors of war, the evils and dispossession of slavery and colonialism were well understood by the 1930’s, yet in continental Europe, that killing could be conceived and instigated at that scale should have been beyond comprehension...
But it did happen, and for some this is still within living memory. At Évian, Europe washed its hands of the Jewish refugee crisis, and after the war, Britain did much to prevent survivors fleeing from the part of Europe that had exterminated them entering Mandate Palestine...
Israel was established in the wake of a critical moment in time when centuries of antisemitism reached its horrific zenith. Jews felt that the only people who could be trusted to keep Jews safe from harm were Jews. This is the core of how Jews understand Zionism...
Today, the ongoing occupation of large swathes of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza, the rhetoric and legislation coming from the Likud government are all disgraceful and need to end. But to compare this situation to the Holocaust is simply wrong...
It’s also deliberately provocative. Hajo Meyer was entitled to say whatever wanted. But no one needed to give a platform to someone to make these statements inside the heart of our politics... google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.…
Corbyn was warned in advance of the meeting in 2010 just how problematic the comparison would be. It seems in retrospect even he now says he agrees...
But the 2011 EDM *followed* the 2010 event. Those who signed the EDM that sought to marginalise the Holocaust knew the proponents of the campaign were doing so to enable the Israel-Nazi analogy...
So for the Jewish community, the removal of the specific examples from the IHRA definition that covers the Israel Nazi analogy is really quite a big deal with some major context...
The Left inside Israel are thriving and mobile. Constantly campaigning and agitating against the worst excesses of a populist right wing government. Israeli activists monitor checkpoints, document military activity, hold power to account...
Palestinians have an absolute right to determine and define their oppression. IHRA won’t stop that. Attempts to do so are not in the spirit of the definition, which from the outset makes allowances for context...
In Nazi Germany, people turned a blind eye to atrocities that happened in concentration camps, in many cases, located on the outskirts of major cities, and ghettos in town centres...
Hannah Arendt called it the “banality of evil”. She’s come under a great deal of criticism for what some feel was the removal of positive agency on behalf of the perpetrators of the Holocaust such as Eichmann, for whose trial her book first coined the term...
But the “banality of evil” was simply the notion that pretty ordinary people are willing to suspend their ability to critically think about the impact of their actions, in exchange for a cacophony of clichés and submission to an authority figure...
I’m seething with anger tonight about what my Party has become, I was beyond upset earlier in the day explaining how bad the situation has become, as I now reflect on the fact that there is now almost no way back from the brink...
But I’m also scared that my deep concerns about the emergence of populism, political polarisation and the suspension of empathy we are increasingly seeing are making my irrational worries now seem really quite rational.
