Monday, January 27, 2025

01/27 Links Pt2: Howard Jacobson: We have still not been fully liberated from Auschwitz; Pres. Higgins’s hatred for Israel is bringing shame on Ireland

From Ian:

Howard Jacobson: We have still not been fully liberated from Auschwitz
It has been said often enough that Holocaust denial takes many forms, from the brute mathematics of those who jotted down the dimensions of Auschwitz to prove that it was no bigger than Butlin’s, and probably more fun, to historians who claim to have found evidence that Jews had done it to themselves to justify invading Palestine. Of all forms of denialism, the worst minimises the slaughter by arguing that Jews were always just Nazis in waiting anyway, thereby forfeiting in advance the world’s pity, first by showing none themselves, and then by claiming what we might call “Shoah exemption”.

I have yet to meet a Jew in real life – as opposed to on a panel or at a literary festival – who believes that what was done to his grandparents in Bergen-Belsen gives him the right to murder children in Gaza, but this passes as psychology in some quarters, especially where Jews of a certain over-educated sort get together and squirm whenever Jews without degrees and from the wrong side of the tracks make a dog’s dinner of defending Israel.

There has always been a reluctance to embrace Zionism among professorial Jews, as much for social reasons as political ones. It is part of the parochialism you are eager to put behind you when you leave Hendon for Oxford, and one of the reasons you march alongside people who don’t know where Hendon is.

I am not a marcher myself. I don’t care for their mood-music. But I have occasionally forgotten to be cautious – or tactful, if you prefer – and allowed myself to stray too close to what’s left of a march late on a Shabbes afternoon. “How dare you?” I have muttered under my breath at the straggling churchy people wrapped in Palestinian scarves who don’t want to go home. “How dare you, as members of a society or practitioners of a faith that made Jews pariahs for two thousand years, sit in judgment yet again in a matter of which, frankly, given what you chant, you know nothing?”

Towards those who have an unborrowed grievance I feel differently. It wasn’t centuries of Arab contempt for Jews that led ineluctably to the camps. But I would like them to know more of what it is they accuse Jews of exploiting, if only to understand the nature of Jewish apprehension. It appears at times as though Israel’s neighbours view the Holocaust as just another of the ways Jews have stolen a march on them, one more Jewish advantage, akin to controlling the media and running Hollywood. Call it Holocaust Covetousness.

My brothers, I want to say to them, believe me, you wouldn’t want it. Go and see A Real Pain if you doubt my words. Played in a low key, it is not a film about the horrors of the Holocaust or any advantage Jews have tried to wrest from it. Without fanfare or self-pity, it tells of the slow-burn of depletion and depression that endures all these years later.

One way or another, the lesson of the last 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews, anyway – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it or how many schlock Holocaust novels people read. The Chartered Accountant of Auschwitz might while away a tedious hour, but it hasn’t brought knowledge or enlightenment.

The true story cannot be told often enough – not only as history of terrible events we are duty bound to commemorate, but as an honest reckoning with the aftermath. And we Jews have to stop being apologetic about repeating it.
Aviva Klompas: When everything is genocide, nothing is: A call to preserve the term’s weight
In a bitter twist of irony, some of the most vocal anti-Israel protesters who invoke the Holocaust to condemn Israel often indulge in genocidal rhetoric themselves, chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea,” which calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.

The word genocide was coined by a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin, in 1944 and enshrined in international law in 1948. It refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This definition, the U.N.’s no less, emphasizes deliberate, systematic targeting — not unintended harm amid conflict.

When I first visited the Majdanek concentration camp as a teenager, I stood before a giant mound of ashes preserved as a testament to the industrialized murder of the Holocaust. I was struck by the meticulous intentionality of it all — the systematic effort to annihilate an entire people. That is genocide. Misapplying the term to describe the conflict in Gaza trivializes the 6 million Jews who were murdered and undermines the legal framework designed to prevent such atrocities.

Meanwhile, real genocides go largely ignored. In early January, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken determined that the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces were committing genocide in their struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces. This conflict has killed 150,000 — more than three times the number of deaths in the Israel-Hamas war — and displaced 11 million. Yet there is scant media coverage, no International Criminal Court arrest warrants, no campus protests and no celebrity speeches at award shows.

The same neglect applies to the Burmese military’s atrocities against the Rohingya and the Chinese government’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims, both of which the State Department recognized as genocides in recent years. Where is the outrage?

Instead, the global focus is on Israel, where the accusations of genocide require a distortion of international law. Amnesty International, for instance, dismisses what it calls “an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence.” This amounts to moving the goalposts, turning genocide into a catch-all accusation, and making a mockery of international law.

Sadly, international legal bodies are complicit in this confusion. Last year, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against political leaders from both Israel and Hamas, charging both sides with “extermination…as a crime against humanity.” This false equivalency — drawing parallels between a democracy defending itself and a terrorist organization deliberately targeting civilians — is a moral and legal outrage.

As legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich has noted, “If Israel’s defense against Hamas constitutes genocide, then American wars from World War II to Obama’s campaign against ISIS do as well.” And this is precisely the problem: If anything is genocide, nothing is genocide.

In 1945, Allied general and future American President Dwight D. Eisenhower liberated a concentration camp at Ohrdruf in Germany. He later documented what he saw and heard, “in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Today I see a new battle unfolding — not just against Holocaust denial but against Holocaust dilution.

If we are silent as genocide is recklessly redefined, we dishonor its victims and weaken our collective ability to prevent future atrocities. In memory of those who perished and in defense of those still at risk, we must stop the politicization of genocide. Instead, we must preserve the term’s integrity, uphold its legal weight, and direct our outrage where it truly belongs — toward those who commit the most heinous crimes.
The debasement of the Holocaust
The Holocaust has been ripped out of its historical context. So much so that its historical meaning has now been thoroughly inverted by assorted anti-Israel activists. After Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023, ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters quickly characterised Israel’s self-defence as Nazi-like aggression. On their marches, they waved placards featuring a Star of David inside a swastika. They compared Israel’s siege of Gaza to Nazi concentration camps. They cast Israeli soldiers fighting to defend their nation as Nazi stormtroopers. In the most grotesque inversion of all, they cast the Hamas terrorists responsible for the atrocities of 7 October in the role of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims.

It now seems that Gaza is equated with Auschwitz itself. In May 2024, pro-Palestine demonstrators went so far as to disrupt an Auschwitz remembrance march with a ‘Stop Genocide’ protest. According to Maung Zarni, a supposed genocide expert, Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is a ‘repeat of Auschwitz’, and a ‘collective white imperialist man’s genocide’.

This wilful warping of the historical record is breathtaking. If Gaza is the new Auschwitz, then where are the packed trains transporting their ‘passengers’ to their death? Where are the deadly gas chambers? Where is the routine violation of the corpses of the dead? Anti-Israel zealots are not merely robbing the Holocaust of its horrific reality, they are also hollowing out its moral significance.

Holocaust inversion is rife among the anti-Israel crowd. As Lesley Klaff explains, it involves both ‘an inversion of reality’, casting Israelis ‘as the “new” Nazis and the Palestinians as the “new” Jews’, and an ‘inversion of morality’, in which the ‘Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of, “the Jews”’.

Anti-Israel propaganda is infused with Holocaust inversion. The UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has even called for the boycott of today’s Holocaust Memorial Day on the grounds it is ‘morally unacceptable’ that Gaza is not considered as a genocide alongside the Holocaust. It wrote to 460 town halls and educational centres asking them to boycott the event.

The words ‘Never Again’ have become thoroughly corrupted. Decontextualised and Disneyfied, the Holocaust has become a weapon to be wielded against the very people who were its historical victims. The ease with which Hamas and its Western supporters have turned the memory of the Holocaust against its historical victims is an indictment of Western culture.

We must start reasserting an uncompromising commitment to ‘Never Again’. Eighty years after its liberation, the memory of Auschwitz must be freed from the powerful forces committed to distorting its meaning.


Jonathan Tobin: Zero tolerance for empty words of Holocaust remembrance
Oct. 7 changed everything
Prior to the existential war for Israel’s existence that began on that Black Shabbat, it might have been possible to make a coherent argument in favor of cooperating with and using the Jan. 27 ceremonies as a way to promote awareness of global antisemitism. But these commemorations are not assisting in educating the world about where tolerance of Jew-hatred leads. To the contrary, it must now be acknowledged that their primary purpose is to provide cover to those who wish to make a distinction between the mass slaughter of Jews in the last century and those who are attempting it in the present one.

In the eight decades since the Holocaust, the growing trend toward the universalization of the Holocaust has long since gotten out of hand. Scholars, self-styled “human rights” organizations and others eager to make use of the historical suffering of the Jewish people for their own purposes have seized on the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews as an all-purpose metaphor for what they deemed to be bad behavior.

Those who promote such universalization claim to do so out of good motives. They desire to use the Holocaust as an example of how to combat hatred so as not to isolate it as a distinct event in history that can’t be applied as a lesson to other conflicts. In doing so, they deliberately misunderstand the nature of antisemitism. It is not garden-variety bigotry or unpleasantness directed at people who worship differently but hatred, coupled with a political program, employed to empower those who despise Jews. Other examples of real genocide exist, such as the mass killings in Cambodia in the 1970s by the Communists or the slaughter of the Tutsi tribe by Rwanda’s Hutus—and even one now being perpetuated against Uyghur Muslims in China—but these tend to fall by the wayside in contemporary discussions on the subject.

The Holocaust, however, is unique. It was the culmination of 2,000 years of antisemitism—a virus of hatred that unfortunately did not die out when the Allies entered the death camps, and then defeated the German Nazis and their collaborators. It lives on in groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and all those who echo their genocidal goals on American college campuses with chants like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.”

Contemporary antisemites don’t merely engage in slandering Jews and spreading lies about their actions and intentions, such as those uttered about Israel. They seek to delegitimize Jews in ways that are not dissimilar to those of the Nazis, who preached about a powerful Jewish cabal that engaged in conspiracies to undermine and harm non-Jews.

That is why Israel is the object of such hatred and a worldwide movement that not only treats its supposed offenses as the worst on the planet but also as a uniquely evil entity. They also claim that Jews wrongly “weaponize” antisemitism and even the Holocaust to attract sympathy and whitewash their crimes. That is exactly the sort of tactic that Nazi ideologues used to justify their actions.

After Oct. 7, the attempt to make a distinction between the current war on Israel and the Jews, and what happened during the Holocaust is not only outdated but intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Doing more harm than good
Suffice it to say that any commemoration of the Shoah, whenever it is held, must take into account the fact that Israel is currently fighting an existential war to prevent another Holocaust. Any event that purports to commemorate the slain 6 million men, women and children, and the fight against the Nazis, without doing so is a fraud.

Like other forms of Holocaust education that universalize the memory of Nazi Germany’s effort to wipe out the Jews, International Holocaust Remembrance Day may now be doing more harm than good.

The United Nations is an institution that has been a cesspool of antisemitism for decades. But we are now at the point when its agencies like UNRWA have not only helped perpetuate the war against Israel but allowed its employees to take part in the Oct. 7 atrocities and its facilities to be used to imprison Israeli hostages.

You cannot be against the Nazis and also morally neutral about Hamas, and the war against Israel and the Jews. Anyone who tries to play that game should be exposed as an ally of those who seek Jewish genocide or one of their useful idiots. There should be zero tolerance for Holocaust commemorations that do not acknowledge that a genocidal war continues in our own day and that those who falsely accuse Israel of genocide to justify that war have no place at such ceremonies.
Brendan O'Neill: Holocaust envy
To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, we are publishing this chapter from Brendan O’Neill’s book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.

One of the most striking things in the aftermath of 7 October was the silence of the fascism-spotters. You know these people. They’re the centrists and liberals who see fascism everywhere. Who think everything is ‘like the 1930s’. The vote for Brexit, Donald Trump, the rise of populist parties in Europe – all of it reminds them of the Nazi years. And yet when the Islamofascists of Hamas stormed the Jewish State and butchered a thousand Jews, suddenly they went quiet. No more Nazi talk. No more trembling warnings of a return to ‘the dark days of the 1930s’. No more handwringing over ‘new Hitlers’. It seems that to a certain kind of liberal, everything is fascism except fascism.

These are the people who lapped up Guardian articles with headlines like ‘The reich stuff’, exploring the supposed ‘comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler’. They’re the people who will have nodded in vigorous agreement when a spokesperson for Joe Biden slammed Trump for parroting ‘the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler’. They’re the folk who no doubt permitted themselves a chuckle when it was revealed that Biden staffers refer to Trump as ‘Hitler pig’ behind closed doors. They’re the self-styled ‘vigilant’ members of respectable society who will have cheered when Biden described Trumpism as a ‘semi-fascism’ that threatens the ‘soul’ of the free world.

They’re the pro-EU middle classes who fretted over the vote for Brexit, viewing it as a ‘return to the 1930s’. They’re the broadsheet readers who will have murmured in agreement with headlines saying there are ‘terrifying parallels between Brexit and the appeasement of Hitler’. They’re the royalty-sceptics who will have found themselves in agreement with princes for once when Charles, then Prince of Wales, said populism has ‘deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s’. They’re the weekend marchers who will have attended anti-Trump demos at which people waved placards showing Trump with a Hitler tache, and anti-Brexit protests at which speakers issued dire warnings about our descent into Hitlerite mania.

There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper or peruse social media without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom – the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-20th century these people love talking about – their fascism chatter evaporated. In fact, they started warning people not to use Nazi analogies. Not to compare 7 October to the 1930s. Not to engage in the very fascism fretting that had been the bread and butter of their own political commentary for years.

Just two weeks after the pogrom, the Guardian published a piece denouncing Israel for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’ in its response to Hamas’s assault. It is an outrage, it argued, that Israeli leaders are likening Hamas to fascist Germany and thus portraying Israel as ‘powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis’. This is the same Guardian that had been namedropping the Holocaust for years. Which ran pieces asking ‘Are we living through another 1930s?’ after the vote for Brexit. Which published columns saying that, thanks to Trump, ‘the world could be heading back to the 1930s’. Yet when Israelis suggested that the slaughter of a thousand Jews by fascistic men with knives, guns and rocket launchers was somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s, the Guardian essentially tut-tutted.
Gerald Steinberg: UN, NGOs transform Holocaust remembrance into hypocrisy
January 27 is designated in many countries and the UN as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp.

This year, which is the 80th anniversary, there will be a number of ceremonies in memory of the 6 million Jewish victims – one-third of the entire Jewish population in the world at the time. Many righteous speeches will be made, with pledges of “never again” and warnings about the dangers of antisemitism.

In stark contrast to these pious words stands the incomprehensible hypocrisy of genocide inversion – the vile accusation that in defending its citizens against a repetition of the October 7 mass atrocities, Israelis have become the new Nazis.

This heinous demonization is the 21st-century version of Jew-hatred, led by the very institutions created after the Shoah, ostensibly to promote human rights and prevent injustice.

Amnesty International, founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson, a Jew and Zionist, is a leader in spreading this evil. Whether in a 300-page pseudo-report that was prominently headlined in influential media platforms or crudely antisemitic social media posts, Amnesty combines centuries of theological Jew-hatred with genocide inversion.

The consensus working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance specifically includes: “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” This is exactly what the leaders of Amnesty and their followers have done.

They are far from alone in a powerful industry that systematically weaponized the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and accompanying Genocide Convention, intended to prevent the repetition of hate campaigns that preceded the death camps and the mass annihilation under Nazi Germany.
How Jews were turned into the ‘new Nazis’
The centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazi ideology was often played down during the 20th century. Both British prime minister Winston Churchill and French president Charles de Gaulle, notes historian Tony Judt, were ‘curiously blind to the racial specificity of Hitler’s victims, understanding Nazis in the context of Prussian militarism instead’. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and its Stalinist political parties tended to downplay the anti-Semitic nature of the Nazis. As Judt points out, the museum at Auschwitz established by the Stalinist Polish regime listed the victims by nationality alone, omitting all references to them being Jews.

It was during the 1990s that the tendency to relativise the Holocaust really took off. It came to be seen as just one of many instances of mass killing. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, Western politicians and journalists often likened the Serbs to the Nazis. In 1999, Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister at the time, said that Serbia was ‘set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews’. That same year, then US president Bill Clinton compared Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler: ‘Though his ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related; both [involving] vicious, premeditated, systematic oppression fuelled by religious and ethnic hatred.’

So first the role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust was downplayed. Then the Holocaust was relativised – recast as just one example among many of man’s inherent inhumanity and genocidal instincts. And then comes the cruellest blow of all. The meaning of the Holocaust is inverted. The Jews are presented as its perpetrators, rather than its victims.

This is the view of the contemporary anti-Israel movement. It doesn’t merely criticise the Israeli state, it demonises it. It deems it guilty of every modern sin – of settler-colonialism, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, genocide, apartheid and more. And this all serves one single objective: to present the Jewish state as the epitome of evil.

In some ways, the anti-Israel movement is drawing on the Stalinist tradition of equating Israel with the Nazis. As writer Izabella Tabarovsky has explained, Soviet anti-Zionists actively promoted this idea from the Six Day War in 1967 onwards. At the heart of this ‘virulent demonisation of Israel and Zionism’, were allegations of ‘Zionist-Nazi collaboration and false equivalence between the two’. This Stalinist libel has now been recycled by the anti-Israel movement.

This, then, is how the victims of the Nazis’ ‘war of extermination’ have been turned into its present-day perpetrators. It is hard to think of a more grotesque abuse of history.
David Collier: BBC News: A deceptive, amateur, anti-Zionist train wreck
There comes a time when you have to accept there is no saving the BBC, and we are way past that point. I am so angry and tired with all this that I cannot even be bothered to give this piece a proper introduction. I have broken this analysis of the latest attack by the BBC’s anti-Zionists down into nine digestible parts.

1. The BBC’s viral attack on Israel
Four days ago the BBC launched yet another attack on Israel. This one was over an IDF strike on a building in the Sidon area of Lebanon on the 29 September. There were a large number of casualties (although the number is in dispute -ranging between 47 and 73 – and there appear to be some errors – this is beyond the scope of my piece).

Along with the article, the BBC also published a documentary that is available on iPlayer as part of its ‘Eye Investigations’ series. Along with the wannabee (and useless) ‘BBC Verify’ fact checking team, ‘Eye Investigations’ is another expensive part of the BBC machinery. In other words this one cost the BBC (and you) a lot of money.

I am now quite adept at spotting problems with BBC material, and this story had red flags waving everywhere. I had a simple choice when I set out to do this exercise. Rather than go deep and check every name involved I felt there was a better test to play here. If I limited my own research to just a day or two – then any rigorous BBC fact-checking before publishing should also have uncovered the errors.

Therefore what is laid out below suggests there is no effective check or balance system to counter a BBC engine room that is overflowing with anti-Zionist journalists.

2. A journalist that shouldn’t
I have written about the main journalist Nawal al-Maghafi before. She once presented a BBC Verify piece that promoted lies worthy of a Russian Soviet era misinformation service. It should come as no surprise, al-Maghafi has serious history associating with some of the world’s most toxic anti-Zionist media.

Nawal Al-Maghafi was born in Yemen – one of the countries that just happens to be firing ballistic missiles at Israel. Following her career path, she worked with Al Jazeera – the Qatari state mouthpiece – and wrote for Middle East Eye – another pro-Qatari propaganda machine. More troublingly she has worked with PRESS TV – a state media outlet of Iran – the regime sponsoring almost all of the trouble in the Middle East.

In that same flavour, she has platformed alongside Massoud Shadjareh- the head of the Iranian backed ‘IHRC’. The IHRC are the ones who organise the annual pro-Hezbollah, pro-Iranian al-Quds march. And on her social media timeline, there are several ‘free Palestine’ hashtags.

When it comes to Israel, Nawal al-Maghafi is the journalist that simply shouldn’t.
Half of Jews have considered leaving Britain in last two years because of anti-Semitism
Half of the Jews in Britain have considered leaving the country in the past two years because of anti-Semitism, a survey has found.

Polling by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA) on Holocaust Memorial Day revealed the extent of the fear felt in recent years by British Jews.

Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain have reached a record high following the October 7 attacks and subsequent Israel-Hamas war.

The study analysed 4,078 responses from British Jews, who were surveyed last June and contacted primarily through Jewish networks and religious bodies.

It found that 50 per cent agreed with the statement: “In the past two years I have considered leaving Britain due to anti-Semitism.” This was up from 48 per cent in November 2022.

Only a third (34 per cent) said they believe that Jews have a long-term future in the UK amid safety fears in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Majority of British Jews hide religion

The Metropolitan Police has come under fire over its perceived failures to tackle anti-Semitic chants on pro-Palestinian marches, while anti-Semitic abuse in British universities has reached record levels.

A majority of British Jews (58 per cent) said they hid their religion in fear of discrimination.

Eighty-five per cent of those surveyed were dissatisfied with Sir Sadiq Khan, Labour’s Mayor of London whose response to weekly pro-Gaza marches drew heavy criticism.

Sir Sadiq has sought to reassure Jews in the capital that they are safe but has been embroiled in a number of scandals relating to his response to the demonstrations.

He was criticised in May after suggesting there must be equally strong criticism of the actions of Hamas and Israel.

The previous month, Sir Sadiq had apologised after accusing the Chief Rabbi of singling him out for criticism over his stance on Israel because he is a Muslim.

Ninety-two per cent said the BBC’s coverage of matters of Jewish interest was unfavourable. The corporation has repeatedly insisted its reporting of the Israel-Gaza conflict is “impartial”.
Never Again means nothing if we are not willing to stand up to today’s Jew haters
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every year, I’m a little uncertain about whether and how to mark this day in Mosaic. Israel commemorates the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah, which falls on the 27th day of the month of Nissan. And there remain Jews who reject Yom HaShoah as a modern imposition, since the ancient fast of the Ninth of Av has already been designated for mourning national tragedies. Why add yet another day, of recent vintage, granted its official status by the corrupt and anti-Semitism-ridden United Nations?

Still, it’s often a day around which very intelligent things are published. One is this column by Stephen Pollard, who remarks upon the sort of meaningless virtue-signaling International Holocaust Remembrance Day inspires, like “Never Again.”

For most of the past 80 years Never Again has been no more than an abstract expression of goodness. . . . Today, however, when the threat to Jews is real and clear, Never Again is exposed as a platitude.

Israel has had to fight many existential wars since its creation in 1948. But here in Britain, there was no serious threat to the Jewish community—but a new and worrying wave of Jew hatred started emerging at around the time of the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn as Labor leader in 2015.

In the past fifteen months, however, anti-Semitism has skyrocketed. Naked and unashamed Jew hate is now a regular feature on the streets of London and elsewhere as hundreds of thousands assemble to demonstrate their loathing of “Zionists”—in other words, of Jews. . . . If Never Again is to be more than the platitude it has become, it means allowing Jews to defend themselves from those who seek to kill them.
Seth Mandel: Holocaust Re-education
Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the Irish government has chosen to commemorate the occasion by reenacting its neutrality during World War II.

The Holocaust Remembrance Day festivities in Dublin kicked off yesterday with a caustic affair that highlighted a couple of lessons from that dark period that remain unlearned.

In recent weeks, the Irish Jewish community, including a very prominent Holocaust survivor, pleaded with President Michael D. Higgins to politely decline the honor of speaking at the government’s official ceremony. This was because Higgins is an unfiltered cigarette of a man, a slow-burning stick of toxic air pollution. He has presided over a period of skyrocketing anti-Semitic incitement in Ireland, some of it coming from his own government: Ireland has intervened with the International Criminal Court to change the definition of “genocide” in order to find Israel guilty of a crime it has not committed. He wants very much for the Jew to again be the world’s scapegoat.

Yet Higgins refused the request to sit this one out. In response, the Irish Jewish community asked him to please leave Gaza out of his speech—it should have no place in the speech anyway, but Michael D. Higgins is the sort of man who has to be reminded to not turn a Holocaust commemoration into a prosecution of the international Jew.

Which is what he did in his speech on Sunday, just as expected, making room in his Holocaust memorial speech for the “rubble of Gaza.” In response, a few men and women in attendance turned their backs on the president. So staffers literally dragged one of the women out, manhandling an Israeli-Irish teacher for her quiet protest.

The video is rather shocking. The ragdolling of a Jewish woman in front of a room full of people is chillingly appropriate to the subject of the event. That is the first lesson: Gratuitous violence against Jewish women for the pleasure of the president is intended as a template of sorts. The government set an example for how a good Irish person can be a patriot in the year 2025: drag a Jew around Dublin.

The second lesson is that the world is not generally afraid of another Holocaust; it is, instead, terrified of the possibility that such a tragedy could befall non-Jews. This is why it’s so important to some people to universalize Holocaust education and commemoration: Don’t let this happen to you or your Gentile friends.
Jake Wallis Simons: Is Ireland the most antisemitic country in the West?
Is Ireland the most antisemitic country in the Western world? In an apparent bid to clinch that shameful title, its president, Michael Higgins – who was recently branded an “antisemitic liar” by Israel’s foreign minister – was invited to deliver the keynote address at the National Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration.

Understandably, Ireland’s chief rabbi and the chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland both objected in the strongest terms. They were ignored; at the event on the weekend, Higgins entirely predictably brought the most solemn event of the Jewish calendar into woeful disrepute by bringing up the Gaza war.

This was the cue for a handful of Jewish and Israeli attendees to turn their backs in protest. One of them, Lior Tibet, a PhD student who teaches the Holocaust as part of courses on Nazi Germany and modern European History, was dragged out by security officers, resisting desperately in a state of shock.

It could not have been more appalling. An event commemorating the Shoah – the Shoah – was interrupted by the forcible ejection of a Jewish historian because she objected to a speech by a man who was accused of “spewing lies” after alleging that Israel would like “to have a settlement in Egypt”. Most bafflingly of all, it did not seem to occur to the security men that manhandling a Jew at a Holocaust event would ring certain ironical bells.

Ireland’s antisemitic tendencies entered the news most prominently in December when Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, ordered the closure of the Israeli embassy in Ireland. The reason, he said, was Dublin’s “antisemitic actions and rhetoric” after it joined South Africa’s “genocide” case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Sa’ar also accused teoiseach Simon Harris of being an antisemite after the Irish premier said the embassy closure was to distract from the killing of children in Gaza.

This was the first time in ten years that the Israeli ambassador was not invited to speak at the Holocaust Memorial event. Although the embassy was closed last year, Dana Erlich officially remains the ambassador despite being recalled in May. She both could have and should have been there.

Whether the fraught relationship between the Irish government and Israel reflects a groundswell of antisemitism in the country or has stimulated it is a matter of debate. But in December, Rabbi Wieder said that many of the 3,000 Jews in the country no longer felt safe to wear signs of their identity openly, such as Stars of David or kippot.


Brendan O'Neill: President Higgins’s hatred for Israel is bringing shame on Ireland
Then Higgins got on to Israel. Jewish spokespeople, even a Holocaust survivor, had pleaded with him to avoid ‘the Israel issue’ in his memorial speech. But he ignored them. It seems winning the moral favour of Dublin’s bourgeois Israel-haters counts for more than the feelings of Dublin’s Jews. Higgins denounced Hamas’s attack of 7 October and then moved on to Israel’s ‘unimaginable’ response to it. Israel has laid waste to ‘women and children’, ‘homes’ and ‘the necessary institutions for life itself’, he said. His speech hinted at a direct comparison between what the Nazis did 80 years ago and what Israel is doing today. For example, he went from talking about the ‘emaciated’ Jews of the death camps to saying we mustn’t look away from ‘the empty bowls of the starving [in Gaza]’.

Can we talk about how loathsome this is? To use a Holocaust memorial event to hector and damn the nation that was born from the fires of that Holocaust is beyond contemptible. It almost defies belief that Higgins would switch so shamelessly from commemorating the Nazi genocide of the Jews to rebuking Israel for its ‘unimaginable’ response to Hamas’s genocidal assault of 7 October. There are any number of recent, far bloodier wars he could have referenced in the service of his banal belief that the Holocaust was about ‘cruelty and hatred’. Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, the Congo. Why Gaza? Why Israel? Why that tiny nation built by the survivors of the very barbarism Higgins was meant to be commemorating? Shame on Ireland’s president for engaging in such a low and dangerous debasement of historical truth to the end of hectoring the Jewish nation.

This transformation of the Jews’ darkest moment into a megaphone for berating the Jewish State is ever-present in ‘pro-Palestine’ activism. On every one of those hate marches there is someone branding Israel ‘the New Nazis’. Protesters often mangle the Star of David with the Nazi swastika on their placards to drive home their sick belief that the Jews have become the very monsters they were once plagued by. It’s Jew-taunting, plain and simple. As Howard Jacobson once said, this feverish comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany is entirely intended ‘to wound Jews’, to ‘punish them with their own grief’. This is the obscene dynamic that more mainstream anti-Israel political figures are playing into, unwittingly or not.

Ireland’s elites are playing a lethal game. They scandalously pressed the International Court of Justice to water down its definition of ‘genocide’ in order that Israel might finally be found guilty of that crime. They watched as Israel shut its embassy in Dublin from sheer exasperation with Ireland’s rulers. And the president can’t even get through one commemoration for Europe’s slaughtered Jews without pontificating about the Jewish State. Every Irish person should be horrified that their nation is now a land where the flag of Jew-killers is waved in the streets while Jews are silenced for opposing the political exploitation of their people’s suffering.
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Irish President’s Holocaust Address Was a Predictable Disaster
The European answer to the Holocaust is the moral imperative to dissolve national and religious loyalties to the maximum extent possible, to make “othering” itself a kind of impossibility. In a way, Europeanism is the moral imperative to live as Nietzsche’s last man. He can’t be dangerous because he believes in nothing.

It is an irony of history, however, that this last man is destined to be a gibbering antisemite. Why? Because Zionism came to a less utopian but more practical conclusion about the Holocaust: Nations that want to protect themselves need a modern state capable of defending them. This answer is practically the opposite of Europe’s, and on a religious question, oppositional answers are heresies. Europeans are thus possessed by a weird moral superiority that makes them thrilled to call Jews Nazis. Again, it’s easy for people who have been retired to the old folks’ home of history, existing behind America’s imperial protection, to look across the world to a border region and declare it full of thugs.

Europe’s impulse after the Holocaust is a kind of utopian death wish. Zionism’s is a thrilling will to live, even in the face of the difficulties and tragedies presented by life on this earth. You see it in Israelis’ birth rates. You see it in their foreign policy. For Jews everywhere committed to Zion, you see it in their faces.
You might not care about the latest Higgins disgrace, but you should
However, one might hope that self-interest alone might make us ask exactly how it looks internationally to be a western country that physically ejects Jewish people from an event to commemorate the holocaust, simply because said Jewish people objected to the President using the event to attack the Jewish state.

I am reliably told by various contacts in the Dublin Embassy circle that the Government of Ireland is already well aware of the increasing disquiet with which it is viewed by many countries in Europe and around the west on account of what is perceived to be its hysterical conduct over the war in the Middle East. This diplomatic pushback is widely accepted to be the explanation for the new Government’s rapid, mildly amusing, and comprehensive climbdown on the Occupied Territories Bill, which has been sent away for a lengthy and extensive re-drafting process that is designed to ensure that it never sees the light of the legislative day – or that if it does, it will be meaningless in effect.

Readers who observe these things will also perhaps note the grovelling being done by the Irish Government towards the new Trump administration, which is so outrageously pro-Israeli that the American President wondered aloud yesterday whether it might not just make sense to deport the entire population of Gaza to the Egyptian desert, and call it a day. That administration has just appointed a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defence (Mssrs Rubio and Hegseth) who might well be the two most Pro-Israeli men on the planet not named Benjamin Netanyahu.

How does it look, then, to be the country where Israel shuttered its embassy due to anti-semitism? How does it look to follow that up weeks later with an event where actual Jews are thrown from a Holocaust memorial event to accommodate the whims of our pro-Iranian President? How does it look that on the very same day, Hamas and Hezbollah flags were parading through Dublin on Holocaust memorial day, without a word of public criticism from the Government?

We are told that Ireland is at grave economic risk from the Trump administration, which takes a dim view of this country on economic grounds already. We’re now adding to that the spectacle of being perceived as a country – whether we like it or not, or whether we accept it or not – with what could at its most charitable be called a tin ear about the sensitivities of Jews. On Holocaust Memorial day, no less.

As somebody once said in a movie, it’s a bold strategy, Cotton.

Let’s see if it works out for us.


Andrew Pessin: "Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism," On Campus, Fourth (Final) Installment
To this point I have offered some ten reasons to consider that, despite the coarseness of the expression “Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism,” generally speaking anti-Zionism is antisemitism after all—and that the antisemitism is to be found in its typical foundation, motivations, methods, and consequences. Along the way I introduced the notion of “epistemic antisemitism” (the antisemitism that can permeate one’s belief-forming mechanisms like a cognitive bias of which one is unaware), and shown specifically how epistemic antisemitism is typically to be found throughout the foundational anti-Zionist narrative. In the previous installment I dealt with some of the common counterarguments to the thesis, as represented by (unfortunately) well-known “journalist” Mehdi Hasan. In this concluding section we look at specific applications of the issues to the campus situation.

8. Campus Anti-Zionism
With the material above in hand, let’s briefly analyze some manifestations of anti-Zionism commonly found on campuses over the past decade, and especially over the past year.

8a. Slogans.
Campus anti-Zionism is fond of slogans—shouted, megaphoned, graffitied on buildings and sidewalks, etc.—that generate much debate over whether they are antisemitic. Too much of that debate, in my view, ignores the context and consequences of the slogans and the acts of disseminating them; both Nexus and Jerusalem are particularly guilty of that. Recall the epistemic antisemitism at the foundation of the anti-Zionist movement, that perhaps provides some motivation for disseminating these slogans. Moreover, whatever each slogan is alleged to mean, the mere fact that it is shouted by angry mobs waving banners of jihadi groups that have murdered thousands of Jews, mobs often intimidating and harassing campus Jews and vandalizing Jewish institutions on campus with these slogans, must inform their interpretation both in intent and effect.

Here are some quick hits.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
Out of context this could mean several things, the least objectionable of which is a call for a “binational state” with equality for all its citizens. The first question is why, if so, it must be called “Palestine” and not “Israel,” thus suggesting the destruction of the Jewish state rather than its renovation? But even so, what it demands is something problematic: to take away from the Jews not merely their own right to sovereignty (while Muslims have 50+ states and Arabs 20+) but also the ability to defend themselves from those Islamist groups openly committed to genociding them. Moreover, most people believe the “binational state” would actually be or soon become a Palestinian majority state, and thus truly just “Palestine,” making this proposal look far less copacetic toward the Jews.

But never mind, because that’s not what the slogan means in context, as illuminated by the Arabic version (itself often heard on campuses at the same rallies): “From water to water, Palestine will be Arab.” That is straightforwardly a call to dismantle the Jewish state and replace it with a Palestinian Arab state, which will likely require the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of millions of Jews, outcomes with which the sloganeers, supporters of October 7, are clearly comfortable. If they had in mind some non-violent conception of this, or even the deceptively acceptable binational state, they are of course welcome to clarify—which they never do, except when trying to deny their antisemitism. That effort of course is undermined when they broadcast this slogan in open support of the violent groups actively murdering Jews.

This slogan played out dramatically in the days after October 7, for example in how Harvard University administrators deliberated over what statement to make in response to the massacre. Here is an email released in October 2024 as part of a Congressional report on the campus antisemitism of the preceding year. The email is authored by Alan Garber, who would soon succeed Claudine Gay as President after her own disastrous Congressional testimony, in which she was unable to identify calls for the mass murder of Jews as antisemitic. In light of the message below she was perhaps not alone in being able to so identify:


Financial Times turns post-Holocaust vow of 'Never Again' on its head
It’s unclear how being the grand nephew of a genocide scholar imbues Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper with any special insight into Israel’s war against Hamas. Yet, that’s precisely the hook in his piece (“What is genocide?“, Jan. 23), which opens by citing Leo Kuper, “a Jewish sociologist born in Johannesburg in 1908, who served as a British intelligence officer” in WW2, before, we’re told, he turned to academia, writing a book in 1981 titled ‘Genocide’.

Simon, on the other hand, has no expertise in genocide or, it seems, the Middle East. Rather, he appears to be something of a journalistic polymath, writing on topics as diverse as sports, politics and literary criticism. Indeed, since Hamas invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7th, 2023, murdering over 1,200, he’s published only a few columns (paywall) which even touch on the war – none possessing any original reporting or insight about the conflict.

Though, like most of the commentary in the British media about the topic, his piece deals almost entirely with Israel and the accusation of ‘genocide’, he does note that “Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,200 people on October 7 2023 reran Jewish history’s central nightmare“, before adding that “one side’s genocide, or crimes against humanity, doesn’t justify another’s“.

So, strangely, while he seems open minded to viewing the worst mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust as a genocidal act, he declines to ponder the antisemitic-inspired jihadist barbarism which occurred that Shabbat day – except to chide the victims that two wrongs don’t make a right.


Milan Jews sit out city’s Holocaust memorial event
The organized Jewish Community of Milan in Italy boycotted the main municipal Holocaust commemoration ceremony on Monday, citing fears of its abuse to support narratives that accuse Israel of perpetrating genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The event is not “the appropriate environment to participate in an initiative of this type,” the Jewish Community of Milan wrote in a statement ahead of Monday, Jan. 27, the U.N.-designated annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Dialogue with the younger generations requires sharing and serenity, conditions lacking in last year’s event as well as on other occasions due to excessive politicization of some of the associations” that are also involved in Monday’s event, the statement read.

New leadership at the National Association of Italian Partisans’ branch in Milan—a prominent co-organizer of Holocaust commemoration events—has taken that organization on an anti-Israel course that makes it unacceptable as a partner for commemoration, Davide Romano, director of the Museum of the Jewish Brigade in Milan, told JNS.

Roberto Cenati, the Milan branch’s previous president, resigned last year in protest against the anti-Israel positions adopted by the national leadership of the movement, whose branch he had headed in Milan.

The Milan branch’s current president, Primo Minelli, dismissed the concerns of the Jewish community. “We don’t take orders from anyone, and we don’t let ourselves be intimidated. The battle against antisemitism is a fundamental battle for us, which we fight not only on Jan. 27 but 365 days a year,” he told the ANSA news agency.


How the JC reported Auschwitz’s horror
The news of the liberation of Auschwitz appeared in the Jewish Chronicle of February 2, 1945 halfway down a front page report headed - with what seems now to be the darkest irony - ‘Poland’s Jewish survivors.’

Many reports during the war had told JC readers what was happening at the death camp. For example in November 1944, an account of the trial in Paris of a “traitor who had joined the Gestapo” stated that “For the slightest sickness prisoners were sent to the gas chambers. In April the number, of men and women executed daring one single day reached 2,700. Even the Reich authorities supervising concentration camps found this excessive and ordered a slow-down because the executions were causing serious labour shortage."

However, the reports after liberation threw new light on the scale and methods of the Nazis’ programme of industrialised killing

The JC of February 9 contained a fuller report, which focused on the Nazi attempts to cover up the full horror of their actions.

“First investigations reveal that the horrors perpetrated there put even those of Maidenek in the shade,” read the report.

“Several thousands of completely exhausted prisoners in the last stages of emaciation were rescued by the Russians.”

The Germans, it went on “destroyed an electrical machine which was able to kill several hundred victims at once, the bodies then being dropped onto a conveyor belt which carried them to the electric furnace where the bodies were burned and turned to powder.

“A mobile plant for slaughtering children was removed by the Nazis and the gas chambers were reconstructed to make them appear to be garages,” it continued. “Mass graves in the camp were levelled.

“According to the survivors the death camp was a great industry with many departments. There were offices where the deportees were sorted according to their age and capacity to perform slave labour before being slaughtered. Other offices were set aside for the aged, for children and for invalids doomed to immediate execution.

“The powdered remains of the victims were used as fertiliser for the fields surrounding the camp which was several square miles in extent. Between 1941 and 1943 five to eight sealed trains filled with deportees used to arrive at the camp daily. They drew up at a special siding built in the camp.”

The report estimated the number killed at Auschwitz as 1,500,000 “and hundreds and thousands of them were Jews.” Yad Vashem today estimates that a million Jewish men, women and children were murdered at the camp.
Israel releases Eichmann trial records for Holocaust Remembrance Day
The Israel State Archives released a searchable digital collection on Monday of 380,000 pages from the 1961 Jerusalem trial of SS officer and Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann.

The Israeli government is making the documents available to the public to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The pages uploaded to an advanced search engine include testimony, lists, photographs, court files, and correspondence between the State Attorney’s Office and then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

Israel Police compiled the “Bureau 06” materials for the 1961 trial. Bureau 06 was a team formed to investigate and prepare the State of Israel’s charges against Eichmann.

Among the materials is the testimony of Holocaust survivor Yehiel De-Nur (Ka-Tsetnik), who collapsed during the trial and could not testify in court but recounted the horrors of Auschwitz and his chilling encounter with Eichmann to the police.


UK’s Wiener Holocaust Library releases its extensive archive online for first time
One of the world’s largest Holocaust archives was published online for the first time Monday, coinciding with the international Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The Wiener Holocaust Library’s new online portal includes more than 150,000 documents — such as photos, transcripts and testimonies — detailing Nazi Germany’s extermination of six million Jews.

“The need to defend the truth has been given new urgency by the resurgence of antisemitism and other forms of misinformation and hatred,” Toby Simpson, director of the London-based library, said in a press release.

“By placing a wealth of evidence freely available online we are ensuring that the historical record is available for all regardless of their location, prior knowledge or means.”

The items include photographs of Auschwitz, the death camp in Poland where Germany murdered more than one million Jews between 1940 and January 27, 1945, when Soviet troops liberated the camp.

The collection also features documents from the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders and materials about fascist and anti-fascist groups in the United Kingdom before and after World War II.

The library has also published some 500 pamphlets and books containing anti-fascist propaganda that were distributed in Germany during the Nazi era.

The reading material was disguised as advertisements for cosmetics or shampoo, recipe books and instruction manuals for housewives.

The Wiener Holocaust Library was founded in the early 1930s by Alfred Wiener, who gathered evidence of the persecution of Jews in Germany after fleeing the country.
Herzog invokes Oct. 7, criticizes UN's anti-Zionism in Holocaust remembrance remarks
October 7 and Israel’s war against Hamas underscored Monday’s International Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration at the UN, an event featuring President Isaac Herzog marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation.

Secretary-General António Guterres opened the special session before the General Assembly by acknowledging more than a year has passed since the “appalling October 7 terror attack by Hamas.”

“We welcome at long last the ceasefire and hostage release deal,” Guterres said. “The deal offers hope as well as much-needed relief. And we will do our utmost to ensure it leads to the release of all hostages.”

Guterres said since the beginning of the war that he’s asked for the unconditional release of all hostages and for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

While not specifying Israel, UN General Assembly President Philémon Yang called out alarming global conflicts where there have been massive killings of civilians, women, and children.

Disregard for international and humanitarian law should not be tolerated, he said, noting the UN’s promise of “never again.”


Holocaust survivor Marianne Miller addresses UN General Assembly
Marianne Miller, a well-known Holocaust survivor and educator, addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Monday to mark the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“I represent today the 6 million Holocaust victims who were murdered just because they were Jewish. I demand the world remember what happened only 80 years ago,” Miller said.

Born in Budapest during World War II, Miller endured the forced separation of her family and the murder of multiple close relatives. She survived, and later dedicated her life to educating future generations about the Holocaust, as well as to the dangers of hatred and intolerance.

Miller told those gathered about the remarkable survival of her parents:

“Alfred and Violetta Nobel were a young couple deeply in love. Before my father was taken to a labor camp, my mother wanted to become pregnant. My father was against it. ‘You don’t bring a child into a world where sure death is waiting for them everywhere,’ he said. But my mother, so in love, replied, ‘Maybe one of us will stay alive, and they will have a memory of the other.’

“Under these conditions, I came into the world—a world where death awaited me at every corner.
68 Shoah survivors made aliyah during Swords of Iron war
Sixty-eight Holocaust survivors have moved to Israel since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023, including 50 who made the Jewish state their home in 2024, the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration said on Monday.

According to the official government data, which was published on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the oldest new immigrant who survived the Shoah was 98, while the youngest was 81.

The majority, 36, came from Russia, followed by France (13), Ukraine (eight), the United States (six), Germany (three) and Canada (two).

Many of the Holocaust survivors opted to settle in Mediterranean coastal cities such as Netanya (nine), Ashdod, Nahariya, Haifa and Bat Yam, while others moved to Karmiel, Jerusalem, Beersheva, Ra’anana, Holon and Rehovot, the ministry said.

“We welcome everyone who chooses to immigrate to Israel with open arms,” said Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer. “The data on immigrants over the past year show that many Jews have decided to immigrate now, including Holocaust survivors at an advanced age.”

“At the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, we provide Holocaust survivors who immigrate with a full support package that includes eligibility for advancement in the waiting list for public housing, financial grants, assistance and additional benefits, which will allow them to live with dignity in the State of Israel,” added the minister.

According to figures from Israel’s Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority, 123,715 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, compared to 136,989 at the end of 2023. More than 13,000 Israelis who survived the horrors of Nazi Germany died during 2024.


More than 60 lawmakers to reintroduce bipartisan Holocaust education bill
A bipartisan group of more than 60 House lawmakers is set to reintroduce the HEAL Act, a bipartisan bill examining Holocaust education efforts across the country.

The bill was first introduced at the end of the 2022 congressional session, and reintroduced in 2023, with bipartisan companion legislation in the Senate. The House Education and Workforce Committee incorporated key provisions of the bill into other Holocaust education legislation last year, but the bill never passed the full House. It ultimately amassed 184 sponsors in the House and 11 in the Senate.

The bill, whose title is an acronym for the Holocaust Education and Antisemitism Lessons Act, is led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), joined by Reps. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Michael McCaul (R-TX), Haley Stevens (D-MI), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Young Kim (R-CA), and has 56 other co-sponsors.

The legislation, which is set to be reintroduced on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, requires the director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to conduct an audit of Holocaust education programs nationwide, including in which states Holocaust education is required, the curricula and standards used and other information, and report to Congress on the results.

According to a press release from the bill’s sponsors, 29 states currently require Holocaust education, while 21 do not have comprehensive or mandatory Holocaust education, even at a time of increasing antisemitism and when studies have shown that knowledge of the Holocaust is fading, particularly among younger generations.

The legislation’s sponsors said that the bill would help identify lapses in Holocaust education across the country and ways it can be improved, and ensure that every student learns about the Holocaust.
NYC mayor orders City Hall lit yellow in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day
In honor of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has ordered City Hall and other municipal buildings to be lit yellow in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“On this 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we stand at a profound moment in history, where remembrance is not just about the past, but about securing our future,” Adams said. “As mayor of the city that proudly houses the largest Jewish community outside of Israel, I am deeply moved by the resilience of our Jewish family while remaining ever mindful of the devastating void left by the Holocaust.”

According to a study from UJA-Federation of New York, nearly 1.4 million individuals in the Greater New York area identified as Jewish in 2023.

“In these challenging times, when antisemitism continues to surface in our society, New York City remains steadfast in our commitment to being not just a safe haven but a beacon of hope for the Jewish community,” Adams continued. “The yellow lights illuminating our city buildings tonight serve as both a memorial to the 6 million lives lost and a bright reminder of our unwavering solidarity.”

City Hall will also host a special exhibition in the building’s rotunda for the next week titled “The Anguish of Liberation as Reflected in Art,” featuring works from the Yad Vashem Art Collection.


Holocaust Remembrance Day: Messages from the Prime Minister, Opposition Leader
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton
Vasily Grossman was a Jewish Ukrainian writer who became a war correspondent for the Soviet army and encountered the Nazi death camps. His 1944 essay, The Hell of Treblinka, is a chilling account of the horrors of the Holocaust. Pointing to the industrialised evil of the Nazi regime, Grossman wrote:

“Treblinka was not an ordinary slaughterhouse, it was run on the conveyor system copied from modern large-scale industry.”

Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember the six million Jews whose lives were exterminated by the Nazis in an act so calculated and cruel it constitutes one of the most monstrous crimes in human history. The weight of history will be especially felt by survivors and their families this International Holocaust Remembrance Day with 2025 marking the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In the magnitude of anti-Semitism which is plaguing Western democracies today – including Australia – many citizens who have read about the history and horrors of the Holocaust have, for the first time, grasped how that catastrophe eventuated. They have seen, with their own eyes, a type of hate that, if left unchecked, unleashes greater evils.

The lessons of history serve as a shield of knowledge which helps to deflect anti-Semitism. And that’s why a Dutton Coalition Government will provide $19 million to Australian Holocaust museums to support their expansion and to commemorate the victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. This funding is inclusive of $8.5 million for the Sydney Jewish Museum, $3.5 million for Queensland Holocaust Museum, $2 million for the Holocaust Institute of Western Australia’s Education Centre, and $5 million for specific October 7 commemorations and exhibits more generally. A Coalition Government under my leadership is eager to see every schoolchild visit a Holocaust museum as one measure to eliminate the anti-Semitic rot afflicting our country.

Today, may we heed the warning words that Vasily Grossman penned more than eight decades ago:

“We must remember that racism, fascism will emerge from this war not only with bitter recollections of defeat but also with sweet memories of the ease with which it is possible to slaughter millions of defenceless people. This must be solemnly borne in mind by all who value honour, liberty and the life of all nations, of all mankind.”


Guterres again a no-show at Manhattan Holocaust remembrance event
Although António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, and his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, had been guests for at least a decade before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, at Park East Synagogue’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day service in Manhattan, Guterres wasn’t present at the event for the second straight year.

The U.N. chief reportedly wasn’t invited to last year’s event, which came weeks after he said that Hamas didn’t attack Israel in a vacuum. (JNS sought comment from the Orthodox synagogue.)

Guterres wasn’t present this year either. Instead, Miguel Moratinos, the high representative for the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations and the United Nations focal point for monitoring Jew-hatred at the world body, represented the United Nations.

“The history of the Holocaust is one of total moral collapse, dehumanization, complicity and unimaginable atrocities,” Moratinos said at the Saturday service. “But amidst all the horror, there are also stories of humanity, and of courage.” (The U.N. website suggested that Moratinos was delivering a message from Guterres.)

Moratinos noted those who spoke and acted against the Nazis, including Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who was expelled from the diplomatic corps and died in poverty after producing visas and passports to save many fleeing Nazi-occupied France.


'My great gran survived Auschwitz - but I no longer feel safe in the UK'
The great grandson of an Auschwitz survivor has told how he no longer feels totally safe in the UK.

Dov Forman’s “incredible” great grandmother, Lily Ebert, dedicated her final decades to teaching young people about the horrors of the Holocaust. She relived her World War II horror time and again telling children how her mother, Nina, younger sister Berta and brother Bela, were all murdered at the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

She joined forces with 21-year-old Dov, to spread the word on TikTok and in classrooms around the country, amassing two million followers and a billion views on all platforms. She died last October aged 100. Speaking to The Mirror ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday January 27th, her great grandson told how she feared the “echoes of the past.” He told how Lily had been subjected to ‘vile’ antisemitic abuse online before her death.

Religious hate crime recorded by police in England and Wales has risen by 25 per cent in the past year driven by a rise of offences against jews and muslims since the beginning of the Israeli Hamas conflict. Jewish charity the Community Security Trust (CST) recorded at least 5583 antisemitic incidents in the UK in the year after October 7th - a 204 per cent increase.

They say more than 200 incidents have been reported every month since then, the highest in Greater London, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire. CST spokesperson told the Mirror: “It is deeply concerning that survivors, who endured unimaginable horrors, still face a world where hate persists.”

Lily saw that persistence before she died, all because she tried to spread a message of love after surviving transportation from their home in Hungary to the “killing machine” of Auschwitz in Poland. Half her family had been singled out on arrival at the camp by the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, the notorious “angel of death”, with a deadly gesture of his cane.

If he sent you to the left, it was to the gas chambers, to the right and you would live - at least another day. Lily was 20 when she and her sisters René and Piri, aged around 15 and 17, were sent to the right. Her mum, younger brother and sister ordered to go left.




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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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