Never Again – For Anyone! The Dishonesty of Official Holocaust Memorial Day events (Reduced version)

Howard Zinn, the late American historian, refused to take part in commemorations of the Nazi mass exterminations, the Holocaust, which did not rouse people to action against ongoing genocides. Zinn referenced contemporary American support for genocidal regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador and across the Americas. In 2025 Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) refuses to acknowledge the reality of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, ie mass murder, starvation, destruction of health and water facilities, denial of the essential conditions of life - a textbook example of the legal definition of genocide, 'acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national...group'.

Those who deny the Gaza genocide are no better than those who deny the Nazi Holocaust and perhaps the motivation for both denials is the same - a desire to repeat the crime in the future.

War criminal Tony Blair launched the first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001, just two years before the criminal Invasion and devastation of Iraq. His heir Starmer is also strong on HMD but has defended Israel's right to deny water, ie life itself, to the people of Gaza. So openly genocidal Starmer is pro-HMD.

There is something especially sickening in the announced plan from the Lord Provost of the Scottish capital to commemorate the Nazi Holocaust by asking selected invited school children this question:'How can future genocides can be prevented?' all the while suppressing mention of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

It's not just Gaza. A planned presentation on the Cambodian genocide will conceal British and American diplomatic and military support for the genocide perpetrators, the Khmer Rouge. Commemoration of the 1994 Rwanda genocide will avoid references to France's active role, for which the French government later sought 'forgiveness'. And who will dare to mention Winston Churchill and the 1943 Bengal famine under British rule that killed three million people. It might be useful to at least consider the significance of someone often considered the greatest ever Englishman who was not only racist towards Palestinians but of many others ethnically cleansed by the ,higher grade race, building the British Empire. Bengalis, Indians in general certainly did not qualify as - 'a higher grade race'. He once said, 'I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.'

Selective commemoration of the Nazi Holocaust, and historical amnesia regarding Western-complicit genocides is totally unacceptable. In an age when the unhinged billionaire Elon Musk supports extreme right-wing, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic forces such as AfD in Germany and BNP-trained Tommy Robinson in Britain, he is able to give Nazi salutes as an encore and still enjoy the support of a main US pro-Israel group, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Zionist readiness to ignore antisemitism from supporters of Israel is long-standing and now in full view. Revealingly, the Israeli Ambassador in Ireland demanded that Irish President Michael Higgins stay away from a Holocaust commemoration event because he is critical of Israel's mass killings in Gaza, which the ambassador labelled 'anti-semitism'.
No more selective commemorations of genocide!
No more exploitation of the memory of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust to stifle criticism of Israel's genocide!
Free Palestine!