A Holocaust remembrance day like no other
We don't just commemorate a great evil. We're still living through it
Today in Israel was Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day. At 10 o’clock this morning the siren sounded and the country came to a halt. People stood in the streets with their heads bowed; on the motorways, the traffic came to a complete halt and drivers stepped out of their vehicles to stand in silence.
This, though, was a Yom Hashoah like no other. It was impossible, when thinking about the extermination of the Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, not to see the images in the forefront of all our minds: the genocidal pogrom in southern Israel on October 7 when Palestinians led by Hamas slaughtered 1200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 others into Gaza, where no more than 133 (and maybe many fewer) still remain alive.
While comparisons with the Holocaust are generally wholly inappropriate, this one is all too justified. Like the Nazis, the October 7 storm-troopers set out to murder Jews simply because they were Jews (although some non-Jews were victims too) and to do so in the most sadistic, barbaric and depraved way possible.
Like the Nazis, Hamas and its Iranian puppeteers intend to destroy Israel and wipe out every Jew. We know that because they tell us this over and over again.
And the Palestinians are not just like the Nazis; they are the direct descendants of Nazis. For in the 1930s, their forebears in Mandate-era Palestine formed Hitler’s legion in the Middle East. Their leader, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini, pledged to Hitler that if Germany won the war the Mufti would exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.
Al Husseini is the self-proclaimed role model of Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA) whom the west regards as an acceptable moderate — and whose doctoral thesis was a work of Holocaust denial.
So there’s a direct line from the Nazi Holocaust to the October 7 pogrom. The difference is that in 1939 the civilised world finally got itself together to fight and defeat Nazism. Today, that world is no longer civilised; many of its most educated members now support the forces of evil instead. Indeed, they are parroting the psychotic and genocidal tropes of Nazism.
That’s why the reaction in the west to Israel’s war against the evil of Hamas is causing such horror among Israelis and most diaspora Jews — most, not all, because tragically some diaspora Jews have themselves joined the camp of evil, an insupportable horror that was passionately denounced by Ammiel Hirsch, a progressive rabbi in New York.
It’s why the Jewish world doesn’t view the campus encampments as just silly students mouthing off in ignorance on the latest cause — as those in the west with their heads stuck firmly in the sand dismiss them — but as hotbeds of open and genocidal Jew-hatred: an army of extermination mobilised by Hamas and the far-left in a Soviet-style hijack of truth and language to demonise Israel in order to delegitimise and destroy it.
It’s why the Jewish world shudders when it hears these students accuse Israel of perpetrating genocide and watches them taunt and defame Jews, hurl false and demonising accusations at them and drive them off campus. For this is the lunatic, Nazi-themed inversion of reality and wholesale denial and cultural appropriation of the Jewish experience that the Palestinian Arabs deploy, year in, year out to incite murderous hatred among their own people in order to wipe out Israel and the Jews.
As Palestinian Media Watch has reported, the Palestinians’ “Nazi” libels against Israel have intensified since the October 7 attacks. In March, the official (“moderate”) PA daily stated that Israel’s war of defence against Hamas
has exceeded all the German Nazi and Italian Fascist crimes of annihilation known to history.
Two months into the Gaza war, top (“moderate”) PA official Jibril Rajoub stated:
The Americans, Europeans, and others were deceived to think that the Jew is a victim. The truth is that he is a criminal, a terrorist, and a distorted form of the fascism and Nazism of the last century.
Last month, Fatah Revolutionary Council member Tayseer Nasrallah said that Israel
has actually used all its criminal tools and everything that is consistent with the mentality of crime, fascism, and Nazism against our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians deploy this language not just to defame Israel but to use this form of Holocaust denial to obscure the fact that it is the Palestinians who intend the genocide of the Jews, and not as they claim the other way round. And now, appallingly, this weapon of Jewish extermination is tripping off the tongues of thousands of young people in some the most prestigious universities in America and Britain.
The Jewish world is looking on in horror and astonishment as this emergence of the junior varsity wing of exterminatory Jew-hatred is being either ignored, appeased or even supported by university administrators.
Not only the Jewish world but many others are also looking in horror and astonishment at the emergence of Gaza as a British electoral issue, with dozens of local councillors having been elected on that issue in last week’s municipal elections. These elections are supposed to be about choosing council members to decide on things like housing, rubbish collections and the state of the footpaths. Yet in Leeds, the newly elected Green party councillor Mothin Ali declared that his election was a “win for the people of Gaza” and said in his victory speech:
We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!
It subsequently emerged that after October 7 he had ranted that Israel was a “settler, colonial occupier” which had tried to “erase the legitimacy of a native population”. He had also previously described a Jewish university chaplain, who has been forced into hiding by death threats from would-be Israel-exterminators, as a “creep” and a “kind of animal”, and suggested that he had returned to Israel as a reservist to “kill women and children” after the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
Mothin Ali was one of dozens of pro-Palestinian wannabe Israel-exterminators who were elected to local councils in Britain last week. But their venom against Israel is only the tip of the scimitar. They defeated at least 12 Labour candidates. Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, had provoked the ire of Britain’s Muslims immediately after October 7 by supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. The Mail reports:
Beforehand there was an anonymous briefing to the BBC, condemned by Labour HQ, that the party would lose as a result of the “Middle East not West Midlands”, and that Hamas were “real villains”.
Starmer promptly caved. He told Sky News:
I say directly to those who may have voted Labour in the past, but felt on this occasion they couldn’t, that across the West Midlands we are a proud and diverse community. I have heard you. I have listened. And I am determined to meet your concerns and to gain your respect and trust again in the future.
Like so many other western politicians, Starmer failed to grasp that in the Muslim world gestures of appeasement merely incite further aggression. His comments led a pressure group, Muslim Vote, to issue him with an extraordinary set of demands. The Mail reports:
Pro-Gaza activists have dramatically issued a list of 18 demands to Sir Keir Starmer and threatened to withhold their support at the next general election if he does not fulfil them. The Muslim Vote has called for the Labour leader to promise to cut military ties with Israel, allow followers of Islam to pray in school and stop people with the name “Muhammad” being charged more for insurance should he become prime minister.
It has also demanded a law that criminalises spiritual and religious leaders from instructing their congregation how to vote is scrapped and wants seven per cent of public sector pensions to be invested into “ethical and Islamic funds’” The group, which has vowed to “punish” MPs who it sees as not being supportive of Palestine by mobilising the four million Muslim voters in the UK, said it would only consider backing the Labour leader if Sir Keir caved in to their demands.
The Telegraph has reported that Muslim Vote is supported by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend), two groups under investigation over Islamist extremism fears. In the Commons Michael Gove, the Communities Secretary, described the MAB as the “British affiliate” of the Muslim Brotherhood and as a group that gave “rise to concern for their Islamist orientation and views”.
The Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot, is a global Islamist group that works for the Islamisation of the west. Israel’s Minister of the Diaspora and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, has reported today on X/Twitter a document from the British archive that reveals the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna — a close friend of Haj Amin al Husseini — served as a spy for Nazi Germany.
The UK government has refused to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain.
This evening, Starmer has changed his tune on Israel. He tweeted:
With more than a million Palestinian civilians sheltering in Rafah, an Israeli offensive must not go ahead. There must be an immediate ceasefire, the immediate release of all hostages, and unimpeded aid into Gaza that can be delivered regularly, quickly and safely.
Starmer has now in effect demanded that Israel must not be allowed to defeat Hamas, and has effectively sentenced the hostages to an even more certain death than is in any event unfortunately likely to be the case. In this he is merely continuing to march in lockstep with the Conservative Foreign Secretary David Cameron, who in turn is marching in lockstep with the Biden administration — which is now openly trying to thwart an Israeli victory and thus ensure that Israel permanently twists in the winds of future genocidal attacks.
Israel and the Jewish diaspora are not only traumatised by this mass disdain for Jewish life and wholesale adoption of psychotic lies about Israel. They are also astonished by Britain’s suicidal refusal to join up the dots.
They can’t understand why Britain can’t see the direct connection between the Islamists’ aim to destroy and colonise Israel and their aim to destroy and colonise Britain (and America). They are shocked that the British authorities believe seven months of weekly hate-marches screaming “globalise the intifada” and for the destruction of Israel, and which have terrorised British Jews, constitute the legitimate expression of “free speech”. They are astounded that Britain has done nothing to prevent the emergence of a Muslim bloc that now threatens to upend British politics by religious sectarianism.
Israel and its supporters view such a bloc as innately and irredeemably anti-Jew and anti-west; they note the remarks made by some of these people and their supporters that they are now well on course to Islamise Britain; they are amazed at the near-omerta in Britain over this sectarian voting and bigotry against Israel and the Jews; they are appalled that political leaders are not only doing nothing to challenge this but are actively fanning the flames by regurgitating Hamas propaganda lies about Israel; and they observe that anyone expressing concern about any of this is dismissed as the “Islamophobic” fringe.
Isolated by the west; with rockets still flying from Gaza and Lebanon, with Israelis continuing to be attacked and with tens of thousands of them still displaced and unable to return safely to their border homes; with the dread knowledge that the toll of young conscripts falling in Gaza is bound to rise along with anti-Israel global hysteria as the IDF go into Rafah; with the threat of an American weapons embargo and lawfare in international tribunals aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state hanging over Israel’s head; with Iran sprinting towards building its genocide bomb; with our hearts permanently in our mouths but our spirit unbowed, those of us in Israel nevertheless feel it’s safer — and such a privilege — to be a Jew here rather than in Britain at this pivotal moment in Jewish destiny.
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The campus crucible of Islamic holy war
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