Don’t mention the Jews

There was certainly no shortage of commemorations of Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday.

On ITV’s Good Morning Britain, one of the presenters earnestly explained how the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was an opportunity to remember how ‘six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War as well as millions of others, because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group’.

Then there was UK deputy prime minister Angela Rayner. She tweeted a photo of herself looking terribly serious as she lit a candle, ‘to remember all those who were murdered just for being who they were and to stand against prejudice and hatred today’. Fellow Labour MP Sarah Champion, seemingly wearing the colours of the Palestinian flag, joined in. Of the Holocaust, she wrote: ‘We must ensure that it stays at the fore of our national consciousness: we must never forget.’

Elsewhere, the message from Newham Council in London captured the sentiments of most local councils in the UK. It said it was marking Holocaust Memorial Day with a ‘moving event honouring the millions lost’, before adding, ‘we stand united against hatred and work for a future of peace’.

You might have noticed one thing was missing in all these statements, so I am just going to say it: Jews. Time and again, public figures and institutions simply failed to mention the name of the actual victims of the Holocaust.

I’ve had it with Holocaust Memorial Day. If our leaders won’t use the occasion to talk about the fact that the Holocaust was the product of anti-Semitism, that it specifically involved the systematic murder of Jews, then what is the point? Especially right now, when the poison of Jew hatred is rising again to the point that I and other Jews sometimes feel suffocated by it.

Like many Jewish people, I’ve come to dread Holocaust Memorial Day each year. Not just because it’s a reminder of the searing pain of what happened. The testimony of the survivors is heartbreaking, as are the stories about how quickly neighbours turned on their friends. But I also dread it because of the way the Jewish element of the Holocaust is now either completely ignored or is even turned against us.

First the Nazis tried to erase us. Now those who claim to be against the Nazis are erasing us from that memory. Our voices feel increasingly shrill as our demands to be centred in the genocide of our own people are criticised as being selfish.

This removal of Jews from Holocaust Memorial Day has long been the plan of that weird marriage of the far left and Islamists. For too many leftists, Jews have never been good enough victims for their compassion. They certainly don’t want to remind people that anti-Semitism, the creed they so often march alongside with, is dangerous. Instead, they like to paint Jews as oppressors – or genocidal maniacs. So they have to hide the fact that Jews were the ones attacked in the most heinous and deliberate genocide in history.

There is another reason for removing Jews from the memory of the Holocaust. It’s a way of undermining the necessity of Israel’s existence – a state that had to come into being because the world closed its doors to Jews, despite knowing they were being slaughtered.

Parts of the left really do seem keen on taking the focus of Holocaust Memorial Day away from Jewish suffering. In 2011, Jeremy Corbyn was among a group of mainly Labour politicians who supported a parliamentary motion to rename Holocaust Memorial Day, saying instead it should be called ‘Genocide Memorial Day – Never Again for Anyone’. This was despite the fact it already did officially remember later genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

It is telling that, a few weeks ago, the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) wrote to 460 town halls and educational centres around the UK asking them to boycott this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day because apparently it wouldn’t be inclusive enough (the organisers failed to categorise the war in Gaza as a genocide). In truth, the IHRC hardly needed to go to all that trouble. The message of Holocaust Memorial Day has become so watered down that it is an act of bravery to even mention who the victims of the Holocaust were – especially after Hamas’s pogrom in Israel on 7 October 2023.

One London Jewish councillor tells me that, having organised Holocaust Memorial Day events in the past, since the 7 October attacks she hasn’t been allowed ‘near’ it at the council. ‘I think lots of councils think erasing Jews from their events is “playing it safe”’, she tells me.

I’m ashamed to say that some Jewish organisations have let activists and politicians do this. They’ve let them water down the Holocaust because, otherwise, no one will talk about it at all.

What does that tell you about all those who drearily intone ‘Never Again’ with their crocodile tears about some anonymous horror? If they meant it, they would talk about what must never happen again. They would talk about Jews and anti-Semitism.

All the while, anti-Semitism is surging. As a Jewish person who writes about this stuff, sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the fear, the angst, the terror of people writing to me about the anti-Semitism they have faced.

You’ve seen the weekly images of ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters marching with swastikas, chanting blood libels, calling for another genocide of the Jews. You’ve seen how our political class has done nothing to challenge any of it. You’ve seen how news channels repeat Hamas propaganda. You’ve seen how anti-Semitism has been normalised, even as public figures slap themselves on the back because they lit a candle on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Not one Jewish person who I know has felt entirely safe in the UK since 7 October. Never Again has become a hollow slogan, and not one of our cowardly leaders is prepared to call that out.

Nicole Lampert is a national newspaper freelance journalist based in London. Follow her on X: @nicolelampert