Stealing the Holocaust from the Jews

It’s not often we can say JD Vance and the BBC have something in common. The bruising VP of the United States and the lily-handed woke-mongers of Britain’s public broadcaster probably disagree on every big topic. But this week, briefly, they were as one: both made the shameful moral error of failing to mention the Jews in their remembrance of the Holocaust.

It still boggles my mind that people can talk about the Holocaust without saying the J-word. It’s like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade and not once saying ‘people from Africa’. Or lamenting the nuking of Hiroshima and forgetting to mention Japanese people. And yet here we are, 80 years after the Shoah, surrounded by Jew-free yapping about that most calamitous event in history.

‘Today we remember the millions of lives lost during the Holocaust’, said Vance on X. He gave a nod to ‘the millions of stories’ from what was ‘one of the darkest chapters in human history’. Millions this and millions that, but not one solitary reference to the six million souls who were shot, gassed and vaporised by the Nazi regime solely on the basis of their ethnicity. Vance mourned the ‘unspeakable brutality’ of that period. Unspeakable brutality against who, JD?

The Beeb must have been kicking itself. It loves nothing more than an opportunity to have a pop at Trump’s second-in-command, only it made the exact same unpardonable blunder. On Tuesday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, it made a number of Jew-less broadcasts. A seven-minute broadcast on BBC Breakfast made no mention of either Jews or anti-Semitism. Radio 4 said ‘six million people’ were killed. What kind of people? Buddhists? Freemasons?

The BBC later apologised. Our broadcasts were ‘incorrectly worded’, it said. We should have said ‘six million Jewish people’, it confessed. It added a correction to its website. Take this in: it’s 2026, we have eight decades’ worth of proof for the anti-Semitic lunacy and butchery of the Holocaust, and one of the world’s best-known broadcasters is having to say: ‘Oops. Sorry we forgot the Jews. We’ll add them in now.’

To my mind the BBC’s apology counts for nothing. Huge questions still dangle over its broadcasts. These faux-virtous lamentations were written by someone, edited by someone, fed into an autocue by someone, read out by someone and filmed, clipped and broadcast by reams of people. And not one of them – not one – said: ‘Oh fuck. We forgot to mention the Jews.’ This is so much more than a mistake – it speaks to a profound moral rot in the upper echelons of society where the poisonous politics of identity has clearly laid ruinous waste to decency and truth.

This isn’t the first time the Jews have been so crudely shunted from the crime that almost consumed them. Back in 2008, the Socialist Workers Party handed out a leaflet bewailing the Nazi slaughter of ‘LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people’. Anyone else? Last year, the UK’s then deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, paid tribute to ‘all those who were murdered just for being who they were’, as if the Holocaust were a militant act of political incorrectness rather than an industrialised effort to wipe every last Jew from the Earth.

In part, this Jew-less memorialising is fuelled by a rank instinct for appeasement. Consciously or otherwise, people drop ‘the Jews’ in order to avoid rankling those sections of society who don’t like them. That’s one reason fewer British schools are marking Holocaust Memorial Day – they don’t want to rile certain Muslim kids and others in the student body who might have been radicalised into Jewphobia in the swirling aftermath of 7 October 2023.

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, wonders if a similar impulse was behind Vance’s Jew-free post. It ‘speaks volumes’, he said, that Vance ‘couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that six million Jews were killed by Hitler’. Perhaps he’s trying to ‘comfort’ the ‘anti-Semites on the right who are infecting the Republican Party’. Shapiro raises a pressing question. Vance is a clever bloke. He knows who was targeted by Hitler. He also knows that the digital arena in which he makes a splash is polluted by phrenologist freaks who loathe the Jews and the Jewish homeland. If he failed to name the Jews in order to keep such scumbags sweet, that is beyond immoral.

Among both the new right and the wet liberals who stink up our institutions, it seems the truth of the Holocaust is being sacrificed at the altar of identitarianism. Faux progressives ditch the Jews in the cynical name of maintaining the multicultural order in which ‘brown’ people are perma-victims and ‘whites’, including Jews, are perma-oppressors. Referencing the psychotic efforts of industrialised racism to annihilate European Jewry grates against contemporary narratives of victimhood and privilege, so it’s memory-holed. And on the other side, among Vance and others, it would seem a reluctance to poke the Jew-wariness of white identitarians is behind their deficient Holocaust remembrance.

It’s a species of Holocaust denial. I’m not saying these people are ideological racists like David Irving and other lowlifes who devote their every waking hour to lying about the greatest crime in history. But the consequence of their failure to use the J-word is nonetheless to obfuscate, to blur, to deny. When you say the Holocaust was a sad event in which people died, you are diverting from the singular, epoch-shaping truth of that event – which is that the Nazis sought to exterminate the Jews.

There’s something else going on, too. Something incredibly creepy. In my book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, I call it ‘Holocaust envy’. Today’s all-ravaging culture of grievance, the nauseating spectacle of competitive victimhood, has given rise to a situation where people chip away at the Jewishness of the Holocaust in order to weaken the Jews’ claim to historic victimhood and boost their own. Hence we increasingly see advocacy groups saying the Holocaust was as much a crime against gay people, trans people and left-wing people as it was against Jewish people.

We now have the truly obscene situation where those who insist the Holocaust was an industrialised campaign to destroy the Jews and their history are themselves accused of ‘Holocaust denial’. ‘How dare you distract attention from trans suffering and gay suffering, you denier!’ – that now gets barked at people, primarily Jews, who cling for dear life to the truth of the Shoah as the seas of moral relativism, institutionalised self-pity and outright racism swirl dangerously around it. In this twisted Kafkaesque universe, truth is denialism, and denialism truth.

Let us be clear: everyone suffered under the Nazis. The working classes, trade unionists, homosexuals and especially disabled people and the Roma. But only one people was expressly targeted for complete and utter destruction. Say it: the Jews. The Holocaust was an attempt to dejudify Europe. Now we are witnessing the dejudification of the Holocaust itself. The ‘liberation’ of that crime from those who suffered it in order that other special interest groups might lay claim to it instead, and in the process indulge their depthless capacity for self-pity and self-promotion. It is something even worse than Holocaust denial – it’s Holocaust theft.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.