For too long the Nazi Holocaust has meant the Jewish Holocaust. The other victims – the Disabled, the Roma and Sinti Gypsies, have been ignored. Israel has weaponised the Holocaust in order to justify its racist and apartheid policies and practices.
As Idith Zertal, an Israeli History Professor wrote:
"The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders."
In 2015 Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech to the World Zionist Organisation Congress, stated that Hitler had only intended to expel the Jews before the Palestinian leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem convinced him that he had to annihilate them.
Every year Israel takes thousands of school children to Auschwitz, not to warn them of the dangers of where racism will lead to but in order to instil the values of militarism and chauvinism in them. As Gideon Levy wrote in Ha’aretz:
"I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz."
Yehuda Bauer, the foremost Zionist holocaust historian argued with Sybil Milton, the Chief Resident Historian at the US Holocaust Museum, that only the Jews suffered a holocaust. The Gypsies were killed because of their asocial, criminal lifestyle. Milton’s countered that:
Defining an entire ethnic group as anti-social and criminal is a classic example of racism. I do not know why Mr. Bauer does not understand this.
On Friday 27 January at 6.30 p.m., we are holding a meeting ‘Reclaiming the Memory of the Nazi Holocaust’. Speakers will include two Jewish Holocaust survivors, Suzanne Weiss and Stephen Kapos, Dr Adrian Marsh, a Roma Gypsy historian, Ali Abunimah, the Editor in Chief of Electronic Intifada and Tony Greenstein, author of Zionism During the Holocaust.
We are determined to remember and commemorate ALL the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
Please Register Here