Imagine talking about the Holocaust and not mentioning the Jews. It would be like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade without saying the word ‘African’. Amazingly, the Green Party did just that last week. They de-Jewed the Holocaust. They offered remembrance for the greatest crime in history without mentioning the people it was designed to destroy.
That was it. No heart. No anger. No Jews
I’ve been thinking about this for days. About what would drive someone to erase the Jews from the Shoah, to engage in such eerie Jewless mourning. All the parties mentioned the six million Jews vaporised by fascism in their social-media posts on Holocaust Memorial Day. All except the Greens.
Their X post felt horribly perfunctory. Where Labour remembered ‘the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust’, and Reform ‘honour[ed] the memory of the six million Jewish victims’, the Greens made a cursory, emotionless nod to the murderous insanity of the 20th century. ‘On Holocaust Memorial Day we remember those murdered during the Holocaust and all genocides’, they said.
That was it. No heart. No anger. No Jews. The left is always yapping about the cultural crime of ‘erasure’. Apparently that’s when society marginalises or silences specific identity groups. ‘Trans erasure’ is a big obsession. I’m guessing that’s when a woman politely asks a biological male to get out of her changing room. And yet here was the left brazenly erasing Jews from the Holocaust.
During last year’s Trans Day of Remembrance, the Green Party absolutely remembered to use the words ‘trans people’. Green leader Zack Polanski gave a speech saying ‘trans people deserve apologies from politicians’. He promised to ‘remember the people whose names no one ever learnt’. Fast forward two months and his party won’t even say Jew in a Holocaust Memorial Day social media post.
So trans erasure is bad but Jew erasure is cool? It’s a searing necessity to remember the names of the handful of trans people tragically killed in recent years but not to remember the people who were shot, gassed and exterminated in their millions? I’ll say it: if you show more passion and fury on Trans Remembrance Day than you do on Holocaust Memorial Day, something is up. Seriously up.
The Green Party wasn’t alone in de-Jewing Holocaust Memorial Day. Various BBC broadcasts failed to say the J-word. The Beeb also failed to mention the J people in a report last week on the Battle of Cable St – the 1936 clash between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and EastEnd Jews and their working-class allies. Time and again, Jews are expunged from their own history.
But it’s more serious when it’s a political party. The Greens want voters to trust them. But if you can’t even tell the truth about the most singular crime of modernity, why should we trust you to tell the truth about anything else? Erasing the Jews from Holocaust remembrance is one of the sickest untruths of omission you can tell. I don’t want to be ruled by people who can’t even be honest about what happened in Europe 80 years ago.
We need to grapple with the unusualness, the outright inhumanity, of excising the Jews from the crime that nearly consumed them. Here’s my penny’s worth: the Green Party has made itself so reliant on the Muslim vote, especially the votes of Muslims who loathe the State of Israel, that it is now gripped by a deathly fear of ever being seen to ‘side with’ the Jews.
We know that the campaign group, The Muslim Vote, has endorsed the Greens in the Gorton and Denton by-election. We know the Greens are awash with people who think of the Jewish state as a demonic entity. We know there are Greens who called the Islamofascist pogrom of 7 October a fightback by ‘indigenous people’ against ‘white supremacist European settler colonialism’.
And we know some Greens think it is hypocritical of the UK government to commemorate the Holocaust when it is supporting Israel in its war against that army of anti-Semites, Hamas. Indeed, last year the Green candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election – Hannah Spencer – responded to a Holocaust Memorial Day post by Angela Rayner with the quip: ‘“Never again” but still selling arms to Israel.’
Message to Ms Spencer: likening Israel’s war on Hamas to the Nazi extermination of the Jews is disgusting. To speak of the Jewish State’s pushback against the racist army that murdered 1,200 of its people in the same breath as the enslavement and murder of millions of Jews is a repellant trivialisation of Hitler’s crimes. It implies the Jews have become like the monsters who once hunted them, a vile idea hawked by the far right for decades and now spreading on the far left, too.
The Green Party’s Jew-free post speaks to how lethal the Islamo-left pact can be. A post-class left that craves the votes of angry Islamists is naturally going to be wary of showing sympathy for Jews – even on Holocaust Memorial Day. Mr Polanski is himself Jewish. Is he really content to sacrifice the truth of his own people’s suffering in order to garner more votes? If so, for shame.
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