{"id":287396,"date":"2025-02-03T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=287396"},"modified":"2025-02-02T06:48:19","modified_gmt":"2025-02-02T06:48:19","slug":"how-the-west-hides-its-gaza-genocide-guilt-behind-holocaust-day-remembrance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/02\/how-the-west-hides-its-gaza-genocide-guilt-behind-holocaust-day-remembrance\/","title":{"rendered":"How the West Hides Its Gaza Genocide Guilt behind Holocaust Day Remembrance"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The ghosts of thousands of Palestinian children crushed by Israeli bombs loomed over this year\u2019s Auschwitz commemorations.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

31 Jan 2025 <\/em>– An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week\u2019s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.<\/p>\n

The British state broadcaster asserted throughout the day that the voices of the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination programme were still being heard \u201cloud and clear\u201d in western capitals. Those survivors \u2013 now in their 80s and 90s \u2013 warned that the genocide of a people must \u201cnever again\u201d be allowed to take place.<\/p>\n

As if to bolster its claim, the BBC showed western leaders \u2013 from Britain\u2019s King Charles III, to Germany\u2019s Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron of France \u2013 prominently in attendance at the main ceremony at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps, where more than a million Jews, Roma and other stigmatised groups were burned in ovens.<\/p>\n

As a counterpoint, the BBC highlighted the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been excluded from the ceremony for ordering the 2022 invasion of Ukraine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Steve Rosenberg, the corporation\u2019s Moscow correspondent, underscored the irony that Russia, so visibly absent, was responsible for liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 \u2013 the date that eventually came to be marked as Holocaust Remembrance Day.<\/p>\n

But hanging over the proceedings \u2013 and the coverage \u2013 was a heavy cloud of unreality. Had those western leaders really heard the message of \u201cnever again\u201d? Had media outlets like the BBC?<\/p>\n

There was an unwanted ghost at the commemorations. In fact, tens of thousands of ghosts.<\/p>\n

Those ghosts included the children shredded by US-supplied bombs; the children<\/a> who slowly suffocated under the rubble of their destroyed homes; the children whose bodies<\/a>\u00a0were left to rot, picked apart by feral dogs, because snipers shot at anyone who tried to retrieve them; the children who starved<\/a> to death because they were seen as \u201chuman animals\u201d, denied all food and water; the homeless babies<\/a> who froze to death in plunging winter temperatures; and the premature babies left to die in their incubators after soldiers invaded hospitals<\/a> and cut off the power.<\/p>\n

Those ghosts were every bit as present at the ceremony as the mountains of shoes and suitcases \u2013 separated forever from their owners \u2013 lining the corridors of the Auschwitz museum.<\/p>\n

Western leaders were determined to look back at the crimes of the past, but not to look at the crimes of the present \u2013 crimes they have been so deeply complicit in perpetrating.<\/p>\n

Wasteland of rubble<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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The BBC\u2019s News at Ten, its main evening news programme, dedicated around 20 minutes of its half-hour schedule to the Auschwitz commemorations, and then immediately followed the segment \u2013 apparently with no sense of irony \u2013 with images from Gaza, now a wasteland of rubble.<\/p>\n

Video footage, shot by a drone from high above, showed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians \u2013 the survivors, if Israel does not restart the slaughter \u2013 picking their way along the coast northwards. They were heading towards the ruins that had once been their homes, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries.<\/p>\n

Seen from so far away, they were reduced to a mass of \u201chuman ants\u201d, just as Israel\u2019s leaders wish them to be seen.<\/p>\n

After all, who needs to protect a people so dehumanised, so demonised? A people whose resistance to decades of brutal oppression and dispossession is categorised simply as \u201cterrorism\u201d?<\/p>\n

It was entirely of a piece that US President Donald Trump, who at least stayed away from the orgy of western hypocrisy at Auschwitz, called at the weekend for a programme<\/a> to \u201cclean out\u201d the destitute, the maimed, the scarred from Gaza \u2013 as if this was just a matter of good hygiene, of eradicating an ants\u2019 nest.<\/p>\n

Media like the BBC reported his comments with faint distaste. But it was precisely the media\u2019s disengaged treatment of the horrors unfolding in Gaza for the past 15 months \u2013 as if Israel was simply carrying out a routine counter-terrorism operation, \u201cmowing the lawn\u201d again \u2013 that made the horrors possible.<\/p>\n

It was the media\u2019s refusal to identify those horrors for what they clearly were \u2013 an incipient genocide, recognised<\/a> by every major human rights organisation and suspected by the International Court of Justice<\/a> in a ruling a year ago \u2013 that made the slaughter possible.<\/p>\n

It was the media\u2019s embrace of the preposterous narrative that former US President Joe Biden had \u201cworked tirelessly\u201d to restrain Israel, at the same time as he shipped to its military the most powerful bombs in Washington\u2019s armoury, that made the genocide possible.<\/p>\n

At least Trump, in his vulgar transparency, exploded the pretence of decency, making it impossible to take as good-faith the professions of \u201cnever again\u201d paraded by western leaders.<\/p>\n

Ideological zeal<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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But the Auschwitz commemoration also highlighted a much older lie than the West\u2019s current, self-serving, mendacious claim to have internalised the central lesson of the Holocaust while assisting a present-day genocide.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Holocaust Remembrance Day starkly exposed the chief beneficiary of that lie: Israel.<\/p>\n

For decades, Israel has traded on its self-declared status as guardian of the Holocaust\u2019s memory, and as the Jewish people\u2019s supposed solitary sanctuary from global antisemitism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Israel was never a real sanctuary for Jews. It was always another ghetto, this one a self-created fortress state antagonising and oppressing its neighbours in the oil-rich Middle East.<\/p>\n

Israel was never a bulwark against genocide either. It was the bastard child of genocide \u2013 bitter, traumatised and driven by an ideological zeal to do unto others what had been done to it.<\/p>\n

And Israel was never an antidote to antisemitism. It was always antisemitism\u2019s junkie, needing another hit to give it the illusion of purpose and meaning, to rationalise its crimes to itself and others.<\/p>\n

Israel did not learn the lesson of \u201cnever again\u201d. It learned to view the world as a giant extermination-camp-in-waiting, where no one and nothing could be trusted; where life was seen as a zero-sum battle for survival; where wielding the biggest stick eased its fears a little; and peace was unattainable, so the state of war had to be permanent.<\/p>\n

Touting itself as the realisation of a dream for the Jewish people, Israel offered only a nightmarish hellscape for the Palestinians it has ruled for nearly eight decades.<\/p>\n

The nadir of that long process was the 15 months of genocide in Gaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Litany of tyrants<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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The remedy to all of this is not a mirage-like \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d, which could never be accommodated by Israel\u2019s dog-eat-dog worldview. Rather, Israel must be weaned off its addiction to victimhood, its zero-sum logic.<\/p>\n

But western politicians were never in a position to help. Instead, they endlessly armed Israel and encouraged its most dysfunctional behaviours.<\/p>\n

In truth, even in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War, the West never learned the lesson it so keenly and loudly proclaimed this week at Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

Just ask the Kikuyu people<\/a> of Kenya, who were castrated, beaten, raped and murdered through the 1950s by British soldiers defending a dying empire from the Mau Mau uprising. Or the Algerians, colonised and brutalised until the early 1960s by French imperialists clinging on to one of their last significant colonial outposts.<\/p>\n

Ask the Vietnamese, who were massacred in the service of a Cold War strategy by the US to bolster its expanding economic empire against the spread of a rival communism. Or the Iraqis and Libyans, who saw their countries bombed, and their peoples killed or ethnically cleansed as Washington and its Nato allies pursued the US military doctrine of \u201cglobal full spectrum dominance\u201d.<\/p>\n

And those are only a handful of the post-Holocaust crimes committed directly by western states.<\/p>\n

Even as the West pretended to bring independence to its former colonies, from the 1950s onwards, it propped up a litany of brutal tyrants and dictators: Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, Chile\u2019s Augusto Pinochet, Indonesia\u2019s General Suharto, the leaders of apartheid South Africa, the kings and crown princes of Saudi Arabia \u2013 the list goes on and on.<\/p>\n

The brutalities of western colonialism were veiled by outsourcing the crimes to local dictators and strongmen.<\/p>\n

Glaring hypocrisy<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made an address on Holocaust Remembrance Day that encapsulated how its message has been not only lost, but entirely twisted by western politicians.<\/p>\n