How the West hides its Gaza genocide guilt behind Holocaust Day remembrance

 

The ghosts of thousands of Palestinian children crushed by Israeli bombs loomed over this year’s Auschwitz commemorations

An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week’s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.

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 “loud and clear” in western capitals. Those survivors – now in their 80s and 90s – warned that the genocide of a people must “never again” be allowed to take place.

As if to bolster its claim, the BBC showed western leaders – from Britain’s King Charles III, to Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron of France – 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.

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.

Steve Rosenberg, the corporation’s Moscow correspondent, underscored the irony that Russia, so visibly absent, was responsible for liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 – the date that eventually came to be marked as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But hanging over the proceedings – and the coverage – was a heavy cloud of unreality. Had those western leaders really heard the message of “never again”? Had media outlets like the BBC?

There was an unwanted ghost at the commemorations. In fact, tens of thousands of ghosts.

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

Those ghosts were every bit as present at the ceremony as the mountains of shoes and suitcases – separated forever from their owners – lining the corridors of the Auschwitz museum.

Western leaders were determined to look back at the crimes of the past, but not to look at the crimes of the present – crimes they have been so deeply complicit in perpetrating.  (more...)

How the West hides its Gaza genocide guilt behind Holocaust Day remembrance