Building the Resistance to the IHRA Webinar

The IHRA says that comparing Zionism and Israeli to the Nazi State is anti-Semitic yet today it is the Zionists who compare themselves to the Nazis

Speakers from top left to right - Tony Greenstein, Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead, 

Prof. David Johnson, Lubna Speitan, Prof. Ilan Pappe, Prof. Kristina Hultgren, 

Resisting the IHRA 9 May 2025 JNP Webinar

When I published my book Zionism During the Holocaust in October 2022 little could I know that a year later Israel would embark on a live-streamed genocide with Biden, Starmer and Schultz funding and arming Israel in order to complete the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza.

It is remarkable that all those organisations that make up the Holocaust Industry not only kept silent but they even called those who did  compare it with the Nazi holocaust ‘anti-Semitic’.

Karen Pollock believes comparisons between the Genocide of Palestinians and the Holocaust 'distorts' the memory of the Nazis' victims - far better to use that memory to justify the burning alive of children with their mothers

Prime amongst them was the empty headed trollope from the misnamed Holocaust Educational Trust, Karen Pollock, who whined that ‘modern-day protests on a range of issues, including Gaza, are “trivialising” the Holocaust.’

If there is one thing Zionists hate above all it is comparing the Jewish holocaust to any other genocide or holocaust. To do so is to ‘trivialise’ the murder of 6 million Jews. What happened under the Nazis is unique, a one-off event attributed to the demonic nature of the Nazis. Nothing like it has ever happened before or since.

The Jewish holocaust is beyond history and indeed beyond any explanation. It is inexplicable, demonic, to be attributed to the ‘eliminationist’ mentality of the Germans (Daniel Goldhagen).

Zionism rejects such concepts as fascism, eugenics and selective breeding, racial imperialism or German settler colonialism. As Sybil Milton, the Chief Historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum observed:

the validity of the eugenic interpretation does not fit into the arguments of those historians positing anti-Semitism as a central motivation in Nazi policy. The preoccupation with antisemitism as a causative factor has thus limited our ability to see the connections between Nazi ideology, German social policy, and Genocide.

Milton observed that:

The emphasis on antisemitism and the exclusivity of the Jewish fate has, for obvious political reasons, also been the official Israeli interpretation

To Yehuda Bauer, the principal Zionist holocaust historian

The Nazis were ‘a political elite that had come to power with pseudo-messianic concepts of saving humanity from the Jews.

If the Nazis project was messianic, it was quasi-religious, beyond all explanation. To Bauer what determined Nazi policy towards the Roma was their asocial conduct, irrespective of race. Milton’s response was withering:

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.

Far from trivialising the Holocaust as Pollock believes, comparing it to other genocides such as Gaza helps us understand why it happened. When Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant calls the Palestinians human animals we can but recall the use by Himmler of the same phrase when describing Slavs and non-Aryans to senior SS officers on October 4 1936 in Posnan, Poland. 

What is trivialising the holocaust, indeed mocking the holocaust is when Israelis call for the obliteration and destruction of Gaza and its people. How can we not recall the Nazi destruction of first the Warsaw Ghetto and then Warsaw itself.

By comparing the holocaust in Gaza to the Nazi holocaust we put the murdered Jews of the holocaust back into history rather than exceptionalising them as a freak of history. We take them out of the role that Zionism has created for them of being the reason for the annihilation of others. It is accepting that the 6 million Jews who died were killed for a reason and that they didn't bring it on themselves by refusing to be colonists in Palestine as the Zionist ideologues assert. 

Israeli Producer Demands Gaza Suffers 'HOLOCAUST' - Including Gas Chambers

The IHRA’s 10^th illustration of ‘anti-Semitism’ states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ Yet today it is Israelis themselves who draw this comparison.

Elad Barashi is an Israeli media professional affiliated with Channel 14, a far-right television network widely seen as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s favored platform for interviews and messaging. Barashi serves as a researcher and producer on shows such as “Story Night”… https://t.co/dqrUpSZDqT

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 3, 2025

It has recently come to peoples’ attention that Elad Barashi, a Producer with Israel’s far-right Channel 14, has openly called for a holocaust, including gas chambers, in Gaza.

Men, women, and children—by any means necessary, we must simply carry out a Shoah [Holocaust] against them—yes, read that again—H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! In my view—gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel methods of death for these Nazis.

One wonders whether Karen Pollock considers that Barashi is trivialising the Holocaust or enhancing it?

Dani Dayan - the Fascist Chair of Yad Vashem - Israel's Holocaust Propaganda Museum

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Propaganda Museum refused to condemn the Genocide and even justified it. Its new Director, Dani Dayan, used to the Secretary General of the Teyiha Fascist Party.

Barashi is not a freak or an exception. Strangely enough his remarks haven’t been quoted by one single western newspaper. However if a Hamas spokesman had made such a comment it would be made the headlines. In 2023 we had sweet Israeli school children calling for the ‘annihilation’ of the people of Gaza. It was titled the Friendship Song.

Watch: Israeli children sing, "We will annihiliate everyone" in Gaza https://t.co/kDEdkDwtsOpic.twitter.com/QgVMeL1xIm

— Electronic Intifada (@intifada) November 21, 2023

Amichai Eliyahu and the need to starve the Palestinians 

We have had senior politicians like Nissim Vaturi, Bezalel Smotrich and Amichai Eliyahu calling for the murder of every adult in Gaza, for the destruction of Gaza and the starving of Gaza. These are Nazi like statements from Judeo-Nazis yet the IHRA says that to call them what they are is anti-Semitic.

Death by Hunger was the Nazi policy for Russia and the Jewish ghettos yet the Zionists call such a comparison 'anti-Semitic'. It is as if anti-Semitism has become a statement of truth.  But in reality the Zionists and the anti-Semites were always hand in glove.

The webinar consisted of a series of talks around the IHRA, which has been used to silence debate on the genocidal nature of the Israeli state. It has been adopted by the right and the far-right as part of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism. Our task is to call to account the cowards in universities who are complicit in its adoption, in particular the Vice-Chancellors who gave way to the toilet salesman who was promoted to Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson. It was Williamson with his threat to university funding, much like Trump which led to the abject surrender and sacrificing of free speech by most universities.

In my own contribution I picked up on Ilan Pappe's reference to Chomsky's belief in the responsibility of intellectuals. I observed that a perhaps more pertinent reference would be that of George Orwell who wrote in his essay on The Freedom  of the Press that in this country 'intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.’

We see that in the universities of North America where Columbia has become a transmission belt for the Trump Administration with barely a protest from its academic staff. I noted that the Christian-Jewish academic Victor Klemperer, (he converted to Protestantism in 1912 but in Germany being Jewish was a racial not religious question as it is in Israel). He was sacked from teaching in Nazi Germany in 1935 and he noted in his diaries that the only person to say goodbye to him was the cleaner.  His academic colleagues stayed away.

But at least German academics had good reason to fear reprisals from the Nazi state. What is the excuse for the cowardice of British academics who have said virtually nothing about the IHRA or the silence of their union the UCU?

Tony Greenstein