The Murder of 2 Jews at a Manchester Synagogue is as Despicable as Israeli snipers killing 2 Catholics at Gaza’s Holy Family Parish Church or Murdering Muslims in Mosques

 The Board of Deputies & the Zionist Lobby said that British Jews Support Genocide in Gaza

Is it Surprising That Someone Believed Them?

It goes without saying that the attack on Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester should be condemned unreservedly. British Jews are not responsible for the war crimes and genocide taking place in Gaza, despite the best efforts of the claque of Zionist organisations to get people to believe that they are.

The so-called Jewish representative organisations like the Board of Deputies, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Jewish Leadership Council and the astoundingly stupid Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis bear a large responsibility for what happened in Manchester when two Jewish worshippers lost their lives.

As far as I can ascertain from two AI programmes (Chat GP and Grok) there has never been a fatal attack on a Jewish synagogue before 2 October 2025. The person who carried out the attack, Jihad al-Shamie, is highly likely to have been motivated, not by racial hatred but by Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

Contrary to Starmer’s suggestion that an age-old anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews is to blame, the causes are modern. It is Starmer’s supply of arms and weaponry to Israel and support of military collaboration with Israel that helped cause the murders in Manchester.

In November 2009 on the BBC’s Big Questions I attacked those Zionist organisations in Britain who spend their time trying to convince people that British Jews support Israel’s war crimes. This was reported by the Jewish Chronicle as ‘The Board of Deputies is to blame for rising antisemitism in Britain, according to a leading member of a Jewish anti-Israel group’.

What I said was that:

 “Of course there’s no justification for antisemitism, but there’s also no justification for the Board of Deputies calling rallies in support of the invasion of Lebanon and Gaza in the name of the British Jewish community. That causes antisemitism. [Jewish Chronicle 19.11.09].

Those who openly supported the murder and massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and Palestine in the name of British Jews are those who are ultimately guilty for the murder of 2 Jewish worshippers in Manchester.

Less than a week ago on Twitter I told the Board of Deputies

If you want to stop anti-Semitism @boardofdeputies then stop associating British Jews with the Holocaust in Gaza.
Your support for Zionism, a Christian ideology originally, makes Jews unsafe because most people don't like those who starve children to death. That's what the… https://t.co/IAgx9f3hsT

— Tony Greenstein tonygreenstein.com (@TonyGreenstein) September 29, 2025

The Board of Deputies Protesting That The Government Has Resumed Funding UNWRA and Is Not Objecting to the ICC's Jurisdiction re Israeli War Crimes

I went on to say that

Any British Jews who supports Israel's holocaust and starvation in Gaza should not complain of 'antisemitic hate' when what it really is is a justifiable reaction against Jewish Nazism.

The Board defends Israel's cold-blooded murder of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators as Hamas using children as pawns

The Board of Deputies has consistently supported every war crime of the Israeli state. It supported the murder of over 300 unarmed Palestinians in Gaza in the Great Return march. It supports Israel’s genocide and indeed penalised those few Deputies who eventually spoke out against the genocide.

The Jewish Chronicle Defends Israel's Starvation of Children by Pretending That They All Suffered from Medical Conditions not Lack of Food!

The Jewish Chronicle has been even worse. It should be renamed ‘The Holocaust Denial Gazette’. It has repeatedly defended Israel starving Palestinian children to death claiming that they had medical pre-conditions. It is as if starving to death already ill children was justified. Previously only Hitler justified starving disabled children as part of his ‘euthenasia’ program.

It took the Times of Israel to rebut the lies of the British Jewish Establishment which had justified Israel’s policy of starving the population of Gaza. The ToI quoted two senior Israeli doctors, including the head of the pediatric gastroenterology unit at one of Israel’s premier medical institutions, who ‘insisted that al-Mutawaq’s severely emaciated state is not the result of his preexisting medical conditions alone.’

The attempt of the Zionist propagandists to justify Israel’s policy of starving the population, denying it was even happening, by suggesting that photographs of starving children were misleading in not mentioning pre-existing medical ailments was given legs by a particularly nauseating apologist for Israeli war crimes, David Collier. This was quickly followed up by the misnamed Honest Reporting Zionist site

The Board of Deputies and other Zionist organisations were at the centre of the fake and false 'antisemitism' allegations

The ToI quoted Israeli doctors as having

insisted that no child suffering from such diseases in Israel or most other Western countries would be so skeletal or display such severe malnutrition, and that he was likely in such condition due to an inability to access the proper nutritional supplements.

Prof. Dan Turner, the head of a pediatric gastroenterology unit and Deputy Dean of the School of Medicine at the Hebrew University stated that

You categorically do not find kids looking like that in Israel or Western countries. Even patients with background diseases should not be malnourished like that. A patient like that would be admitted to hospital.

None of this is to justify what happened in Manchester. There are those in the Palestine solidarity movement who buy into the Zionist lie that Israel is a Jewish state and that the British and US states are controlled by Zionists. Such people therefore believe that attacking individual Jewish Zionists in Britain or the US is the solution to Western imperialism’s support for Israel.

These lies are dangerously wrong. Israel is supported by Western elites, not because the British or American states are controlled by Zionists or subject to Zionist infiltration as Professor David Miller has stupidly suggested but because Western imperialism deems it in its interests to support the Israeli attack dog in the Middle East. See Jonathan Cook’s The billionaire class want you thinking Israel controls the West and In Gaza, western colonialism has been unmasked

It is in the interests of western elites to pretend that their support for Israel is all about their concern for Jews and ‘anti-Semitism’, the only form of racism that Trump, Reform and the Tories condemn. That this is all about a ‘Jewish’ state trying to protect itself, albeit over zealously at times, and tie that in with the interests of Jewish populations in the West.

It is convenient for those self-same elites to disguise their own interests in oil and geo-political strategy with concern for Jews. Jews have become the moral alibi for Israel's war crimes and the slaughter of thousands of children, the rape and murder of women and the torture camps for Gaza’s men.

Those who condemn the killing of 2 Jewish worshippers in Manchester should equally condemn the killing of Muslim and Christian worshippers in Gaza yet the genocidal Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the genocide supporting President of the Board of Deputies, Phil Rosenberg have said nothing about the attacks on places of worship in Gaza. On the contrary when 36 Deputies issued a mild letter of criticism in the FT Rosenberg had them disciplined and issued his own letter saying that ‘The Board of Deputies stands firmly with Israel… not THAT letter.’

ABC - Holy Family Church in Gaza Attacked - 2 Murdered

The attack on a Manchester synagogue and the killing of two worshippers was no more reprehensible than Israel’s repeated attacks on mosques and churches in Gaza and the killing of thousands of worshippers. Unfortunately the only attacks that have gained publicity have been those on Gaza’s only Catholic church, the Holy Family Parish. Israeli snipers on 16 December 2023 killed two parishioners, mother and daughter Nahida and Samar Anton.

Cardinal Nicholls interview over sniper attack on Holy Family Church - Mother and Daughter Shot Dead

The Wikipedia article gives the background to the Israeli assault on the Holy Family church. Pope Francis rang the priest Father Gabriel Romanelli every night and condemned Israel’s attacks as terrorism.  Something which the new Pope Leo hasn’t done.

Israel’s liar-in-chief and Prime Minister, Netanyahu, ‘regretted’ the fact that ‘stray ammunition’ hit Gaza's only Catholic Church, killing three people sheltering there. No one else doubts that Israeli tanks deliberately fired shells at the Church which the IDF considers to be an obstacle to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Although the Zionists will purport to condemn the attack on a Manchester synagogue in reality many, especially in Israel, will welcome it. There is a long history of Zionists seeing anti-Semitic attacks as a good thing in that it will drive Jews into believing that only a ‘Jewish’ state can protect them.

As Abraham Shpadrong (Sharon) wrote in Davar in July 1952:

… if I had the power, as I have the will, I would select a score of efficient young men… and I would send them to the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self-satisfaction. The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews, and plague these Jews with anti-semitic slogans, such as 'Bloody Jew,' 'Jews go to Palestine,' and similar 'intimacies.' I can vouch that the results, in terms of considerable immigration to Israel from these countries, would be ten thousand times larger than the results brought by thousands of emissaries who have been, for decades, preaching to deaf ears. [Alfred Lilienthal, The Other Side of the Coin, Devin-Adair, NY, p. 47].

Iraqi Jews Were Convinced that Israeli Agents Had a Hand in Their Uprooting – Avi Shlaim

In Iraq in 1950/51 Zionist agents planted bombs in Jewish cafes and threw a bomb into a synagogue, Masuda Shemtov, in order to simulate anti-Semitism.

Without anti-Semitism there is no Zionism which is why the Zionist leaders welcomed Hitler to power and saw a ‘golden opportunity’ for their movement in the rise of the Nazis. Those  supporters of the Palestinians who see their salvation in anti-Semitism are doing exactly what the Zionists want them to do. The murder of two Jews in Manchester can only be of benefit to Israel and its supporters. It is in the interests of Zionism to increase the level of anti-Semitism in the West.  Anti-Semitism has been Zionism's best recruiting sergeant. That is why the actions of Jihad al-Shamie have ended up strengthening Zionism not weakening it.

It is also why those who believe that it is in the interests of the Palestinians to unite with neo-Nazis, as Rehiana Ali clearly does, are unwittingly serving the interests of Zionism not the Palestinians.

Tony Greenstein

The Time Has Come for Britain’s Anti-Zionist Jewish Groups to Unite

At a Time of Genocide, Division and Disunity is a Luxury We Cannot Afford

When I ‘came out’ as an anti-Zionist Jew in 1970 it was a lonely experience. I lived in Liverpool where my father was a rabbi in a community of about 8,000 people (now less than 2,000).

The only other Jews I knew were in a socialist group which I joined at the age of 16 (expelled at 19!), the International Socialists (now the SWP). It was thanks to them that I read my first anti-Zionist pamphlet, the Class Nature of Israeli Society, by Moshe Machover, Haim Hanegbi and Akiva Orr.

This pamphlet, which first appeared as an article in the New Left Review, helped me to make sense of my instinctive hostility to Zionism as a Marxist. Zionism I began to see as an exclusivist ideology and movement whose only concern was the Jews. This was before the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians and the Apartheid nature of Israeli society had become widely known.

At that time there was no Palestine solidarity movement in Britain and much of the left had illusions in Israel. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer, two stalwarts of the Labour left were members of Labour Friends of Israel.

Today everything is different. Jewish anti-Zionists are not rare. Zionism is no longer assumed to be the natural home of Jews. Its alliance today with the far-right – the EDL, Tommy Robinson, Bannon, Orban etc. – is well known, clear and unmistakable but half a century ago things were different.

interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer on Israel’s Channel 2 about why he calls himself a 'white Zionist'

Hasbara, the Zionist version of propaganda still held sway. The Labour Zionists who had formed the government of Israel from 1948-77 continuously spoke of peace whilst they waged war. As I wrote in Tribune in July 1984, there was nothing Likud had done that Labour hadn’t done before it.

It took the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 for the scales to fall from the Left’s eyes. Benn and Heffer resigned from LFI. For much of the left Israel had been an oasis of socialism in the Middle East. Even Hannah Arendt was fooled into believing that the Kibbutzim were ‘perhaps the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’ [The Jew As Pariah, p. 185.

The image of the Kibbutzim seen in the West - Zionism and Socialism - however Arabs played no part in this 'socialism'

The kibbutzim were held to be models of socialism with their collective organisation and their lack of private property. No one told me that they were racially exclusive societies that banned Arabs from membership or that they had been established over the ruins of confiscated Arab villages whose inhabitants had been expelled. Nor had we been told that they had been established as the most effective and economical method of colonisation and were stockade and watchtower settlements.

Israel was not founded for the benefit of Jews. The West does not support Israel because it calls itself a ‘Jewish’ state. As James Baldwin noted in 1979:

Whenever criticism of Israel is made our rulers profess to be concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’. It is the only form of racism they are concerned about. Even Donald Trump, a bigot and racist for every season, is not only concerned about Jewish students (Zionist Jewish students naturally) suffering from anti-Semitism on campuses but he has cut federal funding from those universities and colleges which allow Palestine solidarity protests on campus.

This is at the same time that he is insisting that diversity and anti-racist programmes be ended, migrants be deported and that Confederate flags and symbols be preserved.

You would have to be stupid (unfortunately many people are) not to see how the rich and powerful, not least racists like Starmer, are using Jewish people and what they call ‘anti-Semitism’ (i.e. anti-Zionism) as a means to intimidate and frighten off support for Palestine and opposition to Zionism.

The same is true in this country. The racist Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, has used the pretext of Jewish Sabbath Services to reroute, ban and delay Palestinian marches on the grounds that they might cause offence to Zionist Jews. Jewish residents of Swiss Cottage are the pretext for banning demonstrations against Israel's racist ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli.

British and Western support for Zionism is not because of their concern for Jews but because of their own imperial interests. Jews constitute the moral alibi for imperialism in the Middle East.

It is for that reason alone that it is incumbent upon Jews who are not Zionists to say in both words and deed that what Israel does is not in my name.

Jews in America, for a number of reasons have been in advance of British Jews. From May 1-4 over 2,000 members of Jewish Voice for Peace gathered in Baltimore for a member’s conference (see Massive JVP member meeting vows to fight Zionism, fascism, and the weaponization of antisemitism).

In the United States 40% of young Jews see Israel as an apartheid state and one suspects that that figure is far higher today in the midst of the current genocide. No one who is progressive and Jewish has any excuse any longer for neutrality. Non-Zionism is no longer an option. It is fence sitting.

As Martin Luther King said ‘The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.’  

Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed that if you are neutral at a time of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Today it is not difficult to be Jewish and anti-Zionist. On April 10, the Zionists’ propaganda organ, the Jewish Chronicle, woke up to the fact that young Jews were turning against Zionism and carried an article ‘Who are the young Jews turning against Israel?’ by Jane Prinsley.

Former General Amiram Levin

Of course Jane, like all the Jewish Chronicle’s journalists is a Zionist. If she wasn’t she wouldn’t be working for them. The JC had started to realise that ‘Radical new groups for Jews who do not support Zionism have formed on campuses up and down the UK’. It went on to say that

‘radical Jewish student groups have emerged to cater to Jews who do not support Zionism. From Leeds, Liverpool, Brighton and Birkbeck to Edinburgh, Warwick, Cardiff, Cambridge and UCL, students have formed Jewish communities, or kehillot.’

This followed an article by Karen Glaser who used to be a features writer on the New Statesman where she wrote what I called the most ‘trivial, trite and superficial’ article the NS has ever run. Its subtitle was  ‘How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape!’ The article was about how Ms Glaser had kicked her Corbyn supporting, socialist boyfriend out of the nest at 2 am in the morning because he doubted that Corbyn was quite the anti-Semite that his girlfriend imagined.

So the article ‘I can’t discuss Israel with my anti-Zionist kids – it’s pointless’ was on a par with Glaser’s normal output. It described how 11 year old Talia had given her mother back the Star of David she had been given as a baby and further that she was ‘resigning as a Jew’.

Not only that but Talia had disposed of her mother’s big Israeli flag! Bright and intelligent child you might think. Clearly someone to interview. Karen though thought differently:

Zionist parents whose children are scared of being associated with Israel; youngsters who have internalised antisemitism, in particular its political iteration, anti-Zionism. Their parents say these young people openly loathe the Jews’ nation state. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem has grown exponentially since the October pogroms.

Karen Glaser is nothing if not stupid. That after all is why the Jewish Chronicle sought her out. It probably hadn’t occurred to her that it isn’t internalisation of anti-Semitism but detestation of burning children alive and bombing hospitals that is making Jewish youngsters puke at the mere mention of the ‘Jewish’ state. Talia doesn’t sound like someone who is intimidated.

Naturally I wrote a letter to the JC suggesting that it might have been a good idea to interview the children concerned and find out their views. And equally naturally the JC refused to print it. The last thing the JC wants to admit is that there may be good reasons why young Jewish kids detest Jewish racial nationalism.

Shortly after these articles 36 members of the Board of Deputies signed a letter to the Financial Times. It was not an anti-Zionist letter. Far from it. But even hardened Zionists had begun to realise that they were defending the indefensible. A war driven by neo-Nazis in Israel's government.

Equally predictable was the reaction of the genocide supporting President of the BOD, Phil Rosenberg, and the rest of the Board's Executive. There is no atrocity, no genocide that they cannot support. The presence of open fascists in Israel's government worries them not. They immediately suspended Harriett Goldenberg, the Vice-Chair of its International Division and opened disciplinary proceedings against all 36 signatories.

Moshe Yalon – Ben Gvir & Smotrich are Mein Kamp Reversed

Being good Zionists the last thing they wanted to see is any discussion over the rights and wrongs of the actions of what I have called ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’. The BOD is there to support whatever Israel does, right or wrong. Jewish neo-Nazis like Itamar Ben-Gvir trouble them not. After all even Gvir and Smotrich are Jewish and Zionism is about the unity of the Jewish tribe.

Rosenberg then issued a disingenuous statement that proclaimed ‘The Board of Deputies is a democratic organisation’ without mentioning the suspension of one officer and the disciplinary process (in the form of a complaint) that was taken against the dissenters.

It is clear that the worm is beginning to turn. That all those who have not become overt fascists and racists, like Rosenberg and his Executive, have developed qualms about the genocide being conducted against 2 million Palestinians in the name of a war against Hamas.

It is therefore incumbent upon Jewish anti-Zionists to come together and form one united organisation like Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States.  At the moment we have a plethora of organisations. I am in Jewish Network for Palestine, there is Jewish Voice for Labour, formed in the Labour Party during the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Corbyn and there is the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Organisation and the newcomer on the block Na'amod, which contains a few Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists. Na'amod is the most moderate and probably the largest.

There is also the older Jews for Justice for Palestinians which is a 2 states group that does very little except canvass for signatures for its founding statement and there is also Independent Jewish Voices which made a big splash when it was created in 2007 but which is now inactive. Its website was last updated a year ago and its last meeting was over four years ago.

By my estimates there are about 2,000 people who are members of the above organisations. There are undoubted differences between people but there is no reason why there should be so many organisations.

JfJP and IJV are not membership organisations. Clearly Na'amod, in so far as it contains some Zionists, will not be able to join a unified anti-Zionist organisation but there is no reason why the 3 anti-Zionist Jewish organisations cannot come together into one single anti-Zionist Jewish organisation.

Although JVL has not explicitly declared itself as anti-Zionist, in practice it is. There will obviously be differences over things like one or two states though the consensus today is that two states cannot be achieved given the number of settlers in the West Bank.

However we owe it to the Palestinians who are undergoing such terrible massacres and pogroms to put aside minor differences in the name of not only unity but effectiveness. A single united anti-Zionist Jewish group would be a pole of attraction, in particular to young Jews who do not wish to have to bear the strain and the stain of being seen to support genocide in the name of Jews. Most Jews who have grown up with the exploitation by Zionism of the memory of the holocaust find it strange that the most ardent supporters of Zionism today are the neo-Nazi and far right in politics.

When Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump and Viktor Orban are on your side, with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer declaring that he is a White Zionist, many Jews will decide that they have had enough of Zionism and its quest for Jewish racial purity. It is the duty of the existing anti-Zionist groups to facilitate that journey not to erect obstacles to it.

Tony Greenstein

Listen to the recording of Holocaust Memorial Day Webinar 2025

 The Refusal of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to Include the Gaza Genocide in their Festivities Demonstrates that our Rulers Have Learnt Nothing from Auschwitz

Holocaust Memorial Day Webinar 2025

The Holocaust memorial day meeting that the Socialist Labour Network, Jewish Network for Palestine and Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign held on 27 January 2025 was the best attended and the most successful we have ever had in the three years we have been holding these.

693 people registered for the meeting and over 60% of them attended. Normally attendance is little over 50% of those registered. The largest number of people watching at any time was 388 but the maximum number of people who did watch was 428.  Many people contacted us to say that they couldn’t attend but that they wanted to see a recording. So here it is!

Attended                           424                                      61.2%

Didn’t Attend                  269                                      38.8%

Registered       Cancelled          Unique Viewers        Max Concurrent Views

693                     4                           428                                388

 

We are told by the BBC and our rulers that we must learn the lessons of the Holocaust. Below is a picture of the Official Hypocrites including Chief Rabbi Mirvis, a rabid settler trained racist and an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

King Charles said that

The Holocaust must never be allowed to become a simple fact of history...the lessons of the Holocaust are relevant today.’ however this  pompous fool  refrained from telling us what these lessons were.  Perhaps because that might expose  the hypocrisy at the centre of the official festivities.

Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust excluded the Gaza Genocide from all mention of the Holocaust. In its FAQs it asked ‘Should I acknowledge the conflict in the Middle East in my HMD activity? And if so, how?’ Its answer was simple: ‘We do not recommend it.’ Thus is demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of the official celebrations, because that is really what they are – a celebration of imperialism.

The advice of the HMD is no surprise when people like the President of the Genocide supporting Board of Deputies, Phil Rosenberg, sits on the HMD board. The Jewish Chronicle and the right-wing press got all worked up by the Islamic Human Rights Commission call to boycott their celebrations.

Chikli, Israel's Diaspora Minister and Thug decided not to risk arrest by travelling abroad

The Israeli government minister Amichai Chikli openly threatened me. This is a blatant act of terrorism and incitement. I will be filing a lawsuit against him.
What a hallucinating sense of impunity. pic.twitter.com/zd1TwKoHHm

— Dyab Abou Jahjah (@Aboujahjah) January 6, 2025

The Telegraph had one of its normal moral fits at the suggestion that the HMD might include all genocides in HMD, including the Palestinian holocaust. It quoted the Zionist propagandist and CEO of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the morally bankrupt Karen Pollock, as saying that:

Just days before we mark Holocaust Memorial Day... we are appalled to see that the Islamic Human Rights Commission continue this tasteless campaign to undermine such a significant day.

Their cynical attempt to denigrate the memory of the Holocaust by drawing false parallels between the Holocaust – a unique and unprecedented episode in history – and unrelated current events, will not succeed.

Hind when she graduated from senior kindergarten - cruelly  butchered by Israel

Quite how the memory of those who died in the holocaust is ‘denigrated’ by comparing their deaths to those in Gaza is difficult to comprehend. Is the death of a Jewish child in Auschwitz any different from that of Hind Rajab, who was murdered because an Israeli tank fired a shell at her and the two paramedics who came to rescue her? 

Ukrainian Police Auxiliaries

The disgusting racist, Karen Pollok, called the Gaza genocide an ‘unrelated current event.’ If anyone is defiling and denigrating the memory of the largely anti-Zionist Jews who died in the holocaust it is Pollok. But then she is CEO of a Zionist holocaust industry organisation whose sole purpose is to harness the holocaust to the Israeli state’s apartheid existence.

The Genocide of Palestinians is different according to Pollok and whatever we do we mustn’t compare. Zionists hate comparisons because they know that the actions of Israel can only be defended by pretending that Israel is unique, being a ‘Jewish’ state that doesn’t have to operate according to the norms of civilised society. Once you compare Israel’s behaviour to others then you cannot help but notice that Israel is a rogue state, barbaric and racist in its determination to effect ethnic cleansing and not at all bothered by the numbers it kills.

So what are the lessons that Pollok, Rosenberg, Mirvis et al intend us to learn?  That Israel, Hitler’s posthumous victory, must be given more bombs and bullets in order that it can perpetrate more genocides and finish the job. This is Zionist  morality.

Israel has killed up to 300,000 Palestinian men, women and children, the International Court of Justice has said that a genocide is plausibly taking place yet the imperialist narrative demands that Israel’s genocide be treated as ‘self defence’.

Our war criminal ruling class, not least the German State, uses the holocaust to reinforce their genocidal narrative by claiming that Israel is the inheritor of the memory of the Jews who died. These are the lessons they draw from the holocaust.

‘Although Israel claims to represent the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust the reality is that Israel has inherited the memory and stepped into the shoes of those who killed them.’

It is a great pity that the IHRC fell into the trap that was laid for them. Instead of simply boycotting HMD they should have actively promoted our own meeting and thus shown that they had something to say about the holocaust.

This webinar refused to be part of the official festivities because that is what they really were. They were not a commemoration. Representatives from Israel and all the imperialist states – the United States, Britain and Germany – who are supplying Israel with the means to annihilate the Palestinian people were present.

Yet strangely enough the very state which bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and which liberated Auschwitz, Russia, was not present. Instead Volodymyr Zelensky, leader of the Ukrainian police state, which celebrates a national holiday each year on the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera was invited. Bandera was the leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) whose members, in their role as the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, participated in the massacre of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar, Kyiv on September 29-30 1941.

Baby Yar Memorial

Babi Yar was the largest Nazi massacre of Jews up to that date and one of the largest of the war.  Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army was heavily involved in massacres of Jews, Poles and Roma.

Speakers at the webinar were Stephen Kapos, a Jewish child survivor who was hidden in Budapest during the Hungarian Holocaust; Suzanne Weiss, a Jewish child survivor who was hidden in Auvergne in France by the Communist resistance; Ghada Karmi, a child survivor of the Nakba in Palestine when Zionist militias ethnically cleansed the native Palestinians to create their Jewish state, Rania Khalek, a Lebanese journalist who directs Breakthrough News; Ronny Kasrils, the Jewish former commander of Umkonte we Sizwe, the ANC's military wing and former MP in Nelson Mandela's first government and Tony Greenstein, the first Jewish member of the Labour Party to be expelled under Corbyn and author of 'Zionism During the Holocaust'. Tariq Ali, who was due to speak, was unfortunately ill and couldn't make it.

The Zionists and their imperialist backers use the Nazi holocaust of the Jews as a justification for Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.   We draw the opposite conclusion which is why we held this webinar. The official state ceremonies draw no anti-racist or anti-fascist conclusions.