How the Holocaust is weaponised to repress anti-genocide voices: Op-ed
That's certainly what happened last year, when both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former US President Joe Biden made such claims. In response, 10 Holocaust survivors issued a letter, stating: 'To use the memory of the Holocaust like this to justify either genocide in Gaza or repression on college campuses is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.'
It's not just Netanyahu and Biden who have misused the Holocaust in this way. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was clearly referring to the pro-Palestine movement when he talked about antisemitism on university campuses and 'hatred marching on our streets' in a speech at the Holocaust Educational Trust last September.
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- Middle East Eye
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Nor did anyone else at the Heritage Foundation, which does not acknowledge that Palestine exists, and openly called for the annexation of the entirety of the occupied West Bank at Thursday's event. Former Gaza contractor says Israeli soldiers were ready to shoot starving children Read More » "This type of work has a cost," Moore continued. "We lost 12 local Gazan aid workers. Hamas brutally murdered them. They injured dozens more, and to make a point, they piled them in front of one of the only hospitals still operating in the Gaza Strip, guarded them within an earshot of the hospital and refused to allow them any medical treatment". Hamas has maintained that the dozen people it killed were part of the Israeli-backed militia known as The Popular Forces, led by a notorious convicted drug trafficker, Yasser Abu Shabab. The US and Israel have tried to prop up Abu Shabab as an alternative to Hamas. 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Tony Aguilar, a former Green Beret and contractor who worked for GHF, has shared with US media harrowing stories of atrocities committed by US mercenaries and Israeli soldiers at the sites. This week, he appeared in an interview with Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen and conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson. Why Trump has little interest in delivering a ceasefire in Gaza Read More » Earlier this week, for the first time, a majority of Senate Democrats and two Independent allies voted to block the sale of $675m in weapons to Israel. The measure was defeated, and all Republicans voted against the resolutions. But Trump's base of "America First" conservatives is also turning against Israel's war on Gaza. This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump supporter, became the first Republican member of Congress to declare Israel's war a genocide, joining dozens of human rights groups and scholars, including two prominent Israeli ones, to do so. The conservative podcaster Carlson has run a series of back-to-back interviews critical of Israel's war on Gaza and the US's involvement in the scandal-ridden GHF. Analysts told MEE that Trump has been forced to manage the ugly realities of the Gaza famine because he has decided not to extend political capital to push Netanyahu into a ceasefire and permanent end to the war. On Thursday, Trump reiterated previous comments that the humanitarian crisis would end if Hamas releases the captives, but he did not spell out a permanent end to the war. "The fastest way to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND FREE THE HOSTAGES!!!" Trump said on Thursday in a social media post. US isolation deepens The US has become more isolated on the world stage as it faces pressure from European and Arab partners to rein in Israel. 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Germany's top diplomat, Johann Wadephul, who met Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Thursday, warned before setting off that "Israel is finding itself increasingly in the minority". So far, the US is doubling down. The US State Department announced it would deny visas to officials from the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and which the US's Arab allies want to govern Gaza after the war.
