Holocaust Memorial Day Was Not Created to Be Hijacked

Every year, we are told to remember.

Remember the six million Jews. Remember the ghettos. Remember the trains. Remember the ash.

Remember where hatred leads when it is dressed up as principle, polished into ideology and fed to the public as morality.

And every year, more and more people seem determined to remember everything except the actual lessons.

Holocaust Memorial Day is not a generic festival of sadness. It is not a floating hashtag for whichever cause happens to be fashionable in the room. It is not an opportunity for civic box-ticking, moral peacocking or the modern sport of squeezing Jews out of their own history while assuring us it is being done in the name of compassion.

It is first and foremost about the Holocaust.

About the systematic, industrial, state-backed attempt to erase the Jewish people from the earth.

Not to criticise us. Not to inconvenience us. Not to “decolonise” us.

To erase us.

That matters, because when you blur the centre of Holocaust remembrance, you do not broaden it.

You hollow it out.

The Word “Genocide” Was Born From Jewish Blood

There is a grotesque irony in watching people fling around the word genocide as a political prop, especially against the one people whose destruction helped force the world to give that crime a name in the first place.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, coined the word because the existing language at the time was too weak, too vague, too anaemic to describe what was being done to Jews and others under Nazi rule. He saw that this was not random wartime cruelty or ordinary brutality. It was a project. A plan. An intent to destroy a people as a people. That is precisely why genocide, in law, is not just about death tolls or ugly pictures or whoever shouts loudest. It is about intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. 

So when Holocaust language is casually detached from Jewish history and reattached to whatever political narrative is currently trending, something obscene happens.

The crime is not only being misunderstood.

It is being stolen.

I Saw It Happen

Last year, I attended a Holocaust memorial ceremony in Bedford, at the foot of the Anne Frank memorial tree. People of different faiths stood together. It was solemn. Respectful. Human. And for a brief moment, it felt as though the day still meant what it was supposed to mean.

Then one of the council officials spoke.

She mentioned the genocides that followed the Holocaust. Fair enough. That is part of the day’s official framework. But then, almost under her breath, she tacked on “Gaza” at the end.

And I was seething.

Because that was not remembrance. That was hijacking.

That was taking a day for six million murdered Jews and quietly slipping in a fashionable political slogan as though our dead were merely a backdrop for someone else’s performance.

How dare you do that on our memorial day?

How dare you stand in the shadow of Anne Frank and turn Jewish grief into an ideological open mic night?

How dare you take the greatest warning in Jewish history and use it to lecture Jews?

That is not moral courage. That is moral vandalism.

Anti-Zionism Has Become the New Respectable Costume

We are constantly told that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Sometimes it is said gently. Sometimes aggressively. Sometimes with a university lanyard. Sometimes with a megaphone. Sometimes with a keffiyeh and a slogan. Sometimes with the polished smile of a person who believes they are far too enlightened to hate Jews.

And yet the pattern keeps repeating.

We are portrayed as uniquely malevolent. Uniquely powerful. Uniquely deceptive. Uniquely deserving of exclusion. Uniquely guilty, even when butchered.

Our trauma is mocked. Our fear is dismissed. Our history is rewritten. Our right to self-determination is treated as a moral stain no other people would ever be asked to apologise for.

The language changes. The target does not.

In 1920s and 1930s Germany, hatred of Jews was dressed up in the language of national purity, intellectual fashion, civic renewal and moral necessity. Today, much of that same impulse has simply had a wardrobe change. It now calls itself anti-Zionism. It wraps itself in words like “justice” and “liberation” and “human rights,” while demanding the dismantling of the one Jewish state on earth and treating Jewish self-defence as a uniquely unforgivable crime.

That is not progress. It’s old poison in a new bottle with a fancy label.

Holocaust Remembrance Means Recognising the Warning Signs

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with a culture. With a mood. With permission. With slogans. With boycotts. With lies.

With the steady drip-drip-drip of propaganda until hatred felt principled and exclusion felt righteous.

It began when Jews were recast as the obstacle to a better world.

Sound familiar? Because it should.

When mobs chant for the destruction of the Jewish state, when Jewish students are hounded on campuses, when synagogues need ever more security, when Jewish identity is treated as suspicious unless prefaced by ritual self-denunciation, we are not looking at some totally new phenomenon. We are watching a very old hatred teach itself new vocabulary.

And one of the greatest obscenities of our age is this: people now invoke the Holocaust not to understand Jews, but to silence them.

Remember Us Properly

Yes, Holocaust Memorial Day can and should educate people about where unchecked hatred leads, including later genocides. That is part of its formal purpose in the UK. But the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a preface, a springboard, or a moral prop for whatever anti-Israel sermon somebody is itching to deliver. 

The six million were not a rhetorical device.

They were Jews. Our Jews. Our families. Our children. Our old people. Our teachers, tailors, pianists, mothers, rabbis, dreamers, shopkeepers, poets and babies.

They do not need to be “contextualised” out of their own story.

They need to be remembered with honesty. With dignity. With historical clarity.

And with enough backbone to say, without apology, that Jewish remembrance does not require permission from people determined to misuse it.

No More Hijacking

So let’s say it plainly.

Holocaust Memorial Day is not the place to smuggle in fashionable contempt for Jews under the guise of universal compassion.

It is not the day to relativise Jewish suffering.

It is not the day to turn Anne Frank into a prop in a modern political tantrum.

And it is certainly not the day to take a word born from the attempted annihilation of Jews and fling it back at Jews as a weapon.

We are allowed to reclaim our history. We are allowed to defend our dead. We are allowed to demand respect.

And frankly, we should stop asking nicely. Because remembrance without truth is theatre. Remembrance without moral clarity is vanity.

And remembrance that cannot even leave the Jews in possession of their own graves is not remembrance at all.

It is desecration.

May the memory of all those lost be a blessing 🕯️💔