Holocaust Memorial Day is over, so certain politicians can stop pretending to care
If you've spent significant time sharing sentiments which make many British Jews feel less safe, then stop pretending HMD means anything to you; we'll all be happier for it
Today is not Holocaust Memorial Day.
It is the day after Holocaust Memorial Day, which seems like a good day to ask certain politicians a few very straightforward questions.
First, now that you’ve tweeted, or posted, or even turned up at an event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day – what exactly are you doing today, following on from that?
And second, are you able to show the Jewish community in the UK that your words or sentiments were not just a tick-box exercise – simply an item on your calendar, to be publicly noted and filed away again until you tweet or post a very slight variation on the theme next year?
My apologies to those Members of Parliament who do regularly speak up for British Jews – this piece is not aimed at you, and if you feel the need to click away and carry on with your everyday business at this point, I understand.
But there are, regrettably, politicians who never seem to take any sort of interest in British Jews in everyday life – or far worse, who seem obsessed with making our lives in this country harder – who, on Holocaust Memorial Day can be seen, bold as brass, tweeting utterly meaningless pictures of themselves signing a book of remembrance.
This last year, the rise in antisemitism in this country claimed lives, in a terror attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur. The security services, as we learned about in considerable detail during a terror trial, managed to prevent a hideously evil plan to slaughter hundreds, of British Jews. Hardly a week goes by without another doctor being referred to a Medical Practitioner Tribunal for publicly expressing sentiments that would not have been out of place in Der Sturmer.
Where are these MPs, the day after Holocaust Memorial Day? Are they condemning the antisemitism that runs rampant within the rallies they speak at?
The Jewish community is full of people’s accounts of having been shunned by those they once considered friends, frozen out by colleagues, and feeling the need to hide their faith due to the levels of hideous hostility directed at us. Insofar as such MPs address this hatred at all, they prefer to blame Israel for it – as if a bitter war halfway around the world is a justification for people to express bigotry towards Jews in Britain.
So where are these MPs, the day after Holocaust Memorial Day? Are they condemning the antisemitism that runs rampant within the rallies they speak at? Are they reaching out to Jewish communal organisations to listen – really listen – rather than to a handful of obsequious yes-men from the fringes of British Jewish society who tell them exactly what they want to hear, and which they subsequently tokenise?
These are rhetorical questions, of course. We all know the answers.
So next Holocaust Memorial Day, after you’ve spent yet another year ratcheting up your rhetoric in a way which endangers British Jews, spare us your nauseating hypocrisy. We’d have more respect for you if you simply led with your chests and stopped pretending that you care even in the slightest about the victims of the Holocaust – other than to use them in your rhetoric attacking us for having ‘not learned the lessons of the past’, of course.
No-one is falling for it – it’s a waste of your time and ours. Ditch the tweets, stop the photos. You’ll feel better not having to hide your true selves, and we’ll feel happier not having to see you pretend to care to score pathetic political points on the backs of our murdered family members.
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