By LifeSiteNews (Politics) | Created at 2025-02-01 03:13:57 | Updated at 2025-02-01 07:54:49
5 hours ago
Fri Jan 31, 2025 - 9:21 pm EST
LONDON (LifeSiteNews) — As Jews and others from around the world observed Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday — the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp complex — a group of Jews in London gathered to additionally recognize and protest “the one genocide going on in front of our eyes, the Gaza Genocide.”
“It’s incredibly important to me to make the connection,” said Sonja Linden, the daughter of a holocaust survivor. In addition to remembering the Jewish Holocaust, “we also remember, as Jews in particular, that there is an ongoing Holocaust at this very moment in Palestine, something which absolutely fills us with horror.”
The group assembled before the city’s Cenotaph war memorial, which commemorates the dead of the world wars, including those who were deprived of a proper burial.
“Cenotaph means ‘empty tomb,’” Linden explained to Double Down News. “And I think it’s particularly appropriate that we remember those in the Holocaust who did not get a burial, who remained unburied, just as we remember those Palestinians under the rubble, thousands of them, who remain unburied today.”
Reliable reports of direct Palestinian deaths at the hands of the Israeli army during the last 15 months number at least 58,340, including around 11,000 presumed dead under the rubble and more than 18,100 children. Approximately 116,300 Gazans have been injured, including over 10,000 children who have lost at least one leg.
Holocaust survivor Stephen KamposDeliberate starvation: parallel between Nazi and Israeli crimes of genocide
Mark Etkind, the son of a holocaust survivor, described the parallel between how his father’s family was treated by the Nazis during their occupation of Poland in World War II and the current treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza under Israeli occupation.
“My father was Jewish in Poland when the war started, and he was pushed into the Lodz ghetto within months of the Nazis invading, along with his family and tens of thousands of other Jews,” he said. In Lodz, “they were deprived of health care, of clean water, of enough food, and within a year or so, my grandmother had died of disease, my uncle had died of disease, and tens of thousands of others had died of disease.”
The Jewish Holocaust began this way “as a process, and what we’re seeing in Gaza at the moment is the beginning of that kind of process, the extermination of the people of Palestine,” Etkind observed. “As far as we can tell, they’ve murdered something like 100,000 people.”
In December, advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released extensive reports concluding Israeli authorities were deliberately seeking to bring about the destruction of the people of Gaza by various means, including the deprivation of necessities like water, food, energy and medical care, amounting to crimes of genocide.
READ Genocide ‘only reasonable conclusion’ to Israel’s crimes in Gaza: Amnesty International
Additionally, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered a preliminary ruling. finding the charge of genocide against Israel to be “plausible,” and last November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes,” including “starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
According to a rationale presented in a July Lancet study, one can conservatively estimate total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care, by multiplying direct deaths (47,230) by five to arrive at 236,150 total fatalities. And with a November UN Human Rights Office report identifying fatalities in Gaza comprising approximately 44% children, it is reasonable to estimate 103,906 total deaths of children.
“How many more will die, we don’t know,” Etkind continued, “but until our British government stops arming Israel and supporting this genocide, who knows?”
“And I think it’s so important on a Holocaust Memorial Day that we commemorate the suffering of all genocides and don’t create a hierarchy where only some genocides matter and others don’t, which unfortunately is what our government is doing,” he said.
‘Antisemitism’ charge exploited, ‘never again’ can only mean ‘for everyone’
“We feel particularly strongly that the Holocaust is being exploited and anti-Semitism is being exploited hugely as a way of, I would say, closing down many people who would like to support the Palestinians in their struggle and in their suffering for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic,” Linden said.
“And I would make a very strong distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism,” she said, echoing the conclusions of thousands of Orthodox rabbis who have argued that Judaism and Zionism are actually incompatible, with some even calling the militant religious movement “satanic.”
“There is no greater insult to the Jewish victims and other victims of Nazi crimes than to use that suffering to justify further crimes,” Etkind said.
“’Never again’ can only mean one thing: never again for anyone. Not a selective ‘never again,’ where you say that the crimes of the West don’t count as genocide, whereas the crimes of our official enemies do count as genocide,” he exclaimed. “This, unfortunately, is the argument coming from the American and British governments.”
Etkind went on to chide British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his speech at the official national ceremony commemorating this occasion.
“We really shouldn’t let Keir Starmer get away with commemorating the Holocaust and claiming he’s against genocide,” he said. “He himself is directly responsible for thousands of people who’ve died in Gaza.”
“I really don’t think we should commemorate genocides with people who are committing genocides. It’s a pretty obvious moral point,” he concluded.
Israeli army’s celebrating their genocide against Palestinians ‘sadistic’
Observing aerial pictures of the destruction in Gaza, including the photo of tank tracks sketching out a representation of the Star of David in the earth, Linden found it “completely shocking” that anyone would be proud to put a Jewish symbol there amid devastation resembling “Nagasaki after the war.”
Concurring was holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, who affirmed, “This is completely shocking, and it shows that not only are they (the Israeli army) perpetrating a genocide they’re actually celebrating it, and it is sadistic.”
Jews protest Israel genocide in GazaOther Jewish groups, including the anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews of Neturei Karta, and Torah Jews commemorated the occasion, charging the Zionists with committing the same crimes Jews themselves suffered under the Nazi Holocaust, and reasserting how “being against Zionism is a fundamental part” of a devout Jew’s identity. On the same occasion last year, Jewish Voice for Peace released a video of many individuals demanding the Biden administration end the Israeli genocide in Palestine.
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