Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, what special maiden speeches we have heard today—I welcome them all. I make special mention of the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Sealand, which is up the road from Buckley, so we are almost neighbours.

Some of my Academy of Ideas colleagues are organising a summer school in July entitled, “Upheaval: Why Politics Needs a New Language”, so I have been thinking a lot about disputes over meanings of words. In this House of late, we have had tortuous debates about the meaning of everything including extremism, hate speech and terrorism. God knows what far right means these days, and some cannot even define what a woman is.

One word that is increasingly becoming unmoored from its meaning is “Holocaust”. The Holocaust is now used as a free-floating catch-all to describe every violent geopolitical event or even general human evil. But my plea is that words matter. Very much in the theme of the spot-on speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, we must insist that the “Holocaust” word refers to a particular unique event in history. The Nazi death camps were not generic; they were part of what camp survivor Elie Wiesel explains:

“The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet”.


Despite this, even Auschwitz—a death camp designed for the genocide of the Jews—has been turned into an all-purpose symbol of human cruelty. UNESCO describes the world heritage site as a universal

“symbol of humanity’s cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century”.

In this way, the Holocaust is being ripped out of its historical context.

Meanwhile, celebrity social justice activist Naomi Klein said the quiet bit out loud in an essay in the Guardian last year. She wrote that we are entering a new intellectual era, one in which people are openly asking if the Holocaust should

“be seen exclusively as a Jewish catastrophe, or something more universal”.

Klein goes on to argue that perhaps the Holocaust was not

“a unique rupture in European history”

but rather

“a homecoming of earlier colonial genocides”.

This anti-western decolonising lexicon should be a red flag. Remember, in the decolonisation narrative, Israel has been identified as the epitome of the colonial settler state and Jews branded as the embodiment of white supremacy who deserve our ire and Hamas’s actions.

Klein also notes that increasingly, people are demanding greater recognition for other groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis, as though this was in any way on a par with the targeting of the whole Jewish race for extermination.

Beyond the Guardian’s comment pages, it seems that, because we live in an era which treats victimhood as a virtue and confers moral authority on it, a queue of identity groups is laying some claim to the Holocaust experience. There even seems to be resentment in that, when Jewish voices demand that we recognise that it was they who were central to the Holocaust, it is treated as though they have been driven by narcissism.

Gradually, this has expanded into demands that any reference to the Holocaust must also mention victims of other international atrocities, whether it is Rwanda, colonial era massacres or, inevitably, contemporary events in the Middle East. The Islamic Human Rights Commission wrote to UK town halls asking them to boycott this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day on the grounds that it is “morally unacceptable” that Gaza is not considered a genocide alongside the Holocaust.

The problem is that wrenching the Holocaust from its historically specific context, in which all are victims, relativises and almost normalises it and renders it banal. One of the most devastating consequences is that it makes it difficult for the public, especially new generations, to understand the true nature of this industrialised act of anti-Semitic barbarism, and to even remember at all that the Jews were the targets. The consequences of this trend, what Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom, calls the “dejudification of the Holocaust”, were more than evident on Holocaust Memorial Day this year. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, reminded us that a whole swathe of commentators and politicians forgot even to mention the Jews, listing almost everyone else who was killed, apart from the victims: the Jews.

I am not suggesting such errors of omission are conscious acts of erasure. It somehow feels even more chilling that they are more likely examples of unconscious bias and careless forgetting. The problem with relativising the specific Holocaust is that it makes a mockery of “lest we forget”—and we can expect a lot more forgetting if we are not careful.

In my mind, the consequences of this dejudification of the Holocaust is that increasing numbers, especially of young people, do not even recognise when the iconography and language of historic Nazi period Jew hatred rear their ugly heads today. It is always so jolting when I talk to students involved in BDS campaigns and critique their calls for boycotts of Israeli foodstuffs as they wrench them off supermarket shelves, or their demands to blacklist and censor entire countries’ academics, artists, scientists and sportspeople. When, looking at scenes of blood-like red paint daubed on shop fronts, I mention that it echoes 1930s Germany, they look at me blankly.

I rather nervously disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Dubs—I know that is nerve-wracking—about his Elon Musk arm gesture point. Whole swathes of young activists I know have been queuing up to denounce that as a Nazi salute, seeing far-right fascists around every corner. But when the same people see starving, emaciated Jewish hostages paraded, jeered at and humiliated by Jihadi baying mobs, or when they see political activists standing outside UK synagogues screaming “baby killers” at Jews—and those activists are my tribe—suddenly, they get a blind spot and they cannot see any Nazi salutes, symbolism or anything. They do not recognise the dejudification trends of the Holocaust past and their re-emergence today, and that is worrying.

So, how do we counter this fake news of a Jew-light Holocaust? We all reach for more education, but it bodes badly for the educational boasts that the new Holocaust memorial museum next door to Parliament is going to solve it all when, shamefully, our very own Parliament banned a Holocaust memorial exhibition from Westminster Hall because it was too political. I am not Jewish, and it is exactly more politics—political solidarity—that I think we need. It is why I was so pleased that grass-roots campaigners Our Fight UK took the Auschwitz Album, Yad Vashem’s street exhibition, to Parliament Square the weekend before Holocaust Memorial Day. Young people like Miles explained that their aim was to urgently

“inform the public what a”

real

“genocide looks like”,

and centre that on the murder of 6 million Jews.

Our urgent educational and political task must include exposing the rise of the newly powerful forces which are acting to exterminate the Jews now—“Never again” is now. Yes, I mean Hamas, Iran and the Houthis, but closer to home there are the radical Islamists and their numerous apologists, who, if we are honest, are influential in many political, cultural and media institutions. Too many of us look the other way, bite our lips, and will not name and shame. It is about time we spoke up, loudly.