Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to say a few words about the learning centre. Like other noble Lords who have spoken before, such as the noble Lords, Lord Goodman and Lord Mann, my main concern is about the content. Holocaust education in this era faces two key challenges. The first, as others have remarked, is that we are going through a period of rising anti-Semitism. This is a fact that should give us all pause to reflect on how effective our education about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism has been. How can anti-Semitism still be on the rise, and how do we explain the fact that it is rising among people who consider themselves progressive, and who may often be genuinely progressive in a lot of ways? If we do not use this occasion to ask ourselves these difficult and uncomfortable questions, we risk building a monument to our failure.

While Cynics may have been wrong to think that virtue cannot be taught, it is true that some virtues are more difficult to teach than others, and freedom from anti-Semitism is one of them. As the Oxford physicist David Deutsch suggested, the reason may be that we too often tend to think of anti-Semitism as another type of racist hatred or xenophobia. Anti-Semitism may cause both those things, but it is fundamentally different. Professor Deutsch argues:

“It is a more dangerous moral pathology, centred on the need to preserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews for being Jews”.


This moral pathology has emerged over centuries and not just in the Christian West, by the way. The reason why so many of our Jewish friends and colleagues consider certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic is not because they think that it is anti-Semitic to criticise Israeli policies, but because some of those criticisms are so disproportionate, absurd and obsessive that what drives them is precisely the irrational impulse to want to find some justification for violence against Jews. Unless people are made aware of this distinctive and uniquely irrational mode of thinking and acting that is the essence of anti-Semitism, many people, including some of the highly educated, will continue to fall victim to it.

The second challenge for the learning centre is another contemporary malaise: conceptual overreach. Another Oxford professor, John Tasioulas, has argued that this is a particular form of degradation of the public sphere, whereby core ideas—such as human rights, the rule of law and now genocide—are put through

“a process of expansion or inflation”

in the mistaken belief that expanding their meaning and overusing them is a form of progressive politics. It is not; it is the opposite. It blurs important moral distinctions, discredits ideas and corrupts public argument. How will the learning centre teach a new generation about the genocide of European Jewry at a time when the word “genocide” is losing its meaning and being instrumentalised even in the most august international fora? In fact, it is perversely and cruelly being used to find excuses for—guess what?—violence against Jews.

Last April I was privileged to be invited by the Rwandan Government to attend, in Kigali, the 30th commemoration of the genocide of the Tutsis. I began my career in the late 1990s interviewing Rwandan exiles in Nairobi, where the community included survivors of the genocide but also some perpetrators. The latter, thankfully, were dispatched to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda shortly thereafter and convicted. I was impressed by the way Rwanda commemorates the genocide and educates about it. No one made grotesque comparisons with other situations. There was no mission creep, and no attempt to use that occasion as an opportunity to raise other causes, however worthy. They were focused on the commemoration of that tragic event, and theirs was a genuine and sombre attempt to understand how it could happen.

Looking at the objectives of the Holocaust Memorial Charitable Trust did not allay my concerns about conceptual overreach. The objectives include goals such as promoting human rights throughout the world, promoting equality and diversity, and furthering charitable purposes relating to persecution more generally. All are wonderful goals, but a learning centre that seeks to teach everything will teach nothing. I echo the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Austin, to the Minister, who I hope can reassure us that there will be no such mission creep, that the learning centre will maintain focus and that it will have the moral courage to reach out to those communities in our society where we know that anti-Semitism is prevalent and where the need for Holocaust education is the greatest.