Holocaust Memorial Day

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

As we know, the Nazis created and peddled myths about Jewish people; they dehumanised them, representing them as an existential threat to ordinary German citizens. Their propaganda was massively and horrifically effective. Hate-filled words enabled their crimes. It is startling how many of the myths they created reflected the Nazis’ own sickening plans and twisted thinking. In March 1942, well after the campaigns of mass murder had begun, Hitler said that the so-called Jewish wire-pullers aimed to

“unite democracy and Bolshevism into…a conspiracy…to annihilate all of Europe”.

They peddled fear: democracy a threat from the west, Bolshevism a threat from the east, and Jewish people threatening Germany and Germans from within. Goebbels said:

“The Jew will not exterminate the peoples of Europe. Rather, he will be the victim of his own attack”.

This web of fiction was channelled into cruel and cynical propaganda, and it enabled the holocaust.

Ensuring that such fantasies would be believed by ordinary people was not easy. In 1937, teachers were instructed to

“plant the knowledge of the true danger of the Jew deep in the hearts of our youth from their childhood”—

done using children’s stories. One, “The Poisonous Mushroom”, told children that just as they should not assume they could tell the poisonous mushroom in the forest from the good ones, they could not assume that Jewish people were good and honest just because they seemed that way—truly heart-breaking.

The state-sponsored propaganda also had effect in the Nazis’ puppet states. In Estonia, many of the mass killings of the holocaust were perpetrated by local collaborators, with very little oversight by the Nazi German occupying force. In 1941, Belgian collaborators launched a pogrom in Antwerp, burning synagogues and targeting the chief rabbi. It was among the first of the events of the holocaust in Belgium. The yellow star law had not even been introduced. The wave of unrestrained violence that night was directly and immediately incited by a screening of the Nazi propaganda film, “The Eternal Jew”, one of the most evil works of propaganda ever produced. It shows the squalor and disease Jewish people were forced to live in but claimed it was something they chose. Brutal, dehumanising scenes of Jewish people crammed in the ghetto were interlaced with scenes of rats swarming from a sewer, while the voiceover says that the rats are

“just like the Jews among human beings…a race of parasites”.

The rhetoric has not gone away, in the UK or elsewhere. We have heard about the Nazi white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, their faces uncovered, some sporting machine guns, chanting, “Jews will not replace us”—a direct repetition of the Nazi lie. In an example from another continent, in October, following the debate last year in this place, the Myanmar embassy sent me a dossier, at the heart of which is a list of historical crimes attributed to the Rohingya Muslims as a group. It painted them as an existential threat to the Buddhist people of Rakhine, enemies manipulating the international community into sympathy with them. Where have we heard that before?

The language of extermination has power because the ground has been prepared. Nazis used teachers, newspapers, newsreels and the radio to do that; today, sowers of hate are equipped with the internet and social media. The propaganda of hate builds suspicion and prejudice until ordinary people believe a complete and utter lie. The history of the holocaust teaches us that if this kind of propaganda is allowed to breed and infect communities and even states, the lie—the evil myth—that those people create can be turned into murder on an industrial scale, the reality of a genocide, the holocaust: 6 million innocent men, women and children brutally and horrifically murdered.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), in his absolutely powerful and moving speech, made reference to films. There is another—Steven Spielberg’s fantastic work “Shoah” in which survivors living at the time all gave their testimony, speaking in their own words for the record. Hopefully, those words will be there for generations to come.

Twenty-one years ago, I introduced a private Member’s Bill on holocaust denial. It was a precursor to a private Member’s Bill on Holocaust Memorial Day promoted by my former hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, who came in in 1997. We did not get the Bill on denial, but we did get the Bill on memorial. I received an incredible amount of anti-Semitic abuse. For two years after, I received specially printed Christmas cards with the most vile images. The assumption was that I was Jewish. Actually, I am not; I grew up in Ilford and the mum of one of my best friends at school always thought that I was Jewish because I was always round there, but I am not.

Interestingly, after the election in 1997, I decided that I was going to do more about these issues. Then a group was established locally that campaigned against me because I supported a two-state position in the middle east. The group, which called itself the Association of Ilford Muslims—I do not have the time now, but I refer Members to my Westminster Hall debate that I held in June 2001—put out leaflets saying that I was no friend of the Muslims, I was a true friend of Israel, and I represented Tel Aviv South, not Ilford South. Subsequently, the Muslim Political Action Committee UK was set up. It has peddled on the internet and through social media anti-Semitic material, which it dresses up as anti-Zionism. It has targeted people in election campaigns, including in Rochdale, Oldham, Birmingham, Blackburn, in my constituency and elsewhere to try to get rid of people it regards as pro-Zionist MPs—mainly Labour MPs, but Conservatives as well. That has been the power of their message. It is insidious, and it is in our politics.

I am very pleased to say that next Friday in Ilford we are going to have all communities, as we always do—Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews—

[Lyn Brown]

May I just ask my hon. Friend for the venue?

[Mike Gapes]

Valentines Park in Ilford, at the holocaust memorial garden, which was established on the initiative of the former council leader—still a Conservative councillor—Alan Weinberg. We will have our annual service there, and there will be young people from many different schools, including, as in recent years, young people from a Muslim school—the Al-Noor school. We have many different people from different faiths speaking, because that is Ilford today. A century ago, Ilford had a very large Jewish community, but now we have all the different faiths, and they come together.

It is important to recognise that the poison that was put out against me all those years ago did not succeed. I am still here. More importantly, the community has rejected extremists of that kind, but they are still there. They are out on Twitter. They are out on Facebook.