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Is the progressive left developing it's own form of Holocaust denial?
I came across this video on Twitter where an ITV presenter informs us that:
This reminded me of something similar I saw last year, where then Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf talked for several minutes about the victims of the Holocaust without mentioning the...distinguishing ethnicity of who exactly was most targeted.
The above examples might just be two cases of human error, although I find it hard to imagine how such an oversight could have taken place in the ITV situation. And while this sort of thing stands out less in tweet format, where you don't have many characters to begin with, it still seems strange that Angela Rayner can't find space to mention Jewish victims when Keir Starmer manages to.
Does this point to the emergence of a longer term trend? Despite proportionally being the victims of most hate crimes, Jews are too pale and too successful for the left to care about advocating for (unless it's for the purpose of making dubious claims of fascist sympathies against right-wingers). Given that for many on the progressive left being anti-Nazi is the primary sources of their moral legitimacy, I do wonder if many of them feel the need to find more sympathetic victims of the Holocaust whose future wellbeing they can claim to be the only reliable safe-guarders of.
With the broad racial nature of the progressive coalition, it's also impossible to rule out straightforward antisemitism from many of the far-left's more diverse members. I wouldn't be surprised if the ITV staff member responsible for writing the script was from a Muslim background.
It is of course impossible to divorce this issue from Israel. Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population. It could well be just too tempting to give up this fig-leaf and instead aim to eventually shift the perception of Jews towards never having been serious victims of oppression in the first place. This comes with the bonus of being able to credibly claim that Israel is the modern day equivalent to Nazi Germany.
Is there something there? Or am I reading too much into a handful of small cases?
ETA: 15 upvotes and 13 downvotes. This is most likely my most polarising post in the short time I've been active here. I wonder what that says.
I haven’t yet seen any serious attempts at Holocaust denial from the left, but on Reddit I did notice a sharp increase in the “Oy vey! Remember the Six Gorillion!” type of cracks whenever Israel tried to invoke the Holocaust as justification for the Gaza war. It was pretty shocking to me, because that type of thing would have immediately gotten you ridiculed and hard-banned on Reddit just a few years ago.
TBH overeager Israeli media and figures has caused them huge amounts of credibility damage. Reddit has noticed, lots of normies have gotten markedly more anti-Israeli and that does bring you closer to anti-Semitism.
Don't believe your lying eyes - they're using special techniques! https://x.com/Jerusalem_Post/status/1883574178407915916
Then there was the 'babies incinerated in ovens' story which doesn't seem to be real.
And then there was a government minister calling for sodomizing Hamas prisoners as part of a 'we can do anything to them' torture policy on a live, recorded debate on the protests against soldiers being charged with rape.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/
I can see how normal human beings would get really angry in a bitter war and do such things (let alone lying/justifying such things), yet it's no good when pro-Israeli voices turn around and say 'israel is the great bulwark of liberal democracy in the Middle East and you need to stand with us (give us material and diplomatic support) and share in our overflowing moral superiority.' This kind of behaviour inspires reflexive distrust in many.
Now that people can clearly see a modern-day manifestation of a very particular modus operandi- By way of deception you shall engage in war, it is worth revisiting WWII wartime propaganda as well. Given the stuff they've blatantly lied about in front of our own eyes, imagine the stories that would have been told during WWII...
That was an actual concentration camp where at a minimum tens of thousands of people were murdered. I think we can forgive one inmate for not counting them properly.
After Soviet investigators conquered the camp, they claimed 2 million were killed there between 7 gas chambers. Now today it's "tens of thousands" (not a minimum, by the way) who mostly died of disease and poor hygienic conditions. The gas chambers at Majdanek were a hoax, that newspaper article about 500,000 children being lured into gas chambers with candy and chocolate has no basis in reality whatsoever. It was wartime atrocity propaganda, only one example of a deluge that has been dumped onto the West, a psychological warfare campaign that didn't end with the war itself.
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