How Israel exploits Holocaust Remembrance Day
By
27 Jan. 2020
Monday is the 75th anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of Auschwitz, the death camp in Poland built by the German government during World War II.
The Nazis murdered more than one million people in Auschwitz, the vast majority European Jews.
The anniversary of the camp’s liberation is marked as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
These are crimes that must be remembered, to honor the victims of the European genocide and so that universal lessons can be learned and applied to the present day for the benefit of all humanity.
Sadly, however, Israel and its supporters seek to co-opt this memory for their own purposes.
Israel has “used the history of the oppression of Jews in Europe often historically and as it does today to justify many of its crimes,” Columbia University professor Joseph Massad told RT’s Going Underground program on Monday.
Last week, Israel hosted dozens of world leaders for its own gathering to commemorate the Auschwitz anniversary.
Massad pointed to how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used that gathering as an occasion to attack the International Criminal Court, which is currently investigating Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.
He also noted Israel’s effort to impose a controversial definition of anti-Semitism that equates criticism of Israel and its racist state ideology Zionism, on the one hand, with bigotry against Jews, on the other.
Watch the interview with Massad above.
Read more at http://www.defenddemocracy.press/how-israel-exploits-holocaust-remembrance-day/
