The United Nations designated January 27 as international Holocaust memorial day in 2005, marking the date Soviet troops liberated the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland.
There is a definite counter-move by anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers on this day, not just to deny the Holocaust, but to link it with the recent war in Gaza. Here’s a quick tour of Holocaust Denial Memorial Day:
Let’s start in Iran, where else?
TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran’s government spokesman on Tuesday branded the Holocaust a “big lie” created to place the Islamic republic’s arch-foe Israel in the Middle East, the state IRNA news agency reported.
“The Holocaust is a concept coming from a big lie in order to settle a rootless regime in the heart of the Islamic world,” Gholam Hossein Elham told a conference on Gaza in central Iran’s religious city of Qom.
The Vatican:
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican said Monday that comments by a recently rehabilitated bishop that no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust were unacceptable and violate Church teaching.
In a front-page article, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano reaffirmed that Pope Benedict XVI deplored all forms of anti-Semitism and that all Roman Catholics must do the same.
The article was issued amid an outcry from Jewish groups that Benedict last week lifted the excommunication of a traditionalist bishop, Richard Williamson, who has denied that 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II.
Over to Sweden.
Jpost: A northern Swedish city has decided to cancel a planned Holocaust Memorial Day torchlight procession due to the recent IDF offensive in Gaza, it was reported Tuesday. The official reason given for the decision, made by the municipal board and local church in Lulea, was safety concerns, but Bo Nordin, a clergyman and spokesman for the church, cited the war in Gaza. “It feels uneasy to have a torchlight procession to remember the victims of the Holocaust at this time,” Nordin told Swedish National Radio. “We have been preoccupied and grief-stricken by the war in Gaza and it would feel just feel odd with a large ceremony about the Holocaust.”
Swedish police however did allow a violent breakup of a pro-Israel rally by pro-Palestinians:
Canada
Tori Cheifetz, an intern at the Post, writes: Holocaust comparisons are definitely becoming more commonplace in the media, according to Mike Fegelman, executive director of HonestReporting Canada (HRC), a pro-Israel media watchdog. “These kind of comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany have no place in Canadian media or any international news media for that matter,” Fegelman said. He was speaking in the wake of the release Sunday of the Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism report, showing that Israeli-Nazi comparisons and anti-Semitic incidents had reached a two-decade high. HRC has mounted a campaign against Toronto Sun columnist and foreign correspondent Eric Margolis for comparing Operation Cast Lead in Gaza to the Nazi’s “final solution” against the Jews.
Scotland
Jonny Paul writes: A Scottish group is hosting what it claims to be a Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration on Sunday along with a Hamas supporter who justifies suicide bombings. Holocaust survivors lay a wreath during a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, an anti-Israel fringe group, is hosting an event titled “Resistance to Genocide and Ethnic Cleaning: from Europe in the 1940s to the Middle East Today” to mark the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day.
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