The National Secular Society (and the UN) literally erase the Jews from Holocaust Memorial Day

January 27, 2024 • 8:15 am

UPDATE: The NSS says that the hamhanded tweet-changing was done without the society’s usual vetting, with a tweeter panicking and taking out the Jewish part.  They have corrected the tweet now to what’s below, which is what they should have posted in the first place:

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It’s not often that I devote a post to a single tweet, but this one deserves it. It was put up by the British National Secular Society to “commemorate” Holocaust Memorial Day—the day in 1945 when Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army.

Here’s what you see now:

But here’s the original, which I can’t find on the site. . . .

Clearly, the Holocaust, originally described as “the murder of 6 million Jewish children, women, and men” has been replaced simply by “the atrocities”, as noted by the reader below.

Now why on earth would they do that? I can think of only one explanation. Actually two, but the alternative explanation—it’s a “secular” society so it can’t name a religion—doesn’t make sense.

Working hypothesis: the word “Jewish” has become pejorative. Even to the National Secular Society!

 

 

h/t: Jez, Orli

46 thoughts on “The National Secular Society (and the UN) literally erase the Jews from Holocaust Memorial Day”

  1. Welcome to the era of context and, I suppose, “antidisinformationism”? We wouldn’t want the wrong figures to get fact-checked and shamed.

    … BTW Leftism is a religion, so if they’re truly secular, they should prove it.

  2. One possibility for the change is that the Nazis did kill others besides Jews: Roma, homosexuals, for example. Perhaps they were trying to be more inclusive.

    Of course they could have said ‘Jews and others’ in their post and accomplished the same result. Given the times that might have been a better choice.

    1. Yes, and they’ve now done that (see the correction they’ve done above). Apparently the regular vetting of tweets wasn’t done. But what’s posted now (at the top) is what they should have done in the first place.

  3. The Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews and 11 million other people including Roma, homosexuals, the disabled. It’s all horrible.

  4. [ reads latest comments ]

    Yes – how, for instance, can the terrible fate of Jews under Stalin be recognized?

    It is a gruesome thing – but the Holocaust is isolated in Nazi Germany. This is but a fraction of the antisemitism/Jew hatred and totalitarian promotion thereof in total.

    If I understand – I’m just blurting this out, been meaning to read more about it. The Holocaust is just such a strong story it gets (rightly!) lots of attention. More stories, perhaps, is what I’m looking for.

    2. That’s an excellent piece by O’Neill – thanks!

      Today, humanity’s memory of the Holocaust is assaulted less by the noisy denialism of racist scum than by the jealous claims of victim groups who want some of that glow of victimhood that they think the Jews have been keeping to themselves.

      2. Definitely.

        I’ve seen gender ideologists claim many times that there is a ‘holocaust’ against trans people. I find that deeply offensive. It seems to be the only ‘holocaust’ where everyone lives to tell the tale.

        I replied to both of the comments Jerry mentioned, and I see they each have people claiming that Gaza is the site of another holocaust. It’s horrendous when innocent people get killed, but you can’t call Gaza a ‘holocaust’ either.

    3. Umm, that piece dismisses a statement by Eddie Izzard as:

      … the nadir of victim politics: a wealthy, privileged man in a dress fantasising that, like the Jews, he’d have been marched to the gas chambers. You, a white-skinned, blond-haired bloke who is the darling of the bourgeoisie? Fuck off.

      Who’s competing in the victim Olympics now? That’s where this writer lost me, big time.

      1. I think ~all statements by Eddie Izzard in girl mode are to be dismissed. He’s a caricature of himself.

        There is a non-zero chance that the offending part of the original tweet was not “Jewish” but rather “women and men”, and the offended folks were not supporters of Gaza but supporters of Izzard etc.

  6. Another example of Institutional cowardice! Better not mention the Jews, might garner some “difficult” attention.
    They have completely devalued what International Holocaust Day remembers.

  7. The NSS are usually open and honest about naming the religions they are discussing, whether they are criticising or defending them. It’s more likely that they were referring to the Holocaust as a whole – ie including the Roma and other victims – than that they were being mealy-mouthed, still less antisemitic.

    1. Hi.
      You may well be correct about the NSS, I’m happy to accept that!

      All victims of NAZI (and their allies) racism, *racial hygiene*, social *order* etc Slavs murdered in their millions, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay, Gypsy etc etc must not be forgotten.

      However. I baulk at the notion of The Holocaust including any group apart from Jews.
      Simply because *The Jew* was the only EXISTENTIAL threat in Nazi ideology. *The Jew* as communist, International Financiers, puppeteers of Western leaders department store owners,(!) war mongers, *polluters of Aryan blood*, Hitler described himself as the Robert Koch of politics – ‘I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and fermenting agent of all social decomposition’.

      Hitler stated it clearly: The war could end in 1 of 2 ways. Victory for Germany or victory for *The Jew*.

      All these ideas are still current (look at Twitter) and anything that muddies those waters, places other ghastly murderous events on the same level have to be *contested*

      I’ll stop there…I can go on for pages!🤦

  8. Apologies for overcommenting, but I just thought :

    The perceived link between Atheism and Marxism might be at play here – I’m not sure how, exactly. But that’s for another thread!

      1. My crude outline :

        I think a general perception developed that atheism is necessarily communist. Maybe this cropped up in U. S. anti-Soviet propaganda – e.g. In God We Trust on printed money.

        Marxism is Hermetic transformation with society as god to make “man”. The image of the world is in the mind of “man”.

        That won’t work if a deistic religion is in the society – where the image of the world is outside “man”. Hence, Mao Zedong’s innovative brainwashing programs.

        But as it turns out, yes, atheism isn’t communism – and neither is communism.

        1. My point was: what has your comment about atheism and Marxism got to do with what the NSS is being accused of?

          The NSS campaigns to separate religion and the state in order to create a fairer society. It has supporters in all the major parties in Parliament, and among Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and even Muslims, as well as freethinkers. It defends the freedom of believers to practice their religion within the law, while opposing religious privilege anywhere else in society.

          In recent months it has fought against attempted Christian takeovers of further education colleges, Jewish circumcision rituals, Muslim attempts to suppress free speech, the Hindu caste system, and FGM. It campaigns for the abolition of faith schools and the 26 automatic seats in the House of Lords for CofE Bishops.

          It is neither Marxist nor atheist, and is all the more credible as a result. (Full disclosure: I have been a member for many years).

          1. Err, this isn’t going well, so I’ll try to wrap up .. whatever I started:

            I am 100% supportive of all the ideas you wrote.

            It seems the first NSS statement had “Jewish” in it, the second omitted the reference to any religion, except by association, namely “Holocaust”. “Holocaust” is, necessarily, a Nazi atrocity. Yet, and here I am less informed, communism is responsible for lots of antisemitism.

            “It [the NSS] is neither Marxist nor atheist, ”

            Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that it was. Maybe I thought they didn’t want “Secular” being associated with atheism because atheism is associated with communism.

            … See? I knew this was for another discussion! I’ll have to think it over… because I’m distracted now…

  9. Never before have my prior assumptions been so 180-ed more than by the recent antisemitism disguised as concern for “Palestine”. For a culture whose entire intellectual and cultural architecture is built on one goal: the destruction of one country: Israel. This is quite unique in the modern world. It is its backers and willful idiots in the west which have me so staggered, not the true intentions of the Palestinians themselves which I’ve known for decades. Like the stupid UN.

    Previously I was aware of the low hum of antisemitism in the Eastern Bloc, the loud background clanging throughout the Islamosphere (much worse than we think in the west, in Islamland it is the DEFAULT), and…. I noticed weirdos and crackpot fringe dwellers with tiki torches in the west. No biggie?

    No way. It is a HUGE deal as much for what it portends for Jews as the west and civilization in general. Trump’s idiotic threat to democracy got NOTHING on this.
    Those crowds, trending young and very, very female, in so many western cities…. damn.

    Even living in NYC for 9/11 didn’t shake my view of the world as much as the last few months, startling as that was. Six months prior to 9/11 I was working in the WTC as I was an equities/options trader. I live in south Manhattan/Chelsea.
    But THIS has surprised me more than any other political development.

    D.A.
    NYC
    in calmer times, with puppers: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/

      1. It doesn’t help that someone like Henry Kissinger said that had he not been born Jewish he’d be an antisemite.

        I’ve that quoted at me more than once.

    2. David, you are so correct in all that you say particular regarding Islam. Democratic countries, particularly “western” seem immune to the danger that this religion is to the world. People I have known for a long time tell me that I am wrong when I say that all muslims are a threat and are really shocked when I insist that there is no such thing as a “moderate” muslim because a moderate muslim is simply just not a muslim. The Islamic theocracy doesn’t allow for moderation, all its sects are the same, dangerous! Even the idiot king of England is ditching “Defender of The Faith” for defender of ALL faith so that muslims are not offended. I am at a loss to explain this complete absence of concern. The PM of Canada refuses to really support Israel and keeps on calling for a cease fire because of “ concern” from the Islamic Society in Canada who are indicating that they will remove donations to the Liberal Party of Canada and now Canada announces that it will welcome Palestinian refugees, the Islamic Fifth Column in my opinion but then I am just over reacting, I don’t think so!
      Why are so many completely blind to this threat? Not only blind but they actually support it as well.

    3. “Trump’s idiotic threat to democracy got NOTHING on this.” Agreed.

      Trump is a ratings whore, a grand buffoon, and a classic troll. He is no more capable of destroying democracy than he is of controlling his own mouth—no matter how many horn-wearing, tiki-torch-carrying fools might parade for him. But let’s all be afraid of the clown show; there is nothing to see over here. Assaults on free speech, calls for government and corporate collusion to censor the wrong-thinking, denials of due process. The denigration of our shared humanity, an exploitation of differences, even attempts to redefine what it means to be human—we can all be whatever we choose to be. The authoritarian demands that we accept other people’s subjective “truth,” the multiple ways of knowing, the sheer ignorance masquerading as enlightenment. The sneering self-righteousness of it all. And, now, we have before us again a version of the “Jewish question.”

      The undermining of constitutional protections, the hatred of Western culture and achievement, the jackboots’ banners of “love,” “care,” and “inclusion,” the apologies for terrorists. All part of the Trump clown show, right? Those horned-hatted imbeciles who inhabit our elite national and international institutions? Those tiki-torch-carrying fools whose influence reaches deep into the elite educational, corporate, political, legal, governmental, and non-profit world? Those paragliders in MAGA hats?

      Ah, but carry on, carry on, they truly can’t be as extreme as they seem. But those grannies in Iowa and the bubbas in Alabama . . . there we can find the danger to us all. They might not let us abort babies, and then where would our civilization be?

      We need better choices. I don’t think we will get them anytime soon.

  10. My former employer, The Indianapolis Star, ran a guest column decades ago, upon the opening of the Holocaust Museum in D.C. The writer, a respected leader of a non-partisan international relations group in the city, criticized the museum for emphasizing “Jews” when the Holocaust allegedly was just one of countless genocides in history. There have been real battles elsewhere over what I’ll call ownership of the Holocaust, and certainly over whether the genocide against the Jews was (or is) “unique.” What Jerry points out is part of this trend, unfortunately.

  11. In a not-too-imaginary galaxy: “There they go again. It wasn’t enough that they claimed to be God’s chosen people, now they want to remain Hitler’s chosen victims. Always the stars in their self-produced drama of good and evil. Oh, and then they grab land that was not theirs because some god supposedly gave it to them thousands of years ago, all the while claiming it was especially necessary to steal it when they did because, ‘Oh, look at us, the chosen victims.’ Greedy as always, they couldn’t even wait for their Messiah to arrive and give them the land. Really, these Jews are no more a people of a God who does not exist than they are victims of a Holocaust that . . .”

  12. It’s easy to imagine but difficult to know the reason the post was altered. Is there a way to ask the National Secular Society why, in fact, they erased the Jews from the post?

    (I read posts on X when I get a link, but I’ve never posted and don’t know how.)

  13. In this case, given what I know of the NSS (I was a member for several years until I left the UK) I suspect this is because someone pointed out that other groups were also targeted in the Holocaust (although of course on nothing like the same scale), and they amended it to an inclusive word that didn’t require them to make an exhaustive list of such groups. If the motive was more sinister, they wouldn’t have issued the original tweet in the first place. I could be wrong, but I’ve never seen anything from them that suggested a woke or SJW mindset.

  14. The Holocaust refers to Jews killed for the fact that they were Jews. The Nazis gratuitously killed a lot of people—something like 2.3 million Soviet Red Army POWs, for example—who collectively add up to more than 6 million. But the Holocaust is the Shoah. Not to mention Jews in the context of the Holocaust is ahistorical. The excuse that one is merely trying to be “inclusive” of other people killed by the Nazis or of other “atrocities” and genocides before and since doesn’t wash. The Holocaust explains why there needs to be a Jewish state but not a Roma state, or a homosexual state, or a Slavic state, or a communist state, or a state for mentally defective people.

    1. Doesn’t the electoral map of the 2020 presidential election suggest that the US already has states for mentally defective people? And be careful, Leslie, what ideas you put into circulation. Devotees of critical gender theory might take up the idea of a state for the “trans community”. After all, there once were references to Trans-Jordan, and New Zealand has its TranzAlpine Train.

    2. Leslie, yes that’s a good argument for a Jewish State. October 7 is a good argument for a Jewish State. But as you point out anybody can be a victim of mass murder. I think that is important to stress so maybe people won’t think “Hey, not my problem I’m not Jewish.” The more allies you have the stronger you are. And it is increasingly obvious that strength will be needed.

      1. That is the last thing I would ever think or say, but yes, your larger point is a good one and I didn’t mean to disagree with it.

        Edit: We should all be allies, even those whose ancestors didn’t have mass murder inflicted on them.

  15. While not denying the role of holocaust envy in today’s victimhood culture, I should point out a different, earlier case of avoiding mention of “Jews” in connection with the holocaust. Laurel Leff’s “Buried by the Times’ (2005) pointed out exactly this editorial policy at the NYT in reporting on the holocaust while it was happening!. As one reviewer mentions: “How could you possibly tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without mentioning Jews? But The Times did.” During WWII, the NYT’s mysteriously unspecific language was probably designed to avoid disturbing the sensibilities of goyim. Something like that may be one reason for these invocations of the holocaust without mentioning its principal victims.

  16. We should, as this post notes, be careful not to turn “Holocaust” into a general term that obscures that THE Holocaust was an attack on Jews. But we should also be careful in references to Palestinians, and not treat that word as if all Palestinians are Muslims. There is a substantial population of Palestinian Christians.

  17. Is the term “holocaust” to be specifically understood as applying to Jews only (let alone to Jewish children)? I’m actually seeing definitions for either the narrow or the broader sense, clearly influenced by the opinions of their writers.

    I wholeheartedly agree with the tenor of several replies above that there were millions of victims in addition to Jews. This makes the edit eminently sensible.

    To lay sole claim to the horrors of the concentration camps alienates other survivors and their descendants.

  18. This day just keeps getting more and more depressing. Thanks to everyone for your comments and links.

  19. If you go to the website of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to a page entitled ‘ Holocaust Memorial Day 27th of January’ it says there that:

    ‘Holocaust Memorial Day is the day for everyone to remember the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, and in the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur’.

    So maybe the National Secular Society, rather than trying to exclude Jewish people, was trying to include all those others who have also died in genocides.

  20. Given the current downward trajectory of stupidity of many organizations I think it will only be a couple of years before Holocaust statements will start to claim that it was only the occasional Jew who was systematically murdered but it was mainly “Insert name of favourite victim of oppression here”.

    History is being rewritten and it is utterly infuriating.

    1. As eyewitnesses die away…. In my 1950’s childhood in the U.S., the evil was real as it had only been ten years since the discovery and liberation of the camps. Most men in our neighborhood fought in WW2 and we had Holocaust survivors with their numbers tatooed on their forearm in our Jewish community. Summers and a short sleeve shirt gave us kids stark reminders. It could not be ignored, rewritten, or die away then.

      1. I am a generation junior to you, Jim, but I saw similar reminders. My father was a police officer in Skokie when I was a boy, and he recounted to me an incident or two when, upon pulling over a person for a traffic violation, he walked up to the car to see that tattooed arm at the door. The ticket was never written. That time was also a good lesson in what the ACLU once was and the freedom of speech that they once defended. Perhaps all we can do is keep the memories alive and fight for what those men and women once fought for.

  22. i agree with comments on this stance of pulling in all people and think it’s a good start to the humanitarian viewpoint. The Jewish people however need to be recognised for their disproportionate suffering under the Nazi regime. That is history and true but the Nazis didn’t stop there.
    If antisemitism is to stop, their history and culture needs to be assimilated and normalized to get away from pathetic conspiracies, deflate Islam’s obsession, so there is nothing extra special about being Jewish, like when an individuals says, I’m Tibetan, Danish, or Kenyan. No over the top add-on’s attached.
    Just Jewish people with a history and culture like all other ethnicity groups on the planet.
    The Russian (Stalin) and Chinese history is not so friendly either. At a short look, Moa managed wasting up to 45 million people, is not any of this worth learning from? Is it, not the West so who cares? The perils of ideology… apparently not and I’m not holding my breath.

    1. Definitely agree on deaths under Stalin and Mao. But the current governments of Russia and China don’t want to discuss it.

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