Sir, – Justine McCarthy’s opinion piece on Gaza is the latest example of an Irish journalist deploying Holocaust inversion to describe the desperate conditions of the Palestinians in Gaza (“We know what’s going on in Gaza, and won’t be able to say we didn’t”, Opinion & Analysis, March 22nd). Comparing the physical state of individuals to victims of Auschwitz and Belsen deliberately creates a false equivalence, language that serves merely to ramp up a growing anti-Semitic sentiment and distort the Holocaust narrative. However shocking the statistics of human destruction recorded in Gaza, the toll to date represents fewer than 10 per cent of the 430,000 Hungarian Jews who were loaded onto cattle trucks and deported to Auschwitz over a six-week period in 1944. Nearly all were gassed. Comparisons are odious but Justine McCarthy knows very well that the situation in Gaza bears no comparison whatever to the genocidal regime of Nazi Germany.
When describing the October 7th atrocities, your columnist prosaically describes the victims as having been killed. Systematic rape, torture and mutilation are literary flourishes that are unavailable for the Jewish victims of this disaster, it seems.
As a member of Ireland’s tiny Jewish community, devoted to bringing awareness of the Holocaust to a society unconnected to this history and to combatting anti-Semitism, I believe this ill-considered article represents a sinister distortion of history and reflects a failure of those of us working in Holocaust education. – Yours, etc,
OLIVER SEARS,
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Holocaust Awareness Ireland,
Dublin 2.