A key injunction from the World War II Jewish Holocaust is to “bear witness” and, for the last three decades, I have been researching “deaths from violence and deprivation”.
However, for the last two decades of my 81 years, I have been rendered largely “invisible” by the mainstream media’s extraordinary censorship.
Below is a letter I sent to mainstream Australian-based media editors (and copied to all federal and Victorian Members of Parliament). It is extremely unlikely to be published by them.
Genocide is defined by Article 2 of the United Nations Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
A holocaust implies the killing of a huge number of people and was first used in World War II (WWII) to describe the Bengali Holocaust, in which 6-7 million Indians starved to death under British rule.
Seventeen European countries, plus Canada and Israel, have laws criminalising denial of the WWII Jewish Holocaust, in which 5-6 million people were killed, the crime including substantial diminution of the extent of the atrocity.
However Australia belongs to the all-European, 35-member International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), that is holocaust denying by ignoring all WWII holocausts other than the WWII Jewish Holocaust.
In their dishonest speeches to parliament about the events of October 7, 2023, both Labor and the Coalition MPs railed about “terrorism”, “antisemitism” and “the Holocaust”. But they made no mention of any Palestinian deaths, let alone an expertly estimated 872,000 Gazan “deaths from violence and deprivation” over the last two years — 36% of the pre-war population of 2.4 million. Twenty eight per cent of the pre-war population of Jewish Hungarians were killed by the Nazis.
[Gideon Polya is a World War II Jewish Holocaust-impacted, anti-racist author and scientist.]