The Holocaust

Are you following the trial of Darren Osborne who drove a van into a crowd of worshipers coming out of a mosque in Finsbury Park? Osborne is a right wing terrorist, who killed one person and injured 9 others for no reason other than their religious affiliation.

'Right wing terrorist' is an expression we seem to be reluctant to use in the UK, and I have to admit many white right wing murderers in the USA in recent years have similarly been allowed to escape being labelled terrorists. I'll bet there are no white right wing terrorists in Trump's Guantanamo.

The UK media managed to avoid using the expression 'right wing terrorist' when Jo Cox was murdered by Thomas Mair, even though he was shouting the name of an extreme right wing organisation called Britain First as he stabbed the young mother to death. Darren Osborne was in touch with the same organisation when he planned his attack on innocent people in London.

There's no logic to this: Osborne is Welsh. How did he end up attacking people at a mosque in London? He is described by the UK press as a loner and an unemployed father of four, although during his attack he was shouting 'death to all Muslims.' Mair is Scottish. How did he come to attack a Labour MP in England?

There's a pattern here. And it has to do with us, not people like Mair and Osborne. It's about denial.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people right across Europe in the 1930s denied there was a problem with the Nazis: after all, this was the legally elected government of Germany. It just couldn't be that millions of Jewish people, Roma, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, the religious, intellectuals - in fact, anyone who didn't fit into Nazi ideology - were being kidnapped and murdered in scrupulously organised camps. Except that they were.

Denial also led the governments of the UK and the USA to refuse to accept the many refugees that were waiting on their borders to find a safe place back in the 1930s. Children without parents or any other family waited desperately for a safe place to live.

Does anyone else see a parallel between the refugees of the 1930s and those arriving now, young people waiting in Calais for permission to cross the English Channel to where their families live or waiting on the Mexican border for permission to join their parents in the USA?

I watched the Alex Salmond show on rt tonight. He commemorated the Holocaust in a way that I found very moving: letting witnesses speak for themselves. They included a man who had been pursued all round Europe by the Nazis and joined the Resistance in France only to be betrayed and sent to the concentration camps, and a woman whose mother made it through all sorts of deprivation in order to keep her children alive and then committed suicide when she found out from a newspaper that her childhood sweetheart was dead.

I understand that the leaders of Britain First are on trial right now. I don't care what for but I hope they are found guilty.

In fact, given what they are responsible for, may they rot in hell.