Milan Kundera famously observed that “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In the matter of the war on the Jewish people, the struggle of memory against lying would be more like it.
The lies have proliferated rapidly in the wake of the Hamas massacres of October 7. “To combat such pernicious lies,” the editors of Mosaic note, “the All-Party UK-Israel Parliamentary Group, led by the eminent British historian Andrew Roberts, recently issued a comprehensive report of what happened on that terrible day. It documents, in painful detail, the massacres at each and every site in southern Israel, and identifies each of the victims.”
Roberts writes in the report’s foreword:
Holocaust denial took a few years to take root in pockets of society, but on October 7, 2023, it took only hours for people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken place. Hamas and its allies, both in the Middle East and equally shamefully in the West, have sought to deny the atrocities, despite the ironic fact that much of the evidence for the massacres derives from film footage from cameras carried by the terrorists themselves—though of course there is also much more from many other sources, as this report delineates.
We have allowed no embellishment of the facts, which are painful and distressing enough as they are. We have gone out of our way not to include information that we suspect is true but cannot be double-checked. We have concentrated on the two days between the unleashing of the assault on the morning of October 7, 2023, and the liberation of the last of the kibbutzim, and we have documented each of nearly 1,200 deaths so that future generations will not be misled about the extent and horror of the massacre.
As a Gentile, I believe that it is vital to prevent the emergence of another, more modern version of Holocaust denial, namely October 7 denial. After the Holocaust, non-Jews like me owe the Jewish people nothing less. . . . Our report will hopefully permit people to see such denials and justifications for what they really are: a perversion of reason and rejection of human decency.
The text of the report is accessible here. In a Times of Israel post, my friend Eric Lipman calls it “the most important report of the year.”
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