JNS
Former “MSNBC” host Mehdi Hasan drew criticism for saying that the “genocide” in Gaza was worse than the Holocaust.
Those who say that Gazans are “holocaust survivors,” having endured Israel’s defensive war against the Hamas terror organization, are to be “widely condemned,” according to Sara Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Falsely comparing the Holocaust to Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attack is an outrageous weaponization of the genocide of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, who systematically murdered six million Jews,” Bloomfield told JNS. “It’s antisemitic, inaccurate, highly offensive and must be widely condemned.”
One social media account has received 3.2 million views for a post claiming to be a “holocaust survivor” of war in Gaza. Another post from a “survivor of the Gaza holocaust” garnered 525,000 views, and a post from an artist wearing a keffiyeh, referring to “my survival from this holocaust,” received 40,000 views.
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who created a media company called Zeteo, wrote in a since-deleted social media post that “one of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of previous genocides—Rwanda, even the Holocaust—is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over. They were shunned, deradicalized, prosecuted.”
Deborah Camiel, senior vice president of communications at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that Hasan “based his outrageous comment comparing the Oct. 7 war to the Holocaust on the canard that Israel’s military response to Hamas atrocities was a genocide.”
That claim is a “tired inversion widely used by antisemites, who try at every opportunity, no matter how inexact or intellectually lazy the comparison is, to portray Jews as Nazis,” Camiel said. “Israel’s war of self-defense was not against the Palestinian people but the vicious terrorist group Hamas.”
“As Hasan well knows, Hamas, itself a group with a genocidal charter, embeds itself among Palestinian civilians, in private homes, mosques, schools and hospitals, purposefully exposing them to terrible harm,” the Wiesenthal Center spokeswoman told JNS. “It is clear today that most of the world agrees that it is this maniacal jihadist group that should be shunned, eradicated and prosecuted.”
Hasan stated that he deleted the post since he “was trying, clumsily, to make the point that Holocaust deniers are (rightly) condemned and ostracized in the West while Gaza genocide deniers remain leading members of our political and media establishments.”
“There was no offense meant to the Jewish community, and I abhor and condemn all genocides,” he stated.
That post drew a fresh round of criticism. “Falsely portraying what happened in Gaza as a ‘genocide’ is an attempt to obscure the inability of Muslim-Arab elites to operate in a world of cause and effect,” stated Dexter Van Zile, of the Middle East Forum.
Palestinians “start wars they can’t win and blame their enemies for the consequences,” Van Zile said. “Your false narrative of Israel perpetrating a genocide consigns another generation of young people to another round of suffering. Eventually, the genocide narrative will be discredited. It will happen when a non-Jewish democracy fights a war for its survival.”
