If You Can’t Condemn Hamas, Don’t Pretend to Mourn the Holocaust

Those who minimize the horror of October 7 while quoting “Never Again,” have learned nothing at all.

If you can’t condemn Hamas for unleashing the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, then you should stay silent this Yom HaShoa—Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Because you are not remembering.
You’re performing.
And frankly, you’re not even doing that well.
You are just pretending to care.

It’s been 565 days since October 7, 2023, when Hamas—the U.S.-designated terrorist organization—slaughtered 1,200 Israeli civilians, abducted 250 people, and livestreamed the carnage. They burned families alive. They raped women next to their dead friends at a music festival.

And people are out here like, “Okay, but resistance is justified…something-something…settler-colonialism actually…”

That doesn’t make you sound smart. It makes you a gaslighter to Jewish grief.

When you ignore the horrors of October 7th, you are not contextualizing. You are excusing.

This wasn’t resistance. It was terrorism on a scale we haven’t seen since the Nazis.

And yet, in academic circles, activist spaces, and major cities across the Western world, that truth is minimized, distorted, or outright denied.

How can you “never forget” if you refuse to remember what just happened?

If you dismiss and distort the reality of Israeli pain, then you’ve learned nothing from the past.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is not a time for theoretical frameworks about empire and asymmetry that somehow always stop short of acknowledging Jewish pain.

The Holocaust Didn't Begin With Auschwitz. It Began With Laws.

You think the Nazis just woke up one day and were like, “Let’s build gas chambers?” No. They made it boring first. That’s how fascism works.

If you want to understand the origins of the Holocaust from an anti-racist lens, learn about the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped German Jews of all rights, even making sex between Jews and non-Jews illegal.

They made Jews a separate, lesser class under the law.

If this kind of segregation sounds familiar it’s because it was inspired by Jim Crow laws. As Isabel Wilkerson writes in her phenomenal book Caste, the Nazis saw the American South as a legal blueprint for racial purity.

These laws which dehumanized and ostracized Jews were later expanded to include Romani and Black people under Nazi Germany. Because once you normalize racial hierarchy, it metastasizes pretty quickly.

And if you’re wondering why more Jews didn’t leave, here’s your answer: they tried. But Hitler imposed the Reich Flight Tax, a law that stripped 90% of your wealth if you fled.

In other words: they were trapped. By design.

That’s a reminder for all the schmucks who say Jews were “sheep to the slaughter” or if they only had a little more “Jewish pride” they could’ve stood up to Hitler and won. That’s not how any of this worked.

A Stat I Post Every Year

There are nearly 6 billion more people alive today than there were in 1939, but still 1 million fewer Jews.

That’s the cost of 6 million.

That’s why we remember.

Six million is an unfathomable number to comprehend. Two-thirds of European Jews were systematically murdered—yet nearly half of Americans and about 2/3 of millennials and gen z don’t know this.

How big is 6 million?

1.5x LA

2x Chicago

4x San Diego

7x San Francisco

8x Denver

9x Boston

13x Miami

120 football stadiums

The entire island of Singapore.

More than all of Ireland.

More than all of Norway.

More than all of Denmark.

More than all of Finland.

If you honored just one Jewish victim per day, it would take 16,438 years to name them all.

Six million is not just a statistic. It’s a shit-your-pants number when you actually think about it.

Of those 6 million, 1.5 million were children.

Also, a common misperception:

The Holocaust wasn’t just a German atrocity. It was a global one. Hitler’s war machine invaded or occupied at least 25 countries and territories, including:

Countries the Nazis invaded
1. Austria 🇦🇹 Mar 12, 1938
2. Czechoslovakia March 15, 1939
3. Poland 🇵🇱 Sep 1, 1939 (WWII begins)
4. Denmark 🇩🇰 Apr 9, 1940
5. Norway 🇳🇴 Apr 9, 1940
6. France 🇫🇷 May 10, 1940
7. Belgium 🇧🇪 May 10, 1940
8. Netherlands 🇳🇱 May 10, 1940
9. Luxembourg 🇱🇺 May 10, 1940
10. Channel Islands (UK) 🇬🇬🇯🇪 June 30, 1940
11. Greece 🇬🇷 Apr 6, 1941
12. Yugoslavia Apr 6, 1941
13. Soviet Union June 22, 1941 (Operation Barbarossa)
-Lithuania 🇱🇹
-Latvia 🇱🇻
-Estonia 🇪🇪
-Ukraine 🇺🇦
14. Italy 🇮🇹 Sept 8, 1943
15. Monaco 🇲🇨 Sept 9, 1943
16. Albania 🇦🇱 September 10, 1943
17. Tunisia 🇹🇳 November 9, 1942 - May 13, 1943
18. Hungary 🇭🇺 Mar 12, 1944 (was previously a German ally)
19. San Marino 🇸🇲 Sept 1944

If your land had Jews, the Nazis said, “Great! We’ll ruin that too!”

The Holocaust spanned borders because hate travels fast when the world lets it.

So what does this have to do with today?

Everything.

Not to be dramatic but

• 59 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza. Most of them in underground tunnels.

• Governor Josh Shapiro’s home was targeted by an arsonist over Passover for his support for Israel.

• Synagogue attacks have risen across Europe.

• “Globalize the intifada” is chanted on college campuses like it’s a human rights slogan—not what it actually is: a call to globalize the killing of Jews.

Never Again Means You Actually Have to Give a F*ck

We are not living in the 1930s. But we are living in a time where the lessons of the 1930s are being ignored, erased, and manipulated.

You don’t get to mourn six million Jews while rationalizing the murder of 1,200 more.

You don’t get to remember the Holocaust while ignoring the people still being held in underground tunnels by a terrorist group.

You don’t get to be a resistance fighter if you can’t name the actual terrorists.

Never Again means learning from the past by honoring the present.

Never Again means Never Again, even when your politics get messy.
It means you remember even when everyone else is trying to forget.

Because when you’re Jewish, every day is Holocaust Remembrance Day.