"Never Again" — unless it’s Gaza: How the West selectively mourns genocide
By willowt // 2025-09-09
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  • The Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles removed a post stating "Never Again can't only mean never again for Jews" after backlash, sparking debate over selective empathy in genocide discourse.
  • Western governments criminalize Holocaust denial but actively suppress criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, where leading human rights groups and genocide scholars confirm ongoing genocide.
  • Major outlets amplify Israeli talking points, casting doubt on Palestinian death tolls while internally relying on Gaza Health Ministry data — deemed credible by intelligence agencies.
  • The ICJ has repeatedly ordered Israel to halt potential genocidal acts, yet Western allies (e.g., U.S., Germany) risk "accomplice" liability by enabling the siege.
  • Gaza’s starvation, mass displacement and 50:1 civilian death ratio vs. Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks expose a systemic refusal to acknowledge Palestinian suffering as genocide.
On September 7, the Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles (HMLA) deleted an Instagram post declaring, "‘Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews" after fierce pushback from Zionist groups. The museum claimed the post — a pre-planned part of an "inclusivity" campaign — was "misinterpreted" as a comment on Israel’s war in Gaza, where over 50,000 Palestinians (80 percent women and children) have been killed since October 7, 2023. Critics, including Palestinian activist Abier Khatib, responded bluntly: "Never again is only for them." The episode lays bare a glaring contradiction: While Holocaust denial is criminalized in 30+ countries, denial of Gaza’s genocide is state-sponsored policy in the West. Governments that jail Holocaust deniers fire, imprison, or ruin those who call Israel’s actions genocidal — even as leading human rights groups, genocide scholars and the ICJ affirm the opposite.

The architecture of denial: How Gaza’s genocide is erased

Since October 7, Israel’s military campaign has razed 85 percent of Gaza’s universities, destroyed 80 percent of its schools and blockaded food, water and medicine — tactics the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) formally labeled genocide in August 2025. Yet Western media and politicians treat the term as controversial, not factual. The numbers game: A case study in distraction In May 2024, pro-Israel outlets like the Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel seized on a UN data clarification to falsely claim the Gaza Health Ministry had "halved" its estimate of women and children killed. The reality? The total death toll remained 35,000+; the UN simply specified that 52 percent of identified bodies (not all bodies) were women and children — down from earlier estimates due to the chaos of war. As Owen Jones noted, the spin was "atrocity denial" — a tactic to "take attention away from the fact that tens of thousands are being killed." Even Israel’s own intelligence agencies privately relied on Gaza’s death tolls for months, according to Vice News, while publicly dismissing them as "Hamas propaganda." The goal? "Genocide denial as it is happening becomes one of genocide’s instruments," wrote analyst Jonathan Ofir. Legal hypocrisy: The ICJ’s warnings ignored The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts, yet Israel — backed by the U.S. and Germany — defies every ruling. In August 2025, Professor William Schabas, a top genocide scholar, called South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel "arguably the strongest genocide case ever brought" and warned that Western allies risk legal liability as "accomplices." Meanwhile, seven nations (South Africa, Brazil, Namibia, Bolivia, Spain, Jordan, Turkey) have officially recognized Israel’s actions as genocide — yet Western media still prefaces reports with "Israel says" or "Hamas-run health ministry claims," a framing never applied to Ukrainian or Syrian casualty figures.

The West’s two-tiered justice: Holocaust remembrance vs. Gaza erasure

The disparity is stark:
  • Holocaust denial = crime (punishable by prison in Germany, France, Austria).
  • Gaza genocide denial = official policy (enforced by lobbies like the ADL, which admits its leader doesn’t know the legal definition of genocide).
Mouin Rabbani, writing for Middle East Eye, noted the irony: "No self-respecting journalist platforms Holocaust deniers, yet Gaza genocide denial is amplified by ‘serious’ media." The BBC’s compulsive "Israel says" framing, he argued, "communicates Israel’s talking points as if they were neutral facts." The cost of dissent Across the U.S. and Europe, protesters lose jobs, students face expulsion and academics are blacklisted for calling Israel’s actions genocidal. In contrast, German police raid Palestinian activists’ homes for social media posts, while France bans pro-Palestine protests. The message is clear: Criticism of Israel is treated as a greater crime than the crime itself.

The human toll: Starvation as a weapon, children as casualties

Beyond bombs, Israel’s siege has engineered famine. By September 2025:
  • 90 percent of Gazans faced acute food insecurity (UN).
  • 1 in 3 children under 2 suffered acute malnutrition (Save the Children).
  • 10,000+ bodies remained under rubble, uncounted (Euro-Med Monitor).
Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon who worked in Gaza, told Democracy Now! in 2024: "We’re not just seeing deaths from bombs. We’re seeing deaths from preventable diseases, from starvation, from lack of clean water — this is deliberate depopulation." Yet when South Africa filed its ICJ case, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed it as "meritless." The Biden administration, which pauses bomb shipments over "concerns" only to resume them days later, has vetoed three UN ceasefire resolutions — each time as Gaza’s death toll climbed.

"Never Again for whom?" The moral reckoning ahead

The HMLA’s deleted post was not an anomaly but a symptom of a deeper rot: a world where some lives are grievable, and others are not. As Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd wrote in The Nation: "The West does not see Palestinians as victims of genocide. It sees us as a demographic threat — one to be managed, not mourned." The question now is whether the global consensus on Gaza’s genocide — from Amnesty International to Israeli group B’Tselem — will force a reckoning. For now, the Holocaust Museum’s retreat speaks volumes: "Never Again" remains conditional, and the lesson of the Holocaust — that silence in the face of genocide is complicity — has been selectively forgotten. The only path forward? As South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, part of the ICJ team, argued: "The law must apply equally, or it is not law at all. The world cannot claim to stand for human rights while turning its back on Gaza."

Will the world answer?

The deletion of a single Instagram post may seem trivial. But in the shadow of 50,000 dead, a starving population and a legal system that bends for the powerful, it is a metaphor for the era: One where "Never Again" is a slogan, not a principle — and where the lives of Palestinians are treated as collateral in someone else’s war. The Holocaust Museum’s original post asked a question the world still refuses to answer: For whom does "Never Again" truly apply? Until that changes, the genocide in Gaza will continue — not just with bombs, but with the world’s silent consent. Sources for this article include: InformationLiberation.com MiddleEastEye.net Mondoweiss.net
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