Mick Hartley

After yesterday's refections on the steady removal of any mention of Jews from Holocaust Memorial Day comes this, from the Times:

A Holocaust memorial exhibition has been banned from parliament for being too political even though the authorities have allowed pro-Palestinian activists to campaign in the same space….

A committee that advises the Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, said that the Vicious Circle exhibition would not fall within the criteria of being politically neutral. That ruling was questioned after it emerged that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) was allowed a stall in Westminster Hall in July last year. Supportive MPs were seen by witnesses speaking to members of the public who approached the stall….

The Vicious Circle installation was created by Marc Cave from the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. It tells the story of anti-Jewish pogroms from Kristallnacht in 1938 to Baghdad in 1941 and then October 7 2023.

Cave has already secured spots for the exhibition at the European parliament in Brussels and the Germany parliament in Berlin. But when he applied to bring it to Westminster Hall, for a week that would have included Holocaust Memorial Day, on January 27, his application was rejected.

“It’s one of the great tragedies, I think, of the social media era, and my fear is that by parliament being perhaps more ready to house one side of the argument but not the other — that’s kind of dangerous,” Cave told Times Radio.

"Kind of dangerous" is putting it mildly.