Kate Osamor is not an antisemite – but she should be sanctioned for her Holocaust tweet

Being a generous-spirited, kindly person, I’d like to think that when Kate Osamor posted on Twitter a photograph of herself at a Holocaust Educational Trust event with what she thought she was an appropriate message, she simply made a blunder, or at least a mistake. I’ve no reason to think that the solemn-looking Labour MP is some closet antisemite, nor anything but sincere when she wrote: “Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day, an international day to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the millions of other people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Gaza.” Of course, she should have known better and been rather more careful in the drafting of her remarks, to say the least. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust says the occasion – January 27 is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi extermination camp – is to “encourage remembrance in a world scarred by genocide”, and one to recall the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Sunak snapped back with an unusually hard edge: “That’s the face of the changed Labour Party.” As far as I can see, neither Ali nor Osamor have condemned Hamas’ own genocidal tendencies. One day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, it may be that Israel is shamed by war crimes, the International Court of Justice will find in a definitive, evidenced unimpeachable judgment that Netanyahu’s government is guilty of genocide against the Palestinian people, and that the war in Gaza is added to the accepted list of genocides.