Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI, (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the misuse of Anne Frank’s name to score rhetorical points has reached new levels of nauseating outrageousness.
Just two days before the annual observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Governor Tim Walz was sharply criticized by the U.S. Holocaust Museum and many others after he compared the experience of Minnesota children coping with fear of ICE immigration officers to that of Holocaust victim Anne Frank. While there should be no doubt that Walz deserves every word of condemnation he receives, he is far from the only exploiter of Anne Frank’s memory.
Palestine Action radicals began a hunger strike in jail on November 2, and in recent days they have been in the news due to a Scottish judge’s decision to allow a legal challenge to the U.K.’s ban on the group. News reports did little to explain what Palestine Action is and what crimes its extremists committed, or their despicable use of Anne Frank’s name to attack Israel.
Yet unlike Walz, Palestine Action has faced little public backlash, despite engaging in what is arguably an even more outrageous abuse of Anne Frank’s victimhood.
Far too many in the U.K. have also seemed eager to turn a blind eye to Palestine Action's penchant for hardcore violence. This has led to serious frustration among those who have taken the time to understand what Palestine Action is really all about.
For example, Security Minister Dan Jarvis stated the following to the House of Commons on September 8: “Some of those holding placards in support of Palestine Action may not know the extent of its activities. It has conducted an escalating campaign involving intimidation and sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure. Some of its attacks have involved the use of weapons, resulting in alleged violence and serious injuries to individuals. Palestine Action’s members have been charged with violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent, actual bodily harm, criminal damage, and aggravated burglary-charges that include, in the assessment of the independent Crown Prosecution Service, a terrorism connection."
A June news report from The Telegraph stated that “members of the organisation were ‘spreading intifada,’ an Arabic word for uprising. This week, The Telegraph revealed that Palestine Action was plotting to target RAF bases across the country in a wave of attacks."
Palestine Action knows exactly what it means when it says “spreading intifada." During a now-notorious Palestine Action attack on police during a 2024 break-in, one Palestine Action militant hit a female police sergeant named Kate Evans with a sledgehammer in the back, causing a severe spinal injury. A second police officer, named Aaron Buxton, was also hit with a sledgehammer.
The Palestine Action website also features Holocaust inversion, which is a particularly disgusting form of contemporary Jew-hatred and Holocaust distortion that employs a rhetorical strategy to falsely portray Israel and Jews as Nazis, diminishes the historical Holocaust, and spreads the blood libel that Israel is committing genocide.
Kamran Ahmed is prominently featured on the Palestine Action website and is in a British jail for causing over $1.3 million in damage at an Israeli company’s research facility in South Gloucestershire in August 2024 after committing an illegal break-in. Palestine Action portrays its terrorism and property destruction as necessary to stop what it labels Israeli war crimes. The Palestine Action site quotes Ahmed as saying, “You spit on the face of Anne Frank, who wished someone would put a halt to that genocide (the Holocaust)."
Palestine Action and Kamran Ahmed did not develop their Holocaust denial on their own. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a key initiator of Holocaust distortion, Holocaust inversion, and Holocaust denial in the Arab world. In 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sharply criticized Abbas after he claimed that Israel had committed “50 Holocausts." Scholz stated that he was “disgusted by the outrageous remarks" and that “for us Germans, in particular, any relativisation of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable." Going further, Scholz said, “I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust."
From Mahmoud Abbas’s Holocaust distortion to Tim Walz’s reckless rhetoric, influential figures are abusing the imagery of the Holocaust. The way that Palestine Action exploits Anne Frank and the Holocaust is sick and must be called out.
What is the use of events such as International Holocaust Remembrance Day if these immoral instances of Holocaust denial and Holocaust inversion are being committed with growing frequency and intensity?