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

Israel has a clear case to answer over its ongoing war in Gaza, says Sean O’Grady – but drawing parallels with the Nazis’s worst atrocities was more than a tweeting blunder: it was an error of judgment by the Labour MP

Suspended Labour MP Kate Osamor tweeted that Holocaust Memorial Day was a time to remember ‘recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Gaza’ (Getty Images)

Being a generous-spirited, kindly person, I’d like to think that when Kate Osamor posted on Twitter (now X) 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.