World

Is Holocaust education letting today’s anti-Jewish racism off the hook? When it became compulsory in 1991, Britain was largely in remission from the ancient disease of anti-Semitism. Life was stable. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Liberal democracy was the only future — indeed, Francis Fukuyama infamously wrote how the 1990s would mark ‘the end of history’. How we Fukuyama’ed it all up. Times are now bad and bad times demand scapegoats. So anti-Jewish conspiracy theories thrive on a global scale Joseph Goebbels would lust after. It creates the conditions for the next Jewish genocide. And yet Holocaust education has barely responded. A different kind of Britain today calls for a different kind

As Holocaust Remembrance Day comes round again, actual remembrance of the Holocaust seems fainter than ever. The arson attacks on synagogues in France and Australia, the mass-assault on Israeli football supporters in Holland last autumn, or the shocking recent scenes at the Oxford Union, where Jewish speakers were taunted, booed and sworn at by the audience, are a horrible echo from history, almost unimaginable a few decades ago. At Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote, nothing was morally clearcut Much of this may be due to demographic change, as sworn enemies of Israel migrate in large numbers to the West. Yet as genuine survivors of the Holocaust die out – a year

The word ‘oligarch’ returned to the media lexicon at Donald Trump’s inauguration this week when some of the world’s biggest technology entrepreneurs took their seats while US cabinet ministers were asked to sit dutifully behind them. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg felt the need to demonstrate loyalty to Trump. The President did not insist on them kissing his ring but allotted them places as if they were school prefects listening to their headmaster on speech day. Zuckerberg could not disguise his facial discomfort. The others were better actors. Earlier this century it was Russian big business that was famous for its so-called oligarchs. Under President Yeltsin some of

The UK and Europe have had plenty of time to get to grips with the inevitable, that President Donald Trump will demand a substantial rise in defence spending. When he threw this demand at Europe the first time he served as president, the impact was like a fox entering a hen coop. Lots of fluttering wings and squawking. But in the end it worked. More Nato members met the minimum 2 per cent of GDP target for defence expenditure. Now Trump is back and the issue has become an even greater priority. Nearly three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, every member of the western alliance is fully aware that President