 Felly, we will now move on to the next item of business, and the next item of business is a member's business debate on motion 11789, in the name of Paul O'Cain, on Holocaust Memorial Day 2024. This debate will be concluded without any questions being put and I would ask those members who would wish to speak in the debate to please, prior to the request of speaker buttons, and I call on Paul O'Cain to open the debate to Mr O'Cain. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. It is a privilege to open today's debate to Mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2024 and, indeed, to follow the debates in previous years led by Jackson Carlaw and Fergus Ewing, and I believe that it is showing the strong cross-party commitment to this motion in Parliament. It remains now, as ever, incredibly important to come together to pause, reflect and remember those six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, alongside millions of others, including Roma and Sinti people, disabled people and LGBT people. We also call to mind the millions of others who lived through and survived the Holocaust, but who lost everything—family, dignity, health and home. Now, as in years gone by, we recommit ourselves and our efforts to the statement never again, but we know that all too tragically humanity has not lived up to that statement since the Holocaust, in many places across the globe—Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur—so we remember those people as well today. Never again is not just a phrase that should apply to genocide, but also to the hate and persecution that surrounds the horrific acts of mass murder that we have seen. The theme developed by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for this year's commemorations is the fragility of freedom. The horrors of the Holocaust, indeed the horrors of genocides in humanity's collective history do not come from nowhere. Those acts of targeted mass murder are preceded by an erosion of freedoms to control populations and to make the terrors that follow easier to perpetrate. In the lead-up to the Holocaust, Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis had many of their freedoms and rights restricted and removed. The freedom to study, to work and live wherever you want, Jews were removed from educational establishments, had their businesses attacked and destroyed and were forced into ghettos. The freedom of self-identity, of religion, of marriage, Jews became a defined class for discrimination in the Nuremberg laws, which restricted who they could marry. The freedom to engage in leisure and other activities as Jews were banned from cinemas, theatres and sports facilities. Those are all freedoms that we often take for granted in the modern era and, although many of us cannot conceive of losing a single one of those freedoms, they are fragile and, in recent times, I think that our world has become a more uncertain place in this regard. It is not just the freedoms of groups targeted by those carrying out genocidal acts that are restricted but, frequently, the freedoms of all people are limited to prevent people speaking out. In the Holocaust, the targeting of opposition politicians, journalists and dissenting voices of the Nazi regime ensured that information control and propaganda in the population would stop people speaking out and opposing atrocities. It is a pattern that we have seen repeated in other genocides, such as that in Rwanda, where the infamous hate of radio, television, Libra, De Mules Collins spewed hatred against the Tutsis to lay the ground in propaganda for what would follow. Ultimately, of course, the Holocaust and other crimes of genocide result in the loss of that fundamental freedom, the freedom to live. It is important now more than ever that, for survivors and people born after the Holocaust and other genocides, to recognise that just because the atrocities have stopped and society begins to normalise, freedom does not always fully return and survivors have to live with the reality of what they have experienced. Growing up in East Renfrewshire, I have had the privilege of meeting and hearing first hand from a number of survivors. Their children now carry on the work of telling their story because so few survivors now remain. On Monday evening at the East Renfrewshire commemoration event, I had the privilege to once again hear the story of Marianne Grant, who survived a number of camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. Marianne was a painter who literally painted for her life, including being forced to record images of the horrendous experiments of the angel of death, Dr Joseph Mengele. Her story, I think, is the very embodiment of the fragility of freedom. For those who have lived through those times, freedom, as it once was, does not fully return. People lose livelihoods and homes. They will often have no choice but to move to new countries, as so many Jewish people have done. People are restricted by the mental and physical trauma of what they have experienced. It can be hard to trust—understandably, after all that has been experienced—that it is hard to trust people in your new country, to trust that your freedoms will be guaranteed and to trust that you have complete freedom. For many groups that say and change stigma and hate that is drilled into people through those periods, it remains that their freedom is less than that of their fellow citizens. It would not be for many decades later, for example, that gay men who are imprisoned by the Nazis and around the world would gain full rights and stop being viewed as criminals. The legacy of hate does not just hurt those who survived, but members of persecuted groups were born long after. In the context of the Holocaust, Jews in our communities, including any Shreve for Shire, still have to face the vile words and actions of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denialism. For many, the lessons of the Holocaust, the ways in which Jews and others were victimised, were othered, were expelled, have still not been learned. It is incumbent upon all of us, as representatives of the people of Scotland in this Parliament, to stand up and to recommit to combat anti-Semitism, racism, hatred and attacks on people's freedoms without equivocation. This year, let us once again redouble our focus on predicting those fragile freedoms, watching our own words and deeds, watching the words and deeds of others, whether in our community or in this place or elsewhere, so that we do not allow the fragile freedoms to shatter any further. We must ensure that we, as one voice, say never again and that we must have a Scotland where all people can walk free of hatred and fear. I thank Paul O'Kane for bringing this important debate to the chamber. Often, we say those words at the start of members' debates on all manner of subjects, but in this case it is especially true, critically so, given the importance of the subject, which cannot be underestimated. Around 20 years ago, my wife and I visited Auschwitzham in the south of Poland. Of course, we were not in English as Auschwitz, and we took my teenage daughter to have a look at witness the inhumanity that occurred on that site, which no one could fail to be moved by. The memorials and industrial scale of the slaughter that took place there and elsewhere in concentration camps, but also in towns and villages across Europe are events that saw the murder of 6 million Jews and millions from other groups in horrific circumstances. The horrific events of the Holocaust are perhaps the most significant example of genocide in modern times, but the act of genocide is unfortunately nothing new in human history and continues to this present day. It has been estimated that 43 genocides have potentially occurred between 1956 and 2016 resulting in perhaps 50 million deaths. In this Holocaust memorial day, it is important that we also recognise other genocides that have taken place in Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia and here in Europe in Bosnia in the 1990s. I visited Bosnia in 1995 as part of an aid convoy with Edinburgh, directed an organisation that has delivered humanitarian aid to many war zones and nations affected by crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, their work is still badly needed. The theme of Holocaust memorial day this year is freedom as fragile. Commemoration, of course, means nothing if we do not truly learn the lessons and take steps where we see the need to stand against genocide wherever it occurs. That, of course, is the primary lesson. That can happen anywhere to any group. There is always that risk. In the words of Dutch, Jew and Holocaust survivor, Hale Mayer, never again for anyone. In 1948, the UK General Assembly adopted the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which defined genocide for the first time as any of the five acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Those five have been killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births and forcibly transferring children out of the group. A key point being that victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group not randomly. The international court of justice has a key role to play here in assessing cases that may constitute the crime of genocide. Important work continues to this very day. In combating genocide, we must always be aware of how it starts, dehumanising language, comparing whole groups of people to animals, calling for extermination, mass slaughter or collective punishment. Those are the signs that we need to be alert to expose and combat whenever they arise. In Rwanda, the Tutsi people were described as cockroaches. More recently, ethnic groups have been described as human animals. Insightment to genocide is recognised as a separate crime under international law, a crime that does not require genocide to have taken place to be prosecutable. Those who call for the whole stale destruction of a people, their forcible transfer or collective punishment, are guilty of that crime. The 10 stages of genocide have been identified as classification, symbolisation, discrimination, dehumanisation, organisation, polarisation, preparation, persecution, extermination and then denial. Awareness of how the process works allows us to recognise it and call it out. We must be alert to challenge all forms of hatred and prejudice, including antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism. In conclusion, nothing is more important than the need to expose and root out the causes that lead to genocide to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust that begins with an understanding that that can happen to any group anywhere. At this time of year, we also take time to celebrate our national poet and, while those two are often not linked, it is perhaps worth reflecting on his words that, man to man, the world wash or brothers be for all that, a recognition that people of any ethnic group are not animals is a good place to start. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Having participated in or observed these debates for 17 years, it is difficult at times to think how to bring a fresh perspective to it. I congratulate Paul O'Kane on the contribution and speech that he has made in his debate today. It is a privilege that it has been to work with him since his election in 2021 and with others to ensure that there is a genuine cross-party approach to the way in which we remember and ensure that the country remembers the events of the Holocaust. I congratulate Ben Macpherson on the very successful event that he held this week on yet another example of the fear that the Nazis engenderd and which led to so much loss of life. I wonder, colleagues, when you put your Christmas decorations up, I am quite late in the day. I still have a real tree, so it went up this year on Saturday 16 December, as it very often does the weekend before the week of Christmas. Bear that mind in date, 16 December, 19 2023, because I saw last year the latest adaptation of the movie All Quiet in the Western Front. I think that many of us may, at some stage or other, have seen a version of All Quiet on the Western Front. It is a phrase that has worked its way into the common language. All Quiet in the Western Front, of course, was originally a book written by Eric Murray Remark, a veteran of the First World War. It sold 2.2 million copies in its first 18 months. It was a book about the futility of the loss of life in the First World War, but it was detested by the Nazis. The author of the book found that it was banned, burned and crystal-naked. He had to flee the country. He moved to the United States. He had a very glamorous life, actually. He had affairs with Hedy Lamar with Marlena Deutrach. He married Paulette Goddard. They left £20 million to the commemoration of events of the Holocaust. Back home, the Nazis arrested his sister. In the judgment of the court, they said this. Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach. You, however, will not escape us. On 16 December 1943, she was beheaded by the Nazis for the crime of being the sister of a brother who wrote a book about the First World War that the Nazis detested, The Fragility of Freedom. In the village of Obertsdorf, in a book that I would commend to everybody, a village in the Third Reich, you can read about how one of the world's first tourist resorts, skiing tourist resorts, which benefited from massive international tourism, including Jewish tourism, found an insidious little clique in that village, imposed the will of the Nazis to ban the Jewish community, how there was a resistance throughout, a subtle resistance throughout, but how people there found themselves to be persecuted, arrested, shot for any collaboration or effort to save Jewish people, The Fragility of Freedom. I referred in the debate last year to Danny Finkelstein's magnificent book, Hitler, Stalin, Mun and Dad, about his grandfather, Alfred Wiener, the inspiration for the Wiener Library, which in fact supplied the exhibition that Ben Macpherson hosted this week. And his grandparents, Alfred Wiener and his grandmother Greta, who were in Germany, and his grandparents, Dolo and Louisa Finkelstein, who were in Poland in the remarkable journey that both of them had through Nazi journey. And the heroic efforts of his grandmother to save his mother and her two sisters as they moved through the concentration camps and to Bergen Belsen. In Bergen Belsen, she did everything as a grandmother to save her three daughters. And in the end, they got out, they got out on the near midnight on the 24th of January, the Wieners crossed the border to Switzerland into freedom. Greta had triumphed, she had protected her girls through the long years of Nazi occupation and terror, kept them alive through the valley of death, given them every last crumb of food and seen them to safety. In New York, where Alfred had managed to go, Camille Aroreski, based in Switzerland, had learned of the perspective exchange and informed him. Now he received this telegram from the Red Cross. Dr Alfred Wiener, your wife Margarita Wiener and the children have escaped from Germany and are now in Switzerland. And then there was a final bit. Your wife died on arrival due to weakness. She had done and given everything she could to save her daughters in Bergen Belsen and was so weakened by the experience, she literally died on the train as they escaped from that climate, the fragility of freedom. Presiding officer, whether it was Elfrida Schultz, whether it was the community of Obertsdorf, the Wieners or the Philkensteins or the example Marion Grant gave, where her daughter talked again about Primo Levi saying that if it can happen before, it can happen again, the fragility of freedom. We must remember, we must ensure that, while Primo Levi worried, it can never happen again, even as we know that that is such a difficult task and statement to honour. Thank you Mr Carlaw. I now call Mike Umara to be followed by Ross Greer. Thank you to colleagues for very fine speeches. I thank you to Paul O'Kane MSP for what is an annual opportunity to renew our Holocaust remembrance through reflection and witness. That becomes ever more pressing year by year as the generation who lived through the Holocaust passes, their witness must not be lost with them. The Holocaust is history's greatest horror. The confluence of ancient hatred and industrial modernity is the fullest expression of nationalism given form by an efficient ruthless state that tore down the doors of family, of faith and of fraternity and replaced that human dignity of the soul with collated lists of category, of statistics, of method and calculated means. That project begat the most notorious statistic of all, six million dead. Theodore Adorno said in 1949 that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Where could beauty be found in a world capable of such horror? Was it not trite to find form? Is it not whimsy to seek prose? How do you write about the Holocaust? That was a question that late novelist Martin Amos, who died in May this last year, walked around for most of his literary career. He was a late stepfather to Jewish daughters, and the Holocaust gained ever greater salience in his writing, although it had been a feature from his early career. His 2014 novel, The Zone of Interest, features the idyllic life of the concentration camp guard, a commander and his wife living just over the wire. Of course, we all live just over the wire. For days and even months we can avert our eyes, and yet we cannot avoid, as they could not, the stench of decay. The Holocaust draws writers and readers in ever greater numbers, and colleagues have cited some of these works, already popular books such as The Tatuist of Auschwitz or Films, such as The One Life, accounting for the heroic service of Nicholas Winton and The Kinder Transport. They opened the hearts and minds of audiences, and they prompt the biggest and most essential of questions—how, why and most urgently and repeatedly—could it happen again. It was in Amos' Zone of Interest that I first encountered this quote from W.G. Siebold on the Holocaust. No serious person ever thinks of anything else. While Amos wrote of the exceptionalism of the Third Reich, its our duty is elected politicians to see glimpses of it everywhere. Does our state stray too far? Will artificial intelligence make racism ever more efficient? Is our justice blind? Are we truly free? On Tuesday night, the German Consul-General recalled in this Parliament the first expulsion in 1938 of the Jewish Poles in what is known as Poloknasyon. She was discharging the most solemn duty of the German state. She also told us of the hundreds of thousands of Germans in recent days on the streets of their cities and towns, standing in the face of rising fascism and the far right of nationalism, of ethnic hatred, of economic alienation, of time looping, of history repeating. Never again, never again. But we speak today in the livid aftermath of the largest and most deadly assault on Jews since the Holocaust. On 7 October Hamas slaughtered the innocent, they raped and they tortured 1,269 Jews because they were Jews. They did so in the hopeful knowledge of the horror that would be visited upon innocent Palestinian people. History tells us that we cannot give up on peace, no matter how forlorn or how remote that may feel. That is our remembrance. I now call Ross Greer to be followed by Alex Cole-Hamilton. Thank you for leading this year's debate. I have spoken in a number of the Holocaust memorial debates since I was first elected and I had a look through my notes from those earlier speeches today. One of the core purposes of this day is to remind us of the need to proactively work to ensure that something like the Holocaust could never happen again. Those seven years of notes made for a pretty depressing reading. In 2017, I spoke about how fascists create their own alternative reality and then set about making the rest of society believe in it—a hateful, false reality—where some people are less than human. We are all quite familiar with how the Nazis went about systematically dehumanising Jews, Slavic people, Roma, LGBT people, disabled people and others and the importance of media support to their success as Paul Kane referenced in his opening speech. We are a century on from the start of the Nazis' rise to power, but we have really learned the lessons of the darkest period in human history. A century ago, the Daily Mail's owner aligned himself with Hitler and ran the headline Hurrah for the Black Shirts. When I spoke in this debate for the first time seven years ago, the sun, this country's largest cell in newspaper, had recently published a column that described refugees crossing the Mediterranean as cockroaches who should be stopped by gunships. Language, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, had to intervene and point out was exactly the same as how the Nazis had described Jews and other groups. Today, we see dehumanising language used against the desperate and vulnerable people crossing the English Channel, against trans people, against Palestinians and against other marginalised groups. The Holocaust didn't start with gas chambers. The Rwandan genocide didn't start with machete wielding gangs. The Bosnian genocide didn't start with a massacre at Srebrenica. It started with dehumanising language and misinformation, with extremists pushing the limits of debate, with efforts to suppress the voices of the groups being targeted. Can we really say that the UK in the 21st century is doing all it can to live up to the commitment to never again? Seven years ago, Donald Trump had just taken office and major US publications were running puff pieces on neo-Nazis, with headlines like Meet the Dapper White Supremacist riding the Trump Wave. This year, the prospect of Trump returning to the White House is a distressingly realistic one. How must that make the Jewish community in America feel when his first election was quickly followed by events such as Charlottesville, where uniformed white men held a torchlet march chanting, Jews will not replace us? Across Europe, the far-right surge, which appeared to have subsided a few years ago, has begun again. A left-to-right, broad democratic front might have taken back the Government in Poland, but fascists have just won a shock victory in the Netherlands on a platform that demonises Muslims in exactly the same manner that the Nazis' early election platforms demonised the Jews. Sweden's centre-right government is entirely dependent on fascist MPs to stay in office, Italy's Prime Minister leads a party that traces its lineage straight back to Mussolini, and Germany has just been rocked by revelations that senior figures in the AFD attended a meeting with neo-Nazis, which included a presentation on how they could go about deporting those who are not ethnically German if they ever took power, not a distant prospect when they are currently polling in second place and in first across swathes of eastern Germany. The Cordon Sanitaire is freeing. In a clear and distressing parallel of Germany's ruling parties a century ago, mainstream politicians are so desperate to hold on to or to get into Government are co-operating with the far-right, are co-operating with those who trace their routes back to the fascists who brought that dark period in our history. When you treat fascism as simply another political view, you've conceded legitimacy, it doesn't deserve and it can never have. Its ideas become acceptable to discuss in the mainstream, but inciting genocide is not an acceptable or legitimate point of view. Believing that you can win the argument by giving these people a platform for debate and challenging them misunderstands the problem. Fascism isn't rational. Fascists and others advancing dangerous, lethal agendas aren't interested in winning the debate. They just want to implement their wicked worldview and they're not going to play by the rules that the rest of us do in a liberal democratic society. They don't want a liberal democratic society under which their argument might win out the battle of ideas. We cannot ever allow them to win again. Today we remember the victims of humanity's worst crime—9 million slaughtered in the Holocaust, including 6 million Jews. We need to think seriously about how we turn our determination to never allow it to happen again into practical reality. It's not enough to not be a racist or to not be a fascist. We must all be active anti-racist and anti-fascist. That is the only way in which those statements of never again can truly mean something. It is a privilege for me to rise from my party to speak on this most important of occasions—our annual commemoration of the Holocaust. I am grateful to Paul O'Kane for leading this afternoon's debate. It is a debate that has been characterised and punctuated by thoughtful and moving contributions, not least from Jackson Carlaw and Michael Marra. The Nazis engaged, as we have heard—we will hear again this afternoon—in the most horrific and barbaric acts, the mechanised slaughter of 9 million people—6 million of them Jews—a genocide that killed two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, entire communities, huge segments of entire races and, indeed, anyone that Nazis declared to be either deviant or defective were rounded up, shipped to camps like Auschwitz and Belsen to be murdered. Today is also an important opportunity to remember, as we have heard in speeches like that of Ivan McKee, the victims of other genocides around the world—in Cambodia or Wanda, Bosnia and Darfur—all of them, tyrannised, oppressed and tormented simply because of who they are. Presiding officers and monsters are real, though they may wear business suits or military uniforms. We see the evidence of their works in the bleaker chapters of human history, and today we mark the darkest chapter of all. The horrors of the Holocaust are a grim and tragic reminder of what can happen when we fail to recognise and challenge those monsters, when we turn a blind eye to them. Horific acts of this kind are enabled by the passivity of those with the power and the agency to act and to stop them, but who choose not to? Eli Weisel, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, warns us against this when he tells us that, and I quote, we must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim, and that silence helps the tormentor and never the tormented. The haunting memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, standing as it does at the heart of Berlin, symbolises the particular horror that can occur when those in power become corrupted, when domination trumps any sense that service to a fellow human being can bring. There is no limit to how bleak things can become. We should acknowledge that the Nazi regime was only made possible by the blind capitulation of thousands of otherwise normal people. The Nazis were successful at mass murder because they desensitised it, they normalised it, they buried it under the drudgery of bureaucracy, they endured every level of government and military to atrocity with endless layers of that bureaucracy that reduced millions of precious lives to the lines of a larger book. The theme of this Holocaust memorial day, as we have heard many times today, is the fragility of freedom. That word, fragility, rings scarily true just now. We have seen democratic institutions tested the world over. Some of them are facing tests still now. Authoritarianism is on the rise and war has returned to continental Europe. Look even at modern-day Germany, and you will be alarmed and heartened in equal measure. The rise of alternative for Deutschland, the far-right nationalist party in Germany since the Nazi era, is deeply concerning. But just last weekend, and in recent days, tens of thousands of Germans took to the streets to protest right-wing extremism, following reports that senior AFD members were present at a meeting where the mass deportation of millions of not just immigrants but anyone who they did not deem to be properly German was discussed, a chilling echo of the past. We stand in the Liberal Democrats, and across this chamber, we stand with those who took to the streets in the defiance of that extremism, and we must never be complacent. We must always remember the consequences of that complacency. I have told before the story of a time that I spent some time in hospital, and a man in the bed opposite volunteered his belief that the Holocaust was a hoax. In the argument that followed, he revealed that the basis of his position was rooted in the videos that he had seen on YouTube. Challenging anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial falls to each of us wherever we find it, as does educating our children and young people about the horrific reality of the genocides that have taken place across our world. The fact that today we are living amongst many of the communities of the Holocaust sought to extinguish and that we stand united across this chamber in our remembrance of those awful events and in our opposition to the twisted ideologies that they were born of is evidence that Nazis failed. This sort of darkness will always fail, but only if we stand unflinchingly together, united and resolute against it. I thank Paul O'Kane for securing this debate on this important issue and to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for all of the work that they do. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Paul O'Kane in advance for hosting the Scottish national Holocaust event next week when the Parliament will be welcoming pupils from Northfield academy from my constituency who I believe are speaking at the event because I am always pleased to see young folk from Aberdeen coming into our Parliament. As the motion notes, the theme of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom and over the last few years across the world people's freedoms do feel much more fragile. When I was younger, I remember thinking of the Holocaust as a one-off tragedy, that it was an act of unspeakable evil carried out by evil folk who just kind of disappeared after the end of the war. Over the years and especially over the last few years, I have come to realise that the Holocaust and other genocides are at the end of what tends to be a long journey. I have come to realise that the folk who carried out these acts were not always evil. They were once quite ordinary folk and that many went back to living ordinary lives. I have come to realise that never again is sadly just an aspiration rather than the promise it should be. I have come to realise just how many challenges the groups that were targeted in the Holocaust still face. Can any of us say hand on heart that we have not seen at home or abroad in the past few months any bigotry and discrimination aimed at Jews or Gypsy travellers or those with disabilities or the LGBT plus community? I can't and I think it's becoming more common and in some circles I feel it's starting to be seen as acceptable and that is a very dangerous place to be in and it's something we need to challenge whenever and wherever we see it. Because before the death camps there was the discrimination, the dehumanisation and the turning folk against their own fellow man. I fear we're not doing enough to stop that happening again today. When the details of the Holocaust first emerged, folk reacted with horror and the world said never again. But in the years since, with varying degrees of recognition, we're continuing to see this sort of atrocity. We've seen mass killings in Guatemala and we said never again. Then in Bangladesh and we said never again. Then in East Timor and we said never again. Then in Cambodia and Bosnia and Rwanda and Zaire and Dafur in Iraq and Syria and in Myanmar and we keep saying never again. And in years to come when that list is inevitably even longer, well we just keep saying never again. As we look ahead, instead of just saying never again, we need to say loudly and clearly what we are saying today and we need to do that as individuals and as a nation at home and abroad. When we see discrimination, dehumanisation, persecution and mass killings, we need to call it what it is and call for it to stop. It is the least we can do if we want to show we've learned the lessons of history and to make never again a reality. Thank you, Mr Barth. Due to the number of members who wish to speak in this debate, I am minded to accept a motion without notice under rule 8.14.3 to extend the debate by up to 30 minutes. I now invite Paul O'Kane to move a motion without notice. Thank you, Mr O'Kane. The question is that the debate be extended by up to 30 minutes. Are we all agreed? That is agreed and I now call Tess White to be followed by Jimmy Green. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Presiding Officer, it's an honour and a privilege to contribute to this afternoon's debate marking Holocaust Memorial Day 2024, and I warmly thank Paul O'Kane for securing the parliamentary time for such a poignant and sobering topic. We come together each year in remembrance so that the Holocaust may never be repeated and never again. Now a tragedy is unfolding in the Middle East. Israel has suffered the worst terror attack in its history at the hands of Hamas. Palestinian civilians in Gaza are experiencing a humanitarian disaster. What to say after 1200 Israeli men, women and children were slaughtered in 24 hours, where to begin after the rising tide of antisemitism we've witnessed in recent months. As we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, we understandably looked to the past. The devastating events in Israel and Gaza since October 2023 have shown us that we must look to the horizon too. Experts argue that genocides do not simply happen. They are the culmination of a series of circumstances or events and they begin with the persecution of a particular group of people simply for who they are and they escalate to annihilation, annihilation of lives of religion and of culture. In a diary entry dated Saturday 20 June 1942, Anne Frank wrote, that's when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees. She listed many restrictions in her everyday life from having to turn in a bicycle to being forbidden from using swimming pools. You couldn't do this and you couldn't do that, she said, but life went on. And as other members have touched upon, the theme for this year's Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom and lost her freedoms before she ultimately lost her life. For millions of Jews their lives were curtailed before they were brutally cut short and we must understand what precedes genocide, how the seeds of hatred and prejudice are sown so that we might prevent it from happening again and again, Presiding Officer. The conflict in the Middle East must not become part of the culture wars waged on streets and screens. The nuance and complexity of crisis cannot be effaced for social media likes and views and with the rise of antisemitism incidents across the UK, Europe and the US. I do worry that we have reached a tipping point and we cannot allow the clock to turn back. Thank you. Thank you Ms White and I now call Jamie Greene, Mr Greene. Thank you Presiding Officer. Colleagues, I was not scheduled to speak today. I've been off sick with the chest infections and so apologies, but I made it in today and how could I not speak in today's debate in a Parliament of 128 MSPs eligible to speak in such debates? This debate should have been oversubscribed given the importance of it. I won't take up too much of your time but I do want to make two additional points over and above the very eloquent and very moving speeches that we've already heard today. One point will cast our eyes back in history, but the other point, I hope, will cast our eyes towards the world we live in today. The first point is this. Of course, in addition to the six million Jews that were exterminated, and that is the word we should use, the events of World War II led to the victimisation, persecution, torture and death of some nine million non-Jews as well. It is often described as the era of Holocaust because it extended far beyond the systematic targeting of Jews. Catholics, disabled people, Romani people, gay people, communists and free masons. I am not Jewish, but I have to say I wouldn't have stood a chance. Indeed, to this day, the forget-me-not badge is worn on the lapels of many a Mason across the world in remembrance of those who suffered. Forget-me-not could not be more apt to today's debate. Three simple words. Of course, many people were seen as threats by the Nazis for religious reasons or cultural, ethnic, social, racial, political, sexual or even simply those who were just seen as a burden on society. They failed up to sign to Hitler's increasing growing fascism and violent nationalism. Many of those people were sent to camps and war-inverted red triangles. I know this because in recent visit to Brussels, just a few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Military History and I stood face-to-face behind a glass cage of one of those striped pajamas that we saw often seen in Hollywood films and on it were those badges. It wasn't a prop, it was real. Someone had lived and worn that item of clothing. The second, perhaps the more pertinent point I want to make in today's debate, is a point that's already been made and that's that the Holocaust did not happen overnight. Forget-me-not means as much today as it did then because Test White is absolutely right. It was a creeping hatred that led. It was a serious events that led to mass murder. Crystal Nacht, referred to in Jackson Carlaw's speech, kicked off, of course, overt mass violence against Jewish people and their businesses, but that was the culmination of many months, if not years, of targeting systematically against them. The boycotts of their business was almost discreet when it started, the gossip columns of newspapers, the caricatures of Jews in satirical cartoons, the verbal abuse in the street, blaming them for things that happened in bygone years or indeed faraway places. Then the political rhetoric crept in. Let's not forget that the Nazis were voted in democratically by their people. It was an unsettled country that had a nostalgia and appetite for its former strength and glory. It promised that restoration of glory by opportunistic politicians, which, of course, gave way to Hitler, who promised leadership and restoration of economic success and glory once again. Oh, friends, how history repeats itself. It was, of course, the stab in the back myth that is often referred to, which blamed Germany's losses in World War I on betrayal, not on the battlefield, the communists, the socialists and the Jews. They were to blame for that almighty fall from power because radicalisation of thought crept in. It started with boycotts. It started with protests and placard waving, perhaps driven by political ideology, perhaps even well-meaning expressions of disapproval. It starts with the blaming of everyday people for the actions of Governments and Army Chiefs in faraway lands and looking at the polls across the EU at the moment that balance is swinging and shifting in a dangerous direction. The parallels of that creeping and dangerous antisemitism are as true today as they were in 1930s Germany, less in a century ago, because underneath it all, be it age-old, medieval, true antisemitism, or if it's cloaked in modern outrage over other horrific events of war and conflict, or just simply a wider hatred and othering of those in the margins of society, the sentiment is the same, the causes are the same and the complacency is the same. If you believe for just a moment that the Holocaust was a thing of the past, that is a dangerous assertion. A Holocaust in some shape or form could happen again. Forget it not, Presiding Officer. I now call on Minister Siobhan Brown to respond to the debate. I wish to echo the thoughts of the other members in the chamber and offer my thanks to Paula Cain for tabling today's motion, which gives us valuable opportunity to speak about the importance of the Holocaust Memorial Day. The horrors of the Holocaust are a stark reminder of the inhumanity and violence that hatred and prejudice can wreak if left unchallenged. I want to thank all the members for their really powerful thought-provoking contributions this afternoon. Despite the political differences that we might have, it is deeply touching to see this chamber united in commemorating all of those who perished during the course of the Nazi atrocities, as well as the millions that were persecuted in the genocides that took place in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. This year's theme, as we've heard for Holocaust Memorial Day, is fragility of freedom. Reinforces the importance of opposing those who threaten the essential freedoms that underpin our society. As history tells us, genocide begins with the erosion of basic liberties. In Nazi Germany, the Jewish, the Roman and the Sinty people were initially banned from participating in activities that today we take for granted, such as attending places of entertainment and enrolling in academia. As we are so painfully aware, these cruel and prejudicial acts were to sow the seeds of the mass extermination of millions of people. The Holocaust Memorial Day also marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a tragedy which began the restrictions on people's freedom by instructing them to stay indoors and not to leave their homes. This created an environment for soldiers and the civilian militia to murder indiscriminately, resulting in the deaths of 75% of the Tutsi population. We must of course also pay tribute to the acts of the extraordinary bravery where people put themselves at great risk to preserve freedom and protect the lives of others. Whether by providing food, medication or sanctuary to those targeted for persecution, those are acts of immense sacrifice for which we should forever be indebted. When reflecting on these tragedies, it is also tempting to view them as so abhorrent, we could never possibly allow them to be repeated. We cannot turn a blind eye to the challenges that we face today. We know that there are people whose freedoms are being curtailed and who experience hatred and prejudice because of who they are and the group to which they belong. That is why the Scottish Government in our commitment to combating hatred and prejudice has embarked upon an ambitious programme of work. Last November I spoke at our tackling hate crime and building cohesive communities conference where we launched our hate crime strategy delivery plan. The delivery plan shapes how we work in collaboration with our partners to enhance protections for those most at risk while also taking meaningful action to prevent hate crime from happening in the first place. Putting people and communities with lived experience at the centre of our policies is at the heart of our approach and this is essential to our delivery of our actions. We want to foster communities where everybody feels empowered included and safe and we want to address the societal attitudes that perpetrate hate crime. It is unacceptable for anybody to live in fear or to make it feel as they do not belong. Preventative work that builds strong, respectful and cohesive communities can stop the narratives that foster prejudice from taking hold. We are clear that there is no place for hatred or prejudice of any kind within Scotland schools. I am sure that members across this chamber would fully recognise the vital role schools play in helping our young people to value a diverse and respectful Scotland, supporting them to become responsible and truly global citizens while helping to counteract prejudice and intolerance. It is therefore essential that our curriculum continues to support learners to develop their understanding of others' beliefs and cultures and traditions alongside their own and our aspiration is that they feel equipped to go out to the work world to be citizens of the tolerant and inclusive Scotland that we all want to be part of. This following Tuesday, I along with the First Minister will be participating at the Holocaust Memorial Day Scottish ceremony and I wish to commend our partners at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for their continued efforts in organising the event, which will also be attended by Peter Lantos, a Holocaust survivor. Shantel Murimri and Sabrina Kadic Mackenzie, who escaped the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, will also be in attendance. I hope to see as many of you there as possible as we stand in solidarity in honouring all of those that have suffered. Presiding Officer, in final reflection, I'd like to remind this chamber that while the Nazis began consolidating their power, the German journalist Fritz Gerlich warned, the worst thing that we can do, the absolute worst, is to do nothing. This year's fragility of freedom provides possibly the most poignant illustration of the importance of heeding these words. It is only through remaining unwavering in our opposition to all forms of hate and striving to protect freedom at any cost can we prevent genocides in the future and instead build a better world for everybody. Thank you Deputy Presiding Officer. Thank you Minister. That concludes the debate and I suspend this meeting until 2.30pm. Thank you.