 The final item of business is a member's business debate on motion 9828, in the name of Adam Tomkins, on the Holocaust Memorial Day 2018. The debate will be concluded without any questions being put. I could ask those members who wish to speak in the debate to press the request-to-speak buttons now. I call on Adam Tomkins to open the debate. Mr Tomkins, please. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. The Holocaust was a new order of criminality, like of which the world had never previously witnessed. In the very heart of Europe, it was Government policy to eradicate the Jewish people, to wipe them from the face of the earth. The policy failed, but not before six million men, women and children were murdered by the Nazis. That's more than the entire population of Scotland. This did not happen a long, long way away. It happened here, in Europe. It didn't happen a long time ago. It happened within living memory. The Holocaust is an exceptionally difficult thing to talk about, and that is precisely why we must. As this evening's motion notes, the theme of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day is the power of words. The power of words to do both ill and good. We all know that the children's nursery rhyme that sticks and stones may break my bones but words she'll never hurt me is untrue. Words can wound. They can damage relationships. They can destroy reputations. They can darken any conversation, but words can also enlighten, inform, educate and inspire. Isn't that just as well, Presiding Officer, because here in this chamber words are all we have. Words are our tools. We use them to make law to question ministers, to engage in debate. The very word, Parliament, comes from the old French parley to speak, and without words there would be nothing to say and we'd all be out of a job. The power to speak, the freedom to use words, was just one of the many attributes of human life stripped from those sent to the death camps. Those who were sent there lost their possessions, their loved ones, their family members, their clothes, their shoes, even their hair. They were deformed by starvation, enslaved in hard labour. They were tattooed with a number, they lost their name, their identities, they were stripped, naked in the snow and ice with nothing but their own arms to warm them alone in huge numbers. This was mass systematic, organised murder on an unprecedented scale. In a single day at Auschwitz in August 1944, 24,000 people were murdered, 24,000 people in a single day. And these people were not prisoners of war, the war had nothing to do with it. These were just people that the government wanted to annihilate because that government hated Jews. That this happened and how it was allowed to happen are stories that we must tell and keep telling. Somehow we must find the words. The Nazis used words to mask the truth. They spoke of the final solution instead of extermination, of transfer instead of deportation and of special treatment instead of death in the gas chambers. We must use words not to mask the truth but to reveal it. A key way in which this has been done is the collection and curation of eyewitness accounts of Holocaust testimony. This started even during the war itself. Anne Frank, aged 14, was inspired to rewrite her world famous diary after her family listened to an illegal radio broadcast imploring Dutch citizens to record their experiences of Nazi occupation. Scotland's own Holocaust archives are held in Glasgow's beautiful Garnett Hill synagogue. Many hundreds of Jewish people made a new life in Scotland after the war. They made and they continue to make an immense contribution to Scottish society in business, in our public services, in science, in medicine and in our cultural life. One of the most disturbing truths revealed by those who have sought to find the words to write about the Holocaust is that, even though it was a crime on a monstrous scale, it was not perpetrated by monsters but by ordinary, even banal men and women who were organising train travel across Europe, not as if they were mobilising a million murders but as if they were simply taking goods to market. It was Hannah Arendt who coined the controversial term the banality of evil in her report on Eichman's trial in Jerusalem. Eichman was a Nazi lieutenant colonel in the SS who had played a major role in organising the Holocaust and he was hanged for war crimes in 1962. At his trial, his defence was that he was simply obeying orders, that he was a fully law-abiding citizen doing his job. He was motivated, he said, not by a hatred for the Jewish people but by duty. It was his duty to do his job. It just seemed immaterial to him that his job entailed the management of genocide. It was just a job. Eichman was far from alone in collapsing morality into legality, living his life such that as long as he obeyed the law he could by definition be doing no harm. However, the cold, calculating callousness of this is both breathtaking and horrific and the world reacted. I said at the beginning of my remarks this evening that the Holocaust was a new order of criminality. The world's reaction was no less than to create a new international order. One of its centrepieces was and still is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 70th anniversary we will celebrate this year. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Presiding Officer, is just words. They are not law, not in any conventional sense. There is no court to enforce them, there is no judicial sanction in the event that its words are not honoured. It is a declaration, it is just words. However, they are words that make impossible, not merely Eichman's technical defence in his trial in Jerusalem. Among its opening words are these. The dignity and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. The foundation of justice is not law, as Eichman thought. The foundation of justice is the inherent dignity of every member of the human family. It is beyond the reach of mere law to change, alter or affect that foundation because the rights that flow from it are inalienable. Those are beautiful words. If we cleave to them, if we hold them in our hearts and act true to them in everything that we do, if that happens, I will be able to look my Jewish children in the eye and all of us will be able to look our and each other's children in the eye and say to them not merely in hope but in certainty, never again. Presiding Officer, this will not be a contentious debate this evening but it is an important one. By ensuring that the Holocaust is never forgotten, we can ensure that it is never repeated. I thank all the members of the Scottish Parliament who have supported my motion for this evening and I look forward to hearing the thoughts of members from across the chamber as we remember together and reflect on the unique horror of the Holocaust. Thank you. I am not permitted to clap but it was a very moving and excellent speech. Kenny Gibson to be followed by Jackson Carlaw. Thank you Presiding Officer. I wish first to warmly congratulate Adam Tomkins for securing the time to bring us important debate to the chamber and for his excellent speech. It is a privilege to contribute in some small way to the continued remembrance of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis in ghettos, mass shootings, concentration and extermination camps. The timing of this year's debate is particularly apt, having said goodbye to 2017, the year which saw a prominent resurgence of far-right extremism, most statly demonstrated by the Charlottesville rallies in August 2018. That presents an opportunity for everyone across society to take ownership of their actions and indeed their words as this year's theme suggests. Of course, as we well know, left-wing and religious extremism also has a strong history of antisemitism as European history clearly shows. The power of our words is boundless and we can choose to use that power to do something positive, such as sharing the life stories of those who are murdered or indeed those who resisted, witnessed and survived genocide. We can use our words to remember challenge and evoke change. One shining example of the power of words was Dr Alfred Wiener, born in Germany in 1885. An expert in Oriental languages and Jewish religious thought, he became one of the top officials in Central Verine, an organisation which aimed to combat antisemitism following World War I. Dr Wiener's mission was to warn Jews and non-Jews alike of the dangers of Nazism. In 1933, he established the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam. His collection of Nazi and anti-Nazi books and documented material quickly grew to 8,000 books and leaflets before the collection was moved to London in 1940 and renamed the Wiener Library. Dr Wiener's wife and three daughters survived Bergen-Belsen. The concentration camp responsible for the deaths of approximately 70,000 people, including Margo and Anne Frank. Sadly, while the Wiener daughters escaped safely to America, his wife eventually succumbed to malnutrition and exhaustion, which claimed so many innocent lives, not just during the war but in the years afterwards. By Dr Wiener's death in 1964, his library was well established as one of record for scholars, researchers, the media and the public. Today, the Wiener Library continues to be home to the words that serve as a living memorial of the evil that took hold across much of Europe, a constant call on all of us to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated. Now, what about the language that we use with each other? The words that we share and spread and endorse both in our day-to-day lives and in our social media profiles. Over the past year, Jewish human rights watch and the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities highlighted growing levels of hate speech, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial across Facebook and Twitter, here in Scotland, right now. Those platforms are used by a small minority to share fabricated global Jewish conspiracy theories and classic anti-Semitic tropes, which cumulodill the represent and attack on Jewish faith and culture within our own society. In September of last year, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that more than a quarter of people living in the UK held anti-Semitic attitudes, which 30 per cent of 5,466 people study, agreeing with the statement that Jews think that they are better than other people and Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes. We are now more careful than ever about the language that we use to refer to our peers, and many of us would be quick to challenge a friend who shared homophobic, racist, sexist or Islamophobic slurs online. Why do we let anti-Semitism slip under the radar? In 2018, I hope that we can all make more of an effort to monitor the language used to discredit and disparage the Jewish faith and Jewish people. Holocaust Memorial Day is not just an opportunity to remember and mourn what has passed, but it is also a time where we should seek to learn lessons and prevent discrimination, racism and hatred from taking hold once more. Dr Veener recognised the power of words when he opened his library in 1933, and we recognise it here in the chamber today. We have never had anti-Semitic legislation in Scotland, but that does not mean that we are exempt from playing our part in the global fight to end religious prejudice and persecution. Denial of the Holocaust is often a seed from which harmful and insidious attitudes grow, and Holocaust Memorial Day is not only an appropriate occasion to commemorate the horrors of our past, but it is also an opportunity to discuss the action that we can take to prevent atrocities in the future. I thank you very much. I call Jackson Carlaw to follow by Joan Lamont. Thank you, Presiding Officer. In each of the 10 years that I have been a member of this Parliament, it has been a privilege to contribute to this Holocaust Memorial Day debate and to hear many excellent speeches, none more so than the opening contribution from my colleague Adam Thomson, which was particularly profound. Not least, of course, because I represent Eastwood and previously the west of Scotland, but the community where some three quarters of Scotland's surviving Jewish population live, were people who have throughout my life been my friends, my neighbours, my colleagues. In 2017, in moving this motion, I talked about the nefarious tapestry of death that the various camps created across the continent of Europe during the Second World War, independently of one another, not through some planned process. Many, only after the war, came to understand just how comprehensive that network and different traditions that had led to their establishment had been. Of course, Holocaust Memorial Day takes place at the end of January on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We should remember that Auschwitz only survives for us to visit today, for the Holocaust Education Trust to send parties of school children to see, because the speed of collapse of the German Reich at that point was so comprehensive and quick that they were unable to destroy the evidence of the existence of Auschwitz in the way that they had so efficiently managed to destroy the evidence of so many of the other camps that existed across Europe. So it is there for us to visit. I know that the Deputy First Minister will have business elsewhere tonight, but he visited, I know, Auschwitz for the first time himself just before Christmas. Anyone who has cannot fail to be profoundly moved, particularly at this time of year when it is so bitterly cold, by the whole realisation of the reality of what Auschwitz represented, and its closeness to the main roads through the immediate neighbourhood, to the town that sits alongside it confounds any expectation or hope that anyone might have that this camp existed in isolation somewhere away from a population centre, away from people who must knowingly have understood what was going on. I remember on my own private visit being shown around by a guide that we contracted who was the grandson of a family of whom he was deeply ashamed because when he questioned his grandparents about the existence of Auschwitz on their doorstep, they really could not convincingly argue that they had not known what was going on and had not in their own silent gruesome way realised their own complicity in all of that. This year's theme is voices and Adam Tomkins talked about some of the profound voices and some of the other profound voices of history that allowed the Holocaust to happen. I would like to talk about the very simple voices of some of my constituents. Last year at the Edinburgh festival, the 70th anniversary of which it was and commemorating the establishment of it by a Scottish Jew, Rudolf Bing, many constituents came through for the unveiling of a plaque and I was sitting beside one. I thought I had met many of the constituents of not all the surviving Holocaust constituents that are my neighbours and friends, but that lady suddenly just talked to me about her own experience. She said, you know, I said, if you come here often, she said, yes, I came here every year with my family for as long as I could. I'm only able to come this year because there's a bus as brought us through. I'm not fit enough and able enough to come, but we came every year. And she said, of course, I escaped out of Germany. My father thought that things were getting very difficult, so we moved to Poland to escape the third Reich and he then became increasingly concerned that matters might deteriorate further and he left the family to go to London. It took over a year and three applications to the Home Office at that time. Some things never change. Before there was an agreement that we as a family could join him and we left on the day that Germany invaded Poland on the outbreak of war. She said, I remember, he tried to persuade the rest of his family to apply. They said, oh, you're exaggerating, there's no need. And we made that journey in a sealed train across and the whole of the rest of his family was obliterated. Only we survived. I've said in debates on assisted suicide that we have a right to life but not a duty to live. So many of my Jewish constituents take completely the opposite view. They survived and they have a duty to live and they determined in the years since to make a full contribution to the life of Scotland and to live life to the full. They are so modest and quiet in their recollection but that cloud of the Holocaust hangs like a profound memory over everything that they do. In the spring at the anniversary of Yung Shaw, those families on screens in the constituency will list all the family members that were lost. A favourite memory of mine of the last year was when Ross Greer came along to Yung Shaw and sat beside the sweetest lady. She tells you that she's a Holocaust survivor in the same way that she might say that she danced previously with Scottish Bally. She always says that with an enormous smile on her face, so much so that you have to just think, what is it she just said to me? Now I don't know what she would have thought of Ross Greer's broader views on Israel but they sat there and had the most fabulous conversation about what that event Yung Shaw was there to commemorate. And so those lighter voices, the voices of the survivors, those who determined that they would live life to the full, those constituents of mine who've done exactly that, that's what I want to celebrate and remember today. Thank you. I'll call to one Lamont. We've followed by Patrick Harvie. Ms Lamont, please. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. Can I welcome the opportunity to make what is a brief contribution to what I think is a very important debate? I want to congratulate Adam Tomkins for scouring this debate but also for the power of the speech that he made. We do recognise the significant cross-party support in this issue and I hope that that means more than simply sitting in his chamber agreeing with each other on this issue but recognising the power of that cross-party support and making sure that it counts in our commitment to this question. I want to congratulate all those who are involved in the work of Holocaust Memorial Day. It may happen on a day but it doesn't happen through the work of people on one day. Massive amounts of work was in to make it successful. Work, which quite rightly, forces us to confront the truth and reality of the Holocaust. I want to congratulate the Holocaust Educational Trust on ensuring that successive generations of young people learn about what happened in the Holocaust. It is important to mark the Holocaust for itself, what it was for individuals, what it meant for individuals, for families, for communities and to understand fully what antisemitism led to in Europe at that time. We cannot overstate the power of testimony. The testimony and courage of those survivors who have relived the horrors of air experience in order that we all might learn. I had the privilege as a young woman of knowing a woman called Susan Singerman. She is a woman active in her local Labour Party and came from Hungary. Like all young people, I knew that perhaps I had proper lack of respect for people who were older. I knew that she had been in Auschwitz but she never spoke about what happened until her old age, when she began to speak about what horrors the Holocaust had brought for her and her family. With great dignity, she left a legacy to generations beyond to understand properly what it meant at an individual level. She was known as the Duchess of Auschwitz because throughout her time there, she carried herself with dignity and refused to be broken. Such testimony is really important because genocide in all its forms can simply overwhelm us. It can feel that it is beyond us. It reveals the capacity of people to step away from their own humanity, to engage in the systematic cruelty, violence, torture and murder of others, often those who lived in the same communities. Sometimes when we think of genocide, it can feel that it is beyond our comprehension, it is beyond tackling. However, we must comprehend it and tackle it. Genocide can happen here, it can happen anywhere. It is significant that this year the theme is about the power of words. For genocide does not start with monsters, it does not begin with the outrageous, it does not appear fully formed as an assault on others but it creeps towards us step by step. The Jewish communities across Europe did not immediately wake up to discover that they were under attack. It began with cruel words, grievance, separating off, talking about the other, talking about the difference, describing people in the most cruel of terms. Genocide is a long journey and it is a journey that we have the power to break in our modern society. I am privileged to be a member of the members of Rebonita Scotland and a board member who should declare an interest. In 2016, I was invited to go and visit Bosnia. Later that same year, I went on holiday to Krakow and visited Auschwitz. I will never get over what I learned in those visits, both about the capacity to be cruel and systematic in that cruelty, in turning against others, but also the power of humanity to overcome that cruelty. The survivors of the Holocaust joined with the survivors of what happened in Bosnia to demand justice for those who experience genocide. There are parallels and there are important parallels across our communities just now. To be opportunistic, I say that we are hosting an event next week in the Parliament with Jasmine Mojanovic, who is an intellectual, who understands about Bosnia but has been working on the parallels that are now developing in our society. What happened in Bosnia when we said that we did not understand what happened in the Holocaust when it was all too complicated? He talks about the way in which democratic institutions are being degraded as we speak and the importance of confronting that. We need vigilance. I think now about our own debate. It is important to recognise the significance of the Holocaust for the Jewish people and for all of us to confront that. We also need to think about our own debate. We take too often to ourselves all that is virtue and our tribute to everyone else, all that is without virtue. I think that we owe it to those who speak out for a fairer and equal society where we do not demean and demonise to think in our own debates every day about what the things are that bring us together rather than simply those things that divide us. Of course, there is division and debate, but today, when we mark this occasion, we should recognise the power of words to heal as well as simply divide. I congratulate all those involved in ensuring that the memory of the Holocaust is not forgotten. I thank Adam Tomkins for bringing this debate and for mentioning in his opening speech the theme of this year, the power of words. Each year, as we debate a Holocaust memorial day, no doubt we all struggle to find the right words. Words that are up to the challenge of describing events for which the early 1940s will no doubt be remembered in European and global history long after we have gone. Words like atrocity, genocide, crime against humanity, Holocaust, are any of them up to it. Adam Tomkins says that this is likely to be a consensual debate and I agree. However, when he says that by never forgetting we can ensure that we never repeat those kinds of atrocities, I do think that we need to go further than that. Remembering is important, but I think that it is necessary but not sufficient. Words are powerful, but sadly the human story since the 1940s includes our collective failure to use that power of words to prevent other atrocities, other genocides, other crimes against humanity. The words that we use to remember the past matter, but if we want to prevent such things from happening again, we need to talk about the words that we use to define the present and to shape the future. On that front, we are allowing the forces of hatred to regroup. When those forces act, the power of their words has gained in a culture that can make the difference between individual acts of hate crime and the wave of violence that can carry a whole society with it. As John Lamont was referring to, before the industrial scale mass murder of the Nazi regime, both word and image have been used for years to dehumanise Jewish people, queer people, intellectuals, disabled people, the left and any other target that the regime had in mind. That is what created the conditions in which a whole society could permit atrocity. In just the same way, the British Empire used the same kind of dehumanising words and ideas for many years about racial, religious and national groups in order to make atrocities possible, including the prototypes of concentration camps and forced labour camps, which the Empire used to massacre tens of thousands of decades before the Second World War and its later acts of mass murder, such as against the Cacuyw people in the 1950s, to give just one example. Today, we can see that same attempt to use the power of words to dehumanise groups of people, the chosen targets of today's far right, whether in terms of anti-Semitism or any other form of hatred and prejudice. It is not just on the Facebook pages and Twitter profiles of far right activists, but on the pages of so many national newspapers and on the broadcast airwaves too. Muslims, immigrants, refugees and trans people are often the groups at the sharpest end of the abuse of the power of words today. We should see through the thin veneer of free speech concern that is used to cover the indignation of those who today are howling outrage that a trained company won't be distributing a daily dose of racism to their passengers or to those who rail against a student's union for its choice not to invite racist or transphobic speakers, while they simultaneously denounce MPs or judges as traitors and enemies of the people or demanding that universities hand over lists of academics who have the nerve to speak the truth about the impact of leaving the European Union. We should hold in contempt those who promote vicious and hateful rhetoric about disabled people, working class people, women or any other groups under the absurd cover of being a contrarian and attempt to portray their efforts to dehumanise others as some kind of public service. With far-right political parties in the ascendancy in many European countries and an apologist for white supremacy holding the office of US president and a global culture so threatened, both by self-serving far-right media owners and by modern state propagandists seeking to undermine democracy and human rights, the task of facing down this misuse of the power of words is immense. It begins with a commitment to assert again and again relentlessly the equal human worth of people, regardless of ability or disability, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, social class, religious belief or the lack of it, immigration status or any of the other arbitrary characteristics that forces of hatred will latch on to. Every one of us in whatever positions of influence politicians and political parties might hold must commit to assert the values of human solidarity and to do more than just assert them but also live by them in the laws that we pass, in the policies that we promote and in the candidates that we select as our potential colleagues, not only in the words that we use. Richard Lyle to be followed by Jamie Greene. Mr Lyle, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I begin this afternoon by expressing my thanks to Adam Tomkins MSP for organising today's debate, which is of extreme importance, particularly with the National Holocaust Memorial Day, taking place later this month. It serves as another poignant reminder of the horrific human rights violations and actions that took place during the Second World War. Indeed, the reality of the Holocaust is inescapable. In the years that the Nazis were in power between 1933 and 1945, 6 million Jewish people were slaughtered at the hands of hatred and intolerance. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis displaced countless families into Jewish ghettos, separated loved ones within concentration and extermination camps throughout Eastern Europe. As we know, those camps were a death sentence. Its inhabitants were welcomed with fire and poisonous gas, as well as inhumane living conditions. If they weren't murdered upon arrival, those in the concentration camps were worked day and night. Starvation and exhaustion permeated those camps, fear infiltrated Europe. There are countless individual stories of those who suffered during the Holocaust. Each story tells its tale of hardship and loss, and details personal horrors experienced throughout World War II. One such story that always comes to mind and has already been mentioned several times this afternoon when I think of the Holocaust is the well-known story of Anne Frank. My mother-in-law was Dutch, and she was in Holland during the war in Eindhoven. When we went to visit family in Eindhoven, she encouraged my wife and I to go and visit Amsterdam to Anne Frank's house. Many know Anne Frank's story due to publication of the personal diary that she kept during the German occupation of the Netherlands. At the age of 12, Anne and her family were forced into hiding, spending their days living in small rooms concealed behind a bookcase. Between 40, 1942 and 1944, the Franks were trapped, unable to see the world beyond the confines of the bookcase, in fear of capture and certain death. After two years of hiding, Anne and her family, unfortunately, were discovered and shipped off to concentration camps. Anne and her sister were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne soon died of typhus. She was 15. Like 6 million others, her religion cost her her life. Today, it is important for us to remember stories like Anne's. She was a young woman who had her life and childhood stripped away from her by hate. It is necessary that we continue to discuss what happened during World War 2 to remind us of all the importance of equality. No person should ever be discriminated against because of their religion. Doing so is an insult to the memory of all the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. As we know, the theme of the Holocaust Memorial Day 2018 is a power of words, as already stated by Adam Tomkins. As the Holocaust Memorial Day trust writes on their website, words can make a difference, both for good and evil. As a Parliament, it is imperative that we use our platforms to spew words of fairness, freedom and equality. Everyone should be free to express themselves to whatever their religion they choose and no one should feel as though their religion makes them less than equal. My mother-in-law was a Catholic. My father-in-law was a Lithuanian Catholic. I'm church of Scotland. I've taught my children and now my grandchildren not to judge an individual for what they are, but for who they are. Religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation do not define the quality of a person, their actions and words do. It's time for everyone in this Parliament to start preaching equality for everyone, regardless of religion, creed or ethnicity. I thank Adam Tomkins once again for bringing this debate to the chamber by stating that I hope that, in continuing to remember our mistakes, we can hope to ensure a more positive and tolerant future for all. I call Jamie Greene to be followed by Stuart Stevenson, who will be the last speaker in the open debate. Mr Greene, please. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I start by thanking my colleague Adam Tomkins for bringing forward this important debate this evening. It is right that the Parliament recognises Holocaust Memorial Day, for it is one of the most significant days of remembrance of modern European history. I'd like to reflect on that word, history. History is something we associate with the past, and in my day it was taught in two forms. The first was ancient history, including that of the Jews, the history of the Romans, the history of the Egyptians and, to an extent, even Robert the Bruce. Then we have modern history, and I was taught about Malcolm X, apartheid, JFK, and the Cold War. However, the Second World War fell somewhat in between the gap. We learn more about World War 2 these days on the Discovery Channel or in Hollywood movies. Yet we teach our children about the Second World War and the ensuing Holocaust as history, as a distant period in the past. Let us not forget that these events took place less than 80 years ago. They remain amongst us those who drew breath in 1940 and whose boots laid prints on the battlefields of Europe and who still bear the scars and memories of the horrors of that war. The last night on television I watched a programme about the Yemen. The horrific images of bloodied children and airborne strikes on hospitals and homes were difficult for the eyes to see. I fought for a second what of those images were portrayed in black and white as we so often see in the Second World War. Then perhaps I would have been perhaps protected from the horrors of a modern day war in colour. So what would the Holocaust look like in full HD 4K colour being played out on our mobile phones and on social media if it were happened today? My point here is that the genocide of six million Jews took place within living memory and barely a stone throw away from where we are here. But it still somehow feels like something so distant from the modern day. Holocaust Memorial Day addresses that very issue. It stands as a stark reminder of what happens when society lets hatred and division grow like a cancerous political ideology. And something which seemed almost acceptable to the common man in its early incarnation but grew as fascist hatred and racial and ethnic dominance. It grew into an ugly and hateful act of crime against humanity. All of humanity. Gay people, disabled people, Jewish people, Romani people, Slavs, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Freemasons, Communists and even speakers of Esperanto. And to get a sense of that horror, as my colleague Jackson Carlos said, go and visit Auschwitz. Go to Berlin and walk across the Brandenburg gate to the memorial of the murdered Jews of Europe. It's important that we understand the magnitude of what happened as a result of that culture of fear or go as I did last year to visit Yad Vashem in Israel. Now there's neither time this evening nor even words in my head to describe that experience. My hair stood on end, my legs wobbled, my emotions were overcome as I saw the images and movies of what happened, the voices of the victims, the names of the lost, the artifacts of the robbed, the faces of the dead, the pain of the survivors and the illusions of the propaganda. So let us ask ourselves, why are debates, like Mr Tomkin's debate, still important today? Surely should we not be looking forward to a positive, bright future, not retrospectively, to the dark days and deeds of the past? But the truth is, Presiding Officer, is that we are still faced with the blight of antisemitism in the UK today. In July we learned that antisemitic hate offences had reached their worst levels in Scotland on record. Across the UK, official police figures marked the third consecutive year in which antisemitic incidences were on the rise. It would be easy for me to stand here and say, isn't this terrible? We must do more, they must do more. But as politicians and by default as members of political parties, we too have a duty to address antisemitism. Just as we call out anti-Islamic rhetoric, anti-Christian, anti-Hindu, or any forms of religious or racial hatred. Free speech is one of the wonders and marvels of our modern democratic society. But in my view, Holocaust denial should never be up for debate. The Holocaust will soon no longer be part of primary history or living memory. There will soon be no survivors to tell their stories, and as such it is more important than ever that we educate our children on what happened, but more importantly why it happened. The scourge of antisemitism is ever dangerous, ever real and ever so apparent. Never forget that so many died to protect the freedoms that we have to protest and the freedoms to demonstrate and the freedoms to disagree in political discourse. Modern-day antisemitism should not hide behind thinly veiled campaigns. It cannot and should not jump on the bandwagons of commercial sabotage or the boycott of cultural events or under the guise of political freedom fighting. I conclude by making a plea to ourselves as politicians but to society in general. Never forget how easily and quickly the Holocaust was allowed to happen. May the voices of the past guide the words of today but also shape the actions of tomorrow? Thank you. I now call Stuart Stevenson, please, Mr Stevenson. Presiding Officer, let me like others thank Adam Tomquins for creating the opportunity for having this evening's debate. I've previously participated in similar ones. It's as well to remember that the Holocaust was not a singular event but was the aggregation of millions of decisions to execute millions of people who had committed no crime. The world's legal systems have worked hard over the decades since 1945 to deliver justice for the missing millions of their families and friends but that cannot on its own be enough. We cannot undo the injustice that was done by the Nazis. We cannot restore life and liberty to those from whom such basic rights were removed by the Nazis. We simply cannot reset the world that was destroyed by them. However, we can remember those who lost to the Holocaust. I have the tiniest of personal connections. The last sentences passed at the Nuremberg trials were on 30 September and 1 October 1946, when the remaining people who were found guilty were due to be hanged on 16 October. That was my first full day on this planet. Indeed, Herman Goring beat the hangman by committing suicide on the very day that I emerged from my mother's womb on 15 October. We have to use the example of the Holocaust to remind our contemporaries of the injustices that came from that and to educate new generations of the dangers of demagoguery designed to characterise ethnic or religious difference as somehow less worthy. The theme of 2018, being the power of words, is a fine choice because it was words that created the Holocaust when Adolf Hitler was sitting in prison writing Mein Kampf. It was the words that would lead to the Holocaust. We can prevent, to some extent, with our words and the words of others, our repetition. Words can lead to action, it can be good, it can be bad. Adam Tomkins reminded us that our business as politicians depends on words and the meanings that we have described to them and the use that we put to them are important. Our most important words may be those that we deploy when we defend those with views with whom we disagree, when we defend their right to be different from us. Democracy depends on diversity and so does society's future. Those who lost their lives in the Holocaust were not an undifferentiated group. Each was an individual of worth. Each had individual views and potential. Each could disagree with his or her neighbour as we do with each other in this place. My personal visits to Auschwitz thus far have been vicarious. The good work of the Holocaust Education Trust features regularly in the media. Founded in 1988, it is good work in taking school students to the site. It is highly valued by those who participate in the programme. For me, the most important visit that I have made was via the TV series The Ascent of Man, which was written and presented by Jacob Bronoski and broadcast in 1973, a year before he died. That took me to Auschwitz. Bronoski was born in 1908 into a Jewish family at Wodech, a couple of hundred kilometres north of Auschwitz. 45 years on from his film series, the profound effect of him at Auschwitz walking slowly towards the camera, pausing, leaning down to scoop mud into his hand from a puddle, and then looking at the mud and saying in a quiet voice, this is my family. That remains with me and will never leave me, because personal experience speaks directly in a way that our debate today worthy and necessary, as it is, simply cannot match. That is why we must see each generation relearn the lessons of Nazi bigotry. That is why visits can communicate and embed by experience the message of history in students supported by the trust. That is vital if we believe that that should never, ever happen again, and we do. Like other members, I thank Adam Tomkins for tabling that motion and for highlighting with some feeling the significance of Holocaust Memorial Day. Allowing what I think was a very important and I hope a dignified debate. International Holocaust Memorial Day provides an important moment for all of us to remember and reflect upon the terrible events of the Holocaust and the 11 million people who were murdered in it, including 6 million Jews. It is important that we remember too that above all else the Holocaust was a criminal enterprise. Those lives were lost as a result of the systematic denial of the most basic human rights and freedoms to particular groups in society. We must remember the unspeakable persecution by the Nazis of the Jewish community. Indeed, as Mr Tomkins mentioned, there is concerted systematic effort to destroy every last Jew in Europe. We must remember too the persecution and killing of gay people, disabled people and anyone else who was labelled as different or a threat. All this was underpinned by a profoundly racist ideology that still has the capacity to shock and horrify when we read about it today. We cannot forget that the horrors of the Holocaust were not the end point of what Burns called man's inhumanity to man. Since then, human rights have been denied and atrocities have taken place in many places such as Bosnia, Herzegovina, Rwanda, Cambodia and the Darfur region in Sudan. Although all this has repulsed people around the world and action has been taken, brutal racism and intolerance continue to flourish in too many places to this day. We must take action all of us to tackle this hatred and intolerance, as well as to promote the positive vision of the society that we all aspire to be. That is why we have every year funded in Scotland a major event to commemorate International Holocaust Memorial Day and the First Minister will open this year's event at Glasgow Caledonian University later this month. The Scottish Government works in partnership with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, along with our intermediary partner, Interfaith Scotland, to deliver Scotland's National Holocaust Memorial Day each year. This year, there are a variety of events taking place across Scotland, and I hope that members will take the opportunity to participate in them if they can. It is also why we are continuing to support the lessons from Auschwitz programme, which is an incredibly powerful way for young people to gain some insight into the horrors of the Holocaust, and, just as importantly, to learn about why it happened. I had the honour of accompanying those young people on their visit to Auschwitz Birkenhow in the trip that took place in the winter of 2012. Comparing notes afterwards with different people on the trip, all of us had different things that were lodged forever in our minds. For some people, it was the piles of shoes and suitcases or the stolen house keys or almost unspeakably the piles of human hair. For other people, it was walking around this massive site and beginning to realise the sheer scale in numbers of the crime that we were discussing. Or indeed, as Mr Carlaw pointed out, for many people it was the shocking fact that Auschwitz is in the middle of a village, a town, in plain sight of a whole community. I am extremely proud that, since 2009, we have enabled over 3,200 young people from Scotland to visit Auschwitz to find out about what happened there, to share their experiences with friends, classmates and others. This visit to Auschwitz brings home the reality of what happened far more vividly and effectively than any amount of speaking can achieve. I would like to commend the Holocaust Educational Trust on its work to raise awareness and understanding of the Holocaust and its importance today in schools and among the wider public. Our acts of remembrance forbid us from forgetting. They warn us all never to allow such atrocities to take place again. An active way to ensure that the seeds of such atrocities are not sown in our lifetimes is to promote equality, tackle discrimination and to foster good relations between and within communities. Interfaith dialogue is a vital way to lower the tensions that may exist between communities to eliminate fear and distrust and to increase understanding and mutual respect, helping to create a one Scotland of many cultures where diversity is recognised as a strength. The steps that we take for a better tomorrow require commitment today, and that is why the Scottish Government supports efforts such as the work that has been mentioned of remembering Srebrenica. That is why we are committed to doing all that we can to prevent and eradicate hate crime and prejudice, to build community cohesion and to promote inclusion. However, one area that I want to and must emphasise particularly is the approach that we all take our hope to tackling antisemitism. We appreciate the very significant contribution that our Jewish communities make to this country, and the Scottish Government continues to support the important work of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities. We know from our regular engagement with community leaders that Jewish people continue to experience antisemitism and discrimination. That is unacceptable. That is why, last year, the Scottish Government adopted the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, and we are working with key partners to consider how that can support practical steps to tackle antisemitism in all its forms. More broadly, we will continue to implement our tackling prejudice and building connected communities action plan. This year's theme, as has been mentioned by other speakers at Holocaust Day, is the power of words. It is a very apt theme. In today's world, many are concerned that, with the rise of populism across Europe and America, a permissive environment is being created, where the forces of racism and intolerance believe that they can promote their cause with greater vigor. It is the words from our leaders that have the greatest impact. Whether they are delivered through a speech or a tweet, millions see the words of our leaders as setting the context for everything that happens in our society. That is why words that seek to cast immigrants as other or that seek to spread antisemitism or to label Muslims as terrorists or that seek to attack people on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity or disability, or, indeed, because they are asylum seekers, are all so harmful. Above all, it is why we must use our words, as we have, I hope, done in today's debate, to continue to robustly challenge such intolerance. The Holocaust is the outstanding chilling example of what human beings are capable of doing when fundamental human rights are disparaged and bigotry and intolerance are given free reign. It seems that today this message is more important than ever that we talk about at Holocaust Day. I know that everyone in this chamber will want to ensure that we remain vigilant in standing up to hate and in promoting a Scotland and a world where everyone is accorded the fundamental human dignity to which they have a right. Thank you. That concludes the debate. I thank and commend all the speakers in this debate. I close this meeting.