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| Alex Cole-Hamilton |
West Lothian - A member of the Scottish Parliament has related how quickly
conversation with his ward mates in hospital turned to the Holocaust – and
Holocaust denial.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, the MSP for Edinburgh Western, has
written about his stay in a hospital in West Lothian for hand surgery over the
summer, recounting that the man next to him in the ward “muttered something
about Germany and gas chambers”.
Mr Cole-Hamilton said that he did not hear the man properly
and was about to take issue with the comment when the patient in the bed
opposite chimed in: “No mate, there never were any gas ovens, it was all a
hoax, I can give you a link to a YouTube video which explains it all.”
“Despite being pretty high on painkillers,” Mr Cole-Hamilton
writes, “I challenged him, explaining his statement wasn’t just wrong but it
was offensive. He responded by saying that he was as much entitled to his
opinion as I was, to which I replied that my ‘opinion’ was empirically
verifiable as historical fact.
“The whole exchange left me pretty shaken and the atmosphere
on the ward was strained for the duration of my stay.”
Mr Cole-Hamilton writes that he had of course heard of
Holocaust denial, “but I have never encountered it in the dismal flesh before.
It prompted me to think more about it and last week’s horrific Yom Kippur
shootings in a synagogue in Halle, Germany hammered home to me the brutal and
murderous end that unchecked antisemitism can lead to.”
