Scotland’s former first minister Humza Yousaf has likened Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people to Nazi Germany’s genocide of European Jews and minority groups. It comes after Yousaf spoke out against the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action:
“Never Again”
After the Holocaust we said “never again”
Throughout history I’m not sure if we have ever told ourselves a bigger lie.
What makes this worse, is not just the silence, but the complicity of so many.
Gaza is the cemetery upon which our collective humanity has died pic.twitter.com/AQfpopJKcd
— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) September 4, 2025
Humza Yousaf: “never again”
Speaking in Holyrood (Scottish parliament) on Wednesday 3 September, Humza Yousaf said:
Never again. These are the words we repeat every single year when we attend Holocaust Memorial Day. We rightly gather and promise to honour the memories of the 6,000,000 Jews and all of those killed during the evil of the Holocaust. Never again, we say. I’m not sure if in the annals of human history we’ve ever told ourselves a bigger lie.
Try telling the parents of 17,000 children murdered in Gaza ‘never again’. Look into the eyes of tens of thousands of children who have become orphans and tell them that we really meant it when we said ‘never again’. Hospital workers, journalists, aid workers, all massacred with absolute impunity – tell their families ‘never again’.
So awful is the genocide that we are witnessing, we’re having to create new lexicon just to describe the horrors that we are witnessing. Doctor Tanya Haj-Hassan, a Canadian paediatrician who’s worked in Gaza, tells us that doctors had to create a new abbreviation for the children they were treating.
‘WCNSF’ – ‘wounded child, no surviving family’.
What has become of us, that we can allow ourselves to be so divided by the geopolitics when a massacre of tens of thousands of children is happening in front of our very eyes, and the world does virtually nothing about it?
Shame on us.
Gaza is the cemetery upon which our collective humanity has died.
Yousaf has shown support for Palestine online:
Today Scotland raises the Palestinian flag outside our Government building, St Andrew’s House.
Alongside a series of tangible measures announced today, we are showing our solidarity with the people of Gaza in the face of a horrific genocide.
📹 credit @STVNews pic.twitter.com/ud7Lkuqj9U
— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) September 3, 2025
Palestine Action
On 1 September, Humza Yousaf spoke out against the proscription of Palestine Action by the UK government. Writing in the Daily Record, he said:
The Government’s moral compass needs seriously recalibrated when we live in a country where people are arrested under terrorism legislation for protesting against a genocide, meanwhile, the UK continues to provide support to the regime that is committing the very genocide people are opposing.
The UK Government has only suspended 10% of arms licences to Israel, leaving 90% of export licences untouched, including the F-35 supply chain. When non-violent Scots are handcuffed for a slogan, and the state keeps shipping components to a military campaign that has levelled neighbourhoods, starved families and killed children, you can forgive people for concluding that we are living through an episode of Black Mirror.
In the same piece, Yousaf called for Scotland to forego policing the UK government’s new terror restrictions:
In Scotland, we have an immediate, practical way to demonstrate that we will not partake in the charade of treating non-violent protestors as terrorist sympathisers. Earlier this year, the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, published a prosecution policy for Glasgow’s safer drug consumption room. She concluded it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people for simple possession within the facility. That was a humane and evidence-based judgment, and one I support.
I have written to the Lord Advocate today asking her to adopt a similar public interest policy: that peaceful protestors who merely express support for Palestine Action should not be prosecuted under counter-terror laws.
He added:
Treating non-violent citizens as terrorists for a slogan is not proportionate policing; it is an abuse of extraordinary powers against ordinary people.
As Palestine Action has never perpetrated acts of violence, Amnesty International referred to the proscription as “unprecedented legal overreach”. Amnesty Scotland spoke favourably of Yousaf’s intervention:
We welcome this from @HumzaYousaf. As we have communicated to the Lord Advocate and chief prosecutors across the UK, people who are not inciting violence, but simply voicing outrage at the ongoing genocide in Gaza aren’t terrorists and there is no public interest in prosecution https://t.co/5sUHrPkoqs
— Amnesty Scotland (@AmnestyScotland) September 1, 2025
As reported by the BBC, Scotland’s solicitor general Ruth Charteris responded to him on behalf of the lord advocate, stating:
Whilst I recognise the fundamental right of people to protest within legal boundaries, it would not be an appropriate use of the lord advocate’s authority to issue a statement of prosecution policy of the type you request.
Furthermore, I would consider such a statement to be contrary to the lord advocate’s obligation to independently enforce the criminal law.
Featured image via Scottish Parliament
