US President Joe Biden has marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, warning against what he called an alarming rise in anti-Semitism after the Oct.7 Hamas attacks on Israel and efforts to minimise what happened that day, Reuters reports.

Biden, who launched the first US national strategy to counter antisemitism in May 2023, said the need to remember the Holocaust and the “scourge of anti-Semitism” was more pressing than ever.

“In the aftermath of Hamas vicious massacre, we have witnessed an alarming rise of despicable antisemitism at home and abroad that has surfaced painful scars from millennia of hate and genocide of Jewish people. It is unacceptable,” Biden said in a statement.

“We cannot remember all that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust experienced and then stand silently by when Jews are attacked and targeted again today,” he said, calling for forceful pushback against Holocaust denialism and “efforts to minimise the horrors that Hamas perpetrated on October 7, especially its appalling and unforgivable use of rape and sexual violence to terrorise victims”.