How to Dishonour a Holocaust Survivor: Gad Saad takes on Gabor Maté, and exposes more than intended
Sid Shniad
How to Dishonour a Holocaust Survivor
Gad Saad takes on Gabor Maté, and exposes more than intended
Jan 28, 2026
Speaking in Tel Aviv on 23 January, Gad Saad ridiculed the idea that Gabor Maté, who was born in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, could be a Holocaust survivor.
To be sure, there is a general and a more restrictive interpretation of “Holocaust survivor”. The more general one considers any Jew who managed to remain alive under Nazi rule during the Second World War to be a Holocaust survivor. This definition is often expanded to also include any Jew who successfully managed to escape from territory under Nazi rule.
The more restrictive understanding comprises only Jews who were captured by the Germans and their allies yet managed to elude death. These are typically former concentration camp inmates.
It is the difference between those who successfully evaded capture while being hunted, and those who didn’t, yet emerged alive from the machinery designed and determined to kill them.
From the perspective of 2025 this may seem like a distinction without a difference. Yet I recall a Jewish friend, whose parents survived the camps, informing me that these distinctions were strictly respected among those who endured them.
Be that as it may, what these definitions have in common is that they apply to all Jews, without exception, who fall under one or the other category. This has also been the position taken by every Holocaust scholar, by every Holocaust museum, and in all Holocaust literature and art.
Enter Gad Saad, who works in the field of marketing (primarily of himself), yet likes to promote himself as a scientist.
Saad waded into the discussion about Holocaust survivors indirectly, motivated not by the question of how best to define and categorize Holocaust survivors, but rather by his ideological and political – and exceptionally personal and venomous – antipathy to a single individual, Gabor Maté.
Specifically, Saad is a devoted Israel flunkie who emits a constant stream of bigotry – primarily but by no means exclusively against Muslims – from his social media perch located on the very far right of the political spectrum. Maté, who like Saad is also Jewish, has in sharp contrast been an outspoken critic of Israel and the Gaza Genocide. In other words, Saad’s objective has been to invalidate the premise that Maté is speaking out against genocide from the perspective of a genocide survivor.
It is not in dispute that Maté, born in early 1944, experienced the Holocaust as an infant, entirely unaware of the monumental crimes unfolding around him. Nor that his mother, desperate to save him from certain death as the deportation of Hungary’s Jews reached a peak in mid-1944, placed him in the care of a stranger for a period of time.
Maté, a physician by training, has written that this “abandonment” by his mother, even though it occurred at such a young age that he has no conscious recollection of it, nevertheless produced a trauma which he has carried with him into adulthood. Multiple specialists have concurred that infants can indeed experience genuine trauma under such circumstances, and that it can produce lifelong ramifications.
Saad, the marketing specialist, has sought to repackage Maté’s experience as fraud. He has done so by seeking to redefine the definition of “survivor”, using criteria not employed anywhere else, least of all by Holocaust specialists. In Saad’s words, “”He [Maté] certainly was not a Holocaust survivor. To be a survivor you have to be cognizant and conscious of what happened”.
Elaborating on this point further, Saad argued that if Maté is a Holocaust survivor, then “I too am a Holocaust survivor because in 1943 I was a spermatozoa in my dad’s testicles”. For good measure, Saad likens Maté to an insect, denouncing him as a “wood cricket Jew”.
Quite apart from the gratuitous absurdity of the comparison, and Saad’s insistence on invoking an insect to insult a Jew living under Nazi occupation marked for extermination during the Holocaust, his historical knowledge is embarrassingly ignorant.
Specifically, Saad is of Syrian-Lebanese parentage. Both Syria and Lebanon were ruled by France as League of Nations mandates after the First World War, and after the fall of France in May 1940 came under the rule of the collaborationist Vichy regime. But the latter surrendered to invading British and Free French forces in 1941, after which the Axis and its subordinates had no further presence in these countries.
Even during the brief Vichy interlude, there was no Holocaust in either Lebanon or Syria. While Jews in these countries were subject to discrimination and exclusion by the Vichy regime, there was no campaign of persecution and killings similar to that in Europe. The Vichy authorities did build a detention camp in Lebanon, but those imprisoned in it were Jewish refugees from Europe, not Arab Jews like Saad’s father. So it remains unclear what the spermatozoa that became a very far-right bigot is supposed to have survived.
In fairness to Saad, in the same talk he also referred to the “mountains” of the Gaza Strip from which queers are thrown to their deaths by Palestinians. There is of course neither a mountain nor a policy of executing queers, or of throwing them to their deaths, in the Gaza Strip. But Saad invented all of this in order to make the argument that because Tel Aviv is a more LGBT-friendly city than Gaza City, queers are acting against their own self-interest by opposing the genocide perpetrated by Tel Aviv against Gaza.
This is Saad’s version – perhaps more accurately his distortion – of Barbara Oakley’s concept of “pathological altruism”, introduced in 2012, and which he has repackaged as “suicidal empathy”. Saad’s logic is about as sophisticated as taking the position that true democrats should support the years-long US saturation bombing of Vietnam and its illegal invasion of Iraq, because of these countries only the US holds regular elections.
As noted above, no one professionally engaged with the study or memorialisation of the Holocaust takes Saad’s proposition, that those unaware of their experience cannot qualify as survivors, in any way seriously. As I have pointed out elsewhere, if we accept Saad’s definition of survivor, this would automatically exclude not only infants, but also cognitively impaired children and adults.
If it is indeed the case that “To be a survivor you have to be cognizant and conscious of what happened”, infants and the cognitively impaired also cannot survive fires, natural disasters, school shootings, massacres, or other brushes with death. Those afflicted with Alzheimer’s or dementia can no longer survive a fire at their care facilities unless they understand what transpired. The utter absurdity of this is hiding in plain sight.
I was reminded of this issue when I came across an article by Melanie Lidman in the British newspaper, The Independent, published on 27 January, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and entitled “Born in a Concentration Camp: A Holocaust Survivor Tells Her Story for the First Time - Ilana Kantorowicz Shalem is One of the Youngest Holocaust Survivors After Being Born into The Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in March 1945”.
Upon reading the article, it dawned upon me that the woman in question is more than a year younger than Maté, but that Saad will neither dismiss nor insult her, nor mock her with references to the contents of his father’s testicles. For this to happen would require Kantorowicz Shalem, an Israeli citizen, to be a prominent critic of the genocidal apartheid state. Absent that she is safe.
At the conclusion of her article Lidman reports, “The median age of Holocaust survivors is 87, meaning most were very young children during the Holocaust.” Presumably a good many of these were also too young to qualify as Saad’s Survivors.
As noted above, Saad was speaking in Tel Aviv. Yet neither his host, the professional Israel flunkie Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, nor any member of the audience called him out for his Holocaust trivialization, or questioned his ridiculous assertions.
Rather, they praised and applauded. Because his depraved attacks questioning whether someone who survived the Holocaust is in fact a Holocaust survivor is good for the cause. The cause of genocide, of apartheid, and of the permanent dispossession of an entire people.
It is worth noting that Saad’s event in Tel Aviv was headlined by his hosts as “Gad Saad Reveals How To Stop Islam’s Takeover Of The West Forever!” He was, after all, in Israel to participate in an event described thus by an Israeli newspaper: “Global Far Right Flocks to Jerusalem to Bash Muslims and Migration at Israel’s Antisemitism Confab”. The keynote speaker was none other than the wanted international fugitive Binyamin Netanyahu.
In nearly every public appearance, Saad likes to assert that the worst ideas emerge from universities, and that the main culprits are university professors. As might be expected, he consistently offers this statement without a hint of self-awareness, a hint of self-reflection, or a hint of irony.