Sunday, September 11, 2005
What to say about this? Simultaneously shocking and predictable.
Tony Blair is to be advised that one of the things he is to do should he wish to ameliorate Muslim "grievance" in the aftermath of the July 7th bombings is to ditch Holocaust Memorial Day -- offensive to Muslims don't you know. Oh, and don't ban the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, after all, they don't advocate targeting Britain.
If there were ever an indicator that the rising tide of Muslim immigration to Europe has brought along with it many evils, and that among those evils are what has become a deep and abiding Jew hatred -- a feeling of animosity toward Jews -- as one of the defining pillars of a culture, then this is it. There are undoubtedly many good Muslim citizens in Britain who are embarrassed by this. They must make their voices heard louder.
Instead we're hearing from people like Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who, along with his group, the Muslim Council of Britain, boycotted the remembrance earlier this year and welcomes the finding, and we're hearing all sorts of false equivalencies like "the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia" -- as though the existence of a Holocaust Memorial Day harms any other grievance group's issue, real or imagined.
This isn't a Jewish issue. Where are the rest of you? After the Saturday people, it will be the Sunday people's turn (or the no day people). Appeasement and appeal to the worst aspects of a community will just result in more and worse. This is something -- and whether the recommendations are adopted or not, they are reflective of a very serious and disturbing truth -- that all people, regardless of faith (Christian, Jew, Muslim, Atheist, Hindu, etc...), should be disturbed by.
Times Online: Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair by Abul Taher
They want to replace it with a Genocide Day that would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths.
The draft proposals have been prepared by committees appointed by Blair to tackle extremism. He has promised to respond to the plans, but the threat to the Holocaust Day has provoked a fierce backlash from the Jewish community.
Holocaust Day was established by Blair in 2001 after a sustained campaign by Jewish leaders to create a lasting memorial to the 6m victims of Hitler. It is marked each year on January 27.
The Queen is patron of the charity that organises the event and the Home Office pays £500,000 a year to fund it. The committees argue that the special status of Holocaust Memorial Day fuels extremists’ sense of alienation because it “excludes” Muslims.
It doesn't exclude Muslims. Muslims exclude themselves from it.
This is great: the task force on how to combat extremism recommends, "More dhimmi groveling and appeasement."
The rest of the Times piece, which is a highly recommended and short read, is in the extended entry as Times articles expire quickly as I recall.
“The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others. It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit.”
The recommendation, drawn up by four committees including those dealing with imams and mosques, and Islamaphobia and policing, has the backing of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain.
He said: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’, and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.”
Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpal, said: “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me.”
The committees are also set to clash with Blair on his proposal to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamic group. Government sources say they will argue that a ban is unjustified because the group, which is proscribed in much of the Middle East, neither advocates nor perpetrates violence in the UK.
A Home Office spokesman said it would consider the proposals for a separate Genocide Day for all faiths but emphasised that it regarded the Holocaust as a “defining tragedy in European history”.
Mike Whine, a director of the British Board of Deputies, said: “Of course we will oppose this move. The whole point is to remember the darkest day of modern history.”
Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside and a Holocaust Memorial trustee, said: “These Muslim groups should stop trying to evade the enormity of the Holocaust.”
The seven committees finalise their recommendations today at St George’s House, Windsor, and will submit them to Blair and Charles Clarke, the home secretary, on September 22.
* The defintion given in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide has two elements - a 'mental' one meaning "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such" and a physical element which includes 5 acts:-
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
A crime must include both elements to be called genocide.
If this is the working definition, it's clear that while the Nazi Holocaust should be called a genocide since there was clear intent to destroy an entire people, some of the examples cited by the Muslim working party don't fit. For example, Russian atrocities in Chechyna have been horrendous but this is an independence struggle, not an attempt by Russia to wipe-out Chechens. Similarly with Bosnia - it's a strange form of genocide that gives safe passage to women and children.
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* The Egyptians massacred thousands of Yemenis with its first steps at using poison gas.
* The tens of thousands massacred in Hamma in Syria by the father of "Harley Street optician" Bashir.
* There is the massacre of Christians by Arafat and his PLO in Damour in Lebanon in 1976, and certainly not the only incident there, which Europe and the Christian world practically turned its back on.
* Add the Pakistani genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh - perhaps the forgotten genocide of the twentieth century in which the Pakistani army bayoneted, shot and killed around one million Bengali civilians in order to destroy the Bangladesh independance movement.
* We can also commemorate the million Europeans in Algeria driven from their homes by murderous jihadists in the early 1960s; and the ongoing persecution of Hindus and Christians in Pakistan; and the million plus Southern Europeans (plus a few Cornish folk incidentally) kidnapped into slavery by Muslim slave traders; and the decline in the Christian population of Palestine down from 20% to 3% in only a few decades.
Londonistan is by far the more timely and more apt assignation. To simply refer to 'London', without qualification, is to be extraordinarily naive.
For a set of substantial and probative essays on that topic, also reflective of the West more generally, the current (Sept. 05) issue of The New Criterion is, without exaggeration, nothing less than superb. Perhaps the best single set of essays I've read in the last four years.