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Goebbels grotto revisited
Melanie Phillips-
Monday 24th Jan 2005
So now we start to see their true colours. The Muslim Council of Britain is getting bolder about expressing the crude anti-Jewish prejudice which it has previously been at such pains to conceal.
The Sunday Times reported that the MCB was boycotting this week’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz because it claimed it was not ‘racially inclusive ‘and did not commemorate the 'victims of the Palestinian conflict':
‘Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has written to Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, saying the body will not attend the event unless it includes the “holocaust” of the Palestinian intifada. He said similar events held in other European countries was an “inclusive day” that commemorated deaths in Palestine, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, as well as the former Nazi death camps. “We wrote to the Home Office three or four weeks ago. We said the issue of the Holocaust is not really the concern. But we have now expressed our unwillingness to attend the ceremony because it excludes ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine,” he said.’
With these remarks, Sacranie reveals various truly appalling attitudes. First and foremost is his deep contempt for Jews, his deliberate insult to the memory of the six million Jewish dead at the hands of the Nazis and his denial of the Shoah as a unique crime. On the Today programme this morning (0715) Sacranie disingenuously twisted and turned. The report had been ‘misleading and distorted’, he claimed. The MCB was not boycotting the event, just displaying its ‘unwillingness to attend’. The MCB stood alongside British Jews, he claimed, in their ‘pain and anguish’ at the ‘evil crime’ of the Holocaust. Yet in his reported comments he revealed he was not acknowledging what the Holocaust actually was, a crime against the Jewish people unique in its nature and scale, but wished instead to appropriate, universalise and minimise it.
Holocaust remembrance does not encompass all incidents of mass murder or all brutality in the world. It does not diminish our outrage at such events to commemorate as a distinct episode in the history of human infamy the attempt to wipe out the entire Jewish people from the face of the earth; on the contrary, it is only by understanding the aspects of the Holocaust against the Jews that were sui generis that our moral sensibilities can be educated in the pathological excesses of the human psyche so that we can respond more sensitively to all tyranny, cruelty or sadism, whatever form it takes.
In addition Sacranie grossly and grotesquely libels Israel, the country formed from the ashes of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in Arab countries and elsewhere, by accusing it of ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians and thus equating Israel with the Nazis, the form of Holocaust denial de jour in our morally degraded times and the current stock-in-trade of Jew-haters from all points of the compass. Israel, it should not need saying (but tragically does) is not committing genocide, as is patently obvious to anyone looking at Palestinian society going about its daily business. All Israel is doing – all it has ever done – is attempt to defend itself from being annihilated and its citizens murdered by Sacranie’s co-religionists, who regularly express a desire not only to obliterate Israel but to kill Jews wherever they find them. Incidents of rough treatment or humiliation of Palestinians by Israel do occur, are reprehensible and should be punished. But in the context of a 50-year existential war waged against it, following half a century of attempted ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Palestine before that, Israel has behaved overall with a restraint that would not be found in any other country in the world.
Holocaust denial is a modern form of Jew-hatred. Sacranie’s prejudice should therefore attract opprobrium. But now look at the reported response of the Home Office to his demand:
‘Home Office officials have told the council, which represents more than 350 Muslim organisations, that they are considering the request. But officials have no plans to broaden the remit of the occasion because they fear it would infuriate the Jewish community’ [my emphasis].
So faced with a revolting example of Holocaust denial, does the British government respond by sharply rebuking the bigot and declaring robustly that the Holocaust was a unique crime against the Jewish people? It does not. Instead it implies it would indeed dilute its message if the Jewish community wouldn’t make a fuss.
What is the point of the British government instituting Holocaust Day when it itself does not seem to grasp either the significance of the event it commemorates or the emergence of fresh anti-Jewish prejudice?
Maybe, one might think in desperation, this doesn’t really reflect the Labour government’s view. Maybe it was merely a rogue response by some morally challenged official. Alas; read on:
‘This weekend the boycott by the leaders of Britain’s 1.2m Muslims was condemned by Khalid Mahmood, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. “I’m proud to be a Muslim. But if people are boycotting this then I think it’s a mistake. People who were exterminated in the Holocaust were not just Jews. There were Romany gypsies as well. Anybody who is interested in human rights should support this remembrance.” ’
So to this Labour MP, Muslims should turn up to the Holocaust Day ceremony because other people than Jews were murdered by the Nazis, too. So the Jewish victims - the main victims - can be air-brushed out of the remembrance. Anyone ‘interested in human rights’ can safely turn up because there were enough victims from other ethnic groups to ignore the Jews altogether.
To repeat -- Mahmood is a Labour MP. This vileness is what the Labour party - which never stops stuffing its ‘anti-racism’ and ‘social inclusion’ down our throats - has now descended to.
And from the mainstream media - total silence.
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Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She is best known for her controversial column about political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail.
http://www.melaniephillips.com
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