MONDAY was ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ (HMD). I attended a Jewish community event which was unconnected to HMD, but the organisers decided that this HMD prayer should be read out. It was written under the auspices of the HMD Trust by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Senior Imam Qari Asim. It includes lines such as:
‘In the horrors of that history, when so many groups were targeted because of their identity, and in genocides which followed, we recognise destructive prejudices that drive people apart.’
As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I was dismayed at this prayer. Commentator Daniel Ben-Ami says HMD ‘ought to be an occasion for sombre reflection on the systematic extermination of six million Jews’. Instead, the wording of the HMD Trust prayer is indicative of attempts to minimise the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people, implying that similar genocides against other minorities have taken place, or will take place. As Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust wrote recently, HMD is being used to ‘erode the uniquely Jewish experience of the Holocaust and to erase antisemitism from the narrative of the day’.
Indeed, because of this dilution of the Holocaust we have arrived at a situation whereby, in its long section covering HMD, ITV News failed to mention Jews in the list of groups persecuted during the Holocaust and published an apology only after furious complaints by Jewish organisations. Similarly, Deputy PM Angela Rayner failed to mention Jews in her HMD statement about ‘all those murdered’. She has not apologised for this omission.
Frank Furedi talks about the ‘debasement of the Holocaust’ and points out that ‘Holocaust inversion is rife among the anti-Israel crowd’. He also notes that the Islamic Human Rights Commission called for the boycott of HMD if it did not include Gaza in its list of ‘genocides’.
We must stop pandering to:
- the progressive narrative that all genocides are equal;
- the authorities who use the diversionary tactic of a notional ‘extreme right’ threat;
- those commentators who disgracefully find moral equivalence in what happened in the Shoah with Israel’s actions in Gaza, casting Jews as the new Nazis.
If not, how long before future HMD events and prayers are forced to include reference to the fake ‘Gaza genocide’ as demanded by the Islamists?
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