UK To Drop Holocaust Commemoration For PC Alternative?
Ynet reports,
Advisors appointed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the London bombings have proposed to cancel Holocaust Memorial Day, claiming it is offensive to the Muslim community, The Sunday Times reports.
While Blair has yet to respond to the proposal, the idea prompted a harsh response from the Jewish community.
According to the proposal, Holocaust Day would be replaced with Genocide Day, which would recognize the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths, the Times said.
The committee of advisors said the special status of Holocaust Day encourages a sense of alienation among extremists, as the day “excludes” Muslims.
Full story.
[Update] Judy K. writes,
[This] account only tells a fraction of what is really a story about spreading Islamists’ influence in UK policy making, which carries a distinctly anti-semitic bias.
Read more from Judy here.
how about the British remembering when they sent millions back to the concentration camps when Jews tried to escape for freedom to Palestine but the British just pulled out the white paper and had them murdered. The British f-everyone over the Muslims the hindus the african slave native american several times in history the brits expelled all of it Jews. This is just another example of far leftist nazism yes nazism red ken is a nazi and so are the people in the british government who suggested this moral relativism
What kind of crap is this….how the hell can Blair do that….”Offensive to the muslims” And its not offensive to us to cancel the day that remembers our grandparents and greatgrandparents!! Its only been 60 years since VE Day and the English are already trying to get it out of their minds.
Hopefuly that wouldn’t happen (but with Blair’s populism who knows?). However… I’m writing to my MP expressing my concern and disgust that cancelling the Holocaust commemoration has even being considered as a posibility.
Why don’t they just have Holocaust Memorial Day AND whatever other commemorative days people want — murder of Muslims, Bosnians, etc.? It’s ridiculous to point out that any one day leaves some other ppl out; that’s the whole point. Christmas leaves non-Christians out, but no one seems to have problems with that. I truly don’t see what anyone’s rationale can be for considering Holocaust Memorial Day offensive, in and of itself.
Well, Nazis might find it offensive.
“…encourages a sense of alienation among extremists.”
Extremists cultivate a sense of alienation with or without encouragement.
“mass murder in palestine” do me a fucking favour. i really hope they dont make the stupid mistake of cancelling it.
I’d respond to this in more detail but I am too busy mass murdering Muslims in Palestine. Dang yo! Mass murder is hard, hard work.
The Jewschool headline is, by the way, wrong — it’s not true that UK To Drop Holocaust Commemoration. What is true is that a Sunday Times story has an unnamed government-appointed committee recommending to the government that it drop Holocaust commemoration — the YNetNews story provided is just covering what the Sunday Times said.
For more on the racist bias of the Sunday Times story, incidentally, see here.
It is a bit sick that they only concentrate on Jewish suffering. What about the 10 million killed in the Congo by the Belgians? Or the tens of millions killed by Marxism?
It is a bit sick that they only concentrate on Jewish suffering.
You will be happy, then, to learn that they don’t only concentrate on Jewish suffering — that is only the spin put on the issue by the racist Sunday Times report.
What they do concentrate on is the massive genocide in Europe, which is where the UK is located, and the ending of which was the UK’s most significant military effort, ever. To learn more about Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Trust, suggest you check out this very good FAQ.
The site says “The central focus for Holocaust Memorial Day remains the Holocaust”, which, given it’s name, isn’t too surprising. Other genocides seem to be reduced to a supporting cast – quite surprising given the far greater number of deaths under Mao and Leopold etc.
Other genocides seem to be reduced to a supporting cast… Er, yes. By George, you’ve got it! This is the Holocaust Memorial Day.
Now, this is clearly very complex and difficult to understand, so I will spell it out slooowly:
The Nazis. Didn’t. Only. Kill. Jews.
The Brits. Went to War. Against Nazism.
The Nazis. Didn’t. Only. Kill. Jews.
News to anyone working with the majority of Jewish Holocaust memory, to the various homosexuals (including this writer) who have gotten pissed off in HaShoah museums and listening to Real Estate arguments, and to the Roma who, unlike the Jews, are still exactly where the world left them more than a half century ago.
This is a thread in which people are outraged that more victims are remembered instead of less, and in the contet of a discussion in which “holocaust Denial” is in practice “Quibbling over Jewish Victim Tallies” — there’s never been anything wrong with quibbling over goyish victims.
News to anyone working with the majority of Jewish Holocaust memory, to the various homosexuals (including this writer) who have gotten pissed off in HaShoah museums and listening to Real Estate arguments, and to the Roma who, unlike the Jews, are still exactly where the world left them more than a half century ago.
Oh, tell me about it. The Jews are so damn sensitive about the whole thing! Go and kill most of ’em, and the surviving ones get all whiny about wanting to remember it as a genocide and all that.
Seriously, though, a suggestion: instead of tearing down — metaphorically — what’s out there, go out and fucking build something more. There’s lots of room out there. Pissed off in “HaShoah museums”? Go make another.
For the perplexed, this discussion was about the UK Holocaust Memorial Day, a commemoration of a singular event in British and European history. And good news! They’d love you to organize an event. Local gay activists, Roma activists, goyish-victim activists, this is only one of the hundreds of big opportunities that are out there every single day.
I don’t know. I, for one, feel our attempt to universalize our Holocaust was ill-fated to start with, and am not surprised when it faces serious obstacles and resentments.
Perhaps I am a bit old fashioned (say, pre Holocause Museum of Washington, DC) but I am more concerned about those attempting to kill Jews than I am about killing Holocaust Day, as I don’t subscribe to the view that the latter will do a damn thing to prevent the former.
YES! Tony Blair has done a brave thing, considering how many reactionary Jews who feel entitled to their monopoly on suffering are always at the ready to accuse people of forgetting how much the world owes them, personally. It’s the same people who thought of putting the figure 6 million on those “never forget” bumper stickers when TEN MILLION PEOPLE died in the Holocaust. Also the same people who, because they were such big donors to my private high school, were able to forbid the lighting of 4 more candles (one for each million) at the Holocaust Rememberance program each year.
The attitude that our suffering is more valid than their suffering is the kind of attitude that promotes future genocide. The Holocaust museum in DC opened the same year of the world’s deafening silence on the topic of Rwanda.
What exactly is it that we’re never supposed to forget? Because, while some act like it’s the fact that they’re entitled to the world’s endless eggshell-walking, I really think it’s the more important fact that moral laziness can be devastating, or perhaps that it’s a terrible mistake to think of groups of people as faceless masses, or maybe even that relatively subtle “us”-“them” lines, once drawn, become licenses to kill when enough people start thinking of “them” as the enemy.
A divisive Holocaust memorial day is not any kind of memorial day. Keeping the Holocaust Jewish is selfish and ridiculous.
Keeping the Holocaust Jewish is selfish and ridiculous. Selfish? Ridiculous? Well, if you’re going to take that tone — look, they killed most of the European Jews. The handful who survived feel entitled to mark it. Last time I checked, that was allowed. Gays, Roma, Slavs, White Rose descendants, and anybody the hell else who wants to have exactly the same rights, ability, and prerogative. This is not a zero-sum game.
The attitude that our suffering is more valid than their suffering is the kind of attitude that promotes future genocide. Oh, please. The only attitude here is: we are going to take the time to mark our suffering because it just happened and it was a big fucking deal. Everyone is free to do what they like, including marking whatever suffering they feel appropriate. It’s the same people who thought of putting the figure 6 million on those “never forget” bumper stickers when TEN MILLION PEOPLE died in the Holocaust. I think they were talking about the 6 million people who died that they were related to. BILLIONS OF PEOPLE have died the world over, and commemorating a few of them does certainly not mean that the rest did not die too.
The Holocaust museum in DC opened the same year of the world’s deafening silence on the topic of Rwanda. Yeah — if only they hadn’t opened that Holocaust museum. Then you would have seen some real traction on Rwanda. ‘Cause there’s a causal relationship there. (Sorry. But I get really fed up with this whole all-or-nothing attitude.)
The whole point of museums and monuments to the Holocaust is to memorialize the crime against humanity that it was. Last time I checked, Jews are part of humanity, and institutions like the Holocaust museum and Yom HaShoah educate the public about these horrific tragedies in order to prevent further genocide. This is why, if the above commenters had half a brain, they’d realize that the Save Darfur Coalition is being led by Elie Wiesel and the founding board of the Holocaust Museum. One genocide does not preclude others, it is meant to instill values in a society to never let any other holocausts happen again.
Of course, they have, and they continue to, because you can’t JUST build a building or declare a date in the calendar. It’s supposed to spur us to greater action–this is where the failure has been.
The Holocaust was the largest-scale crime against humanity the world has seen to this date. You wanna fight me on this one? It’s why the UN itself was founded! It’s where we get the modern discourse on human rights, the Geneva Convention as we know it! It’s a Jewish tragedy, but it’s also a human tragedy, and its commemoration SHOULD inspire us to act against genocide and injustice everywhere.
Getting rid of Yom HaShoah misses the point entirely.
Dede,
How do you know that educating people about the Holocaust will prevent a holocaust? I just don’t see that knowing about the holocaust prevents further holocausts.
Look at the Anfal campaing of Hussein against the Kurds. No one cared. The U.S. supported him during that period.
Hussein learned the lesson of the holocaust – that no one will care, but missed a qualifying condition – as long as you don’t act aggressively towards other neutral states.
I don’t think people always learn what we want them too.
No one will ever learn, as long as all we do is have Holocaust museums and Holocaust commemoration days. These things are supposed to lead towards a movement to greater consciousness and activism against global oppression. But they don’t–and that’s our fault, partially. As survivors and victims of anti-semitism, we should know better than to stay silent when others are being oppressed, otherwise all we’ve learned from the Holocaust is how to stay in that slave mentality.