My Holocaust is Bigger than your Holocaust
ByHyperbole and inaccuracy notwithstanding, I had some sympathy with the calls to scrap the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day as reported in the Sunday Times at the weekend:
ADVISERS appointed by Tony Blair after the London bombings are proposing to scrap the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims.
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.
Of course, the advice was bound to be greeted in certain American quarters with the usual Europscepticism/phobia. But I had to ask myself, why does the UK need a Holocaust Memorial Day? This national day (which is not a public holiday) was only instituted in 2001. And it has little to do with Britain itself, apart from the fact that just over 250,00 Jews live there.
More than 5.5 million Jews live in the US, yet to the best of my knowledge America does not have an official Holocaust Memorial Day. Israel, on the other hand, has been marking Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom HaShoah) since the 1950s. It’s a national holiday. A day of remembrance. And quite rightly so. Israel is a Jewish State. The Holocaust is a largely Jewish tragedy.
When I was at school in England we marked Holocaust Memorial Day on the same day as Israel (the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar). Why can’t Jews around the world share this day as their memorial day? Why, in the UK, do we need an official Government stamp of approval? A Holocaust Memorial Day Mk II?
The only other countries that officially mark Holocaust Day are Germany, Italy and Poland—two fascist powers during the Second World War and one, the setting for the death camps and a country which itself suffered a huge death toll at the hands of the Nazis (6 million Poles were murdered, 20% of the population, half of them Jews).
As for the idea of replacing Holocaust Day with Genocide Dayâ€â€well, surely that would be to belittle the horrors of genocide further still. It would become what it already is, a political tool used by religions and races to beat each other over the head with for decades to come. The Sunday Times nicely illustrates the point with its loaded second par about wanting to “recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths†as part of a Genocide Day.
Surely no one is claiming that Palestine and Chechnya are examples of genocide? That they rival the scale and intent of a Holocaust, a Bosnia, a Darfur, or a Rwanda? And if we are going to start talking about mass murder, what about the innocent Muslims and non-Muslims murdered by terrorists in the name of Islam over the past decade? Where do you draw the line?
It is one thing to use national holidays to mark events like world wars that moved nations. It is another to mark a country’s independence. But to institute a Genocide Dayâ€â€a politically loaded term over which nations are still struggling to agreeâ€â€is not only to denigrate the memory of those who died, it is to reduce their deaths to a political sum.
Take these two quotes from the Times piece as an example:
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.â€Â
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.â€Â
It’s a slanging match that drowns out the cries of the tens of millions of people who have been killed in genocides. And, in my opinion, it goes no way towards preventing such acts in the future. They happen to this dayâ€â€despite 60 years of saying “never againâ€Â.
As for keeping the memory of the Holocaust aliveâ€â€one of the prime reasons, I assume, for having a Holocaust Day in the UKâ€â€I doubt there is an event in the 20th century that has been more documented, dramatized, argued and agonized over, than the Holocaust.
The Home Office has said that it will not replace Holocaust Memorial Day. But, alas, it is considering the proposals for a “Genocide Day for all faithsâ€Â.
Get ready to start carving up the British calendar: January 28 Genocide Day; January 29 Victims of Terrorism Day; January 30 Occupied Territories Day; January 31 Israeli Security Day; February 1, Every Man Has His Day; February 2, Every Woman Has Her Day; February 3, Every Child Has Its Day. Do I need to continue?
9 Comments
September 14th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
Ok, I started out disagreeing with you, and ended up agreeing with you. How’s that for a successfully written piece? For me, the real tragedy is that once people have died, and moved beyond all the labels, politics, and territorial nonsense that our human life entails, they still have to be labeled, politicized, and grouped together as victims of this or victims of that. No easy answer here, except that human death by violent means is a tragedy in and of itself. Unfortunately, human beings (myself included) aren’t wired to see things like that. Let’s face it, a vast majority of those whose deaths would be memorialized under any such “day” would be those of strangers — will it make us mourn their death more to know they were on our “side”? And should it?
September 15th, 2005 at 3:23 am
I started out agreeing with Paul and ended up more so. To be honest I wasn’t keen on the Holocaust Memorial Day from the outset. It’s typical a Clintonite/Blairite facade of compassion, as though I couldn’t care without some hollow ceremony attended by the mayor and “community” “group” “leaders” Also, what’s it got to do with us. My grandparents, like yours no doubt, fought on the side that put a stop to the holocaust in the Royal Navy, Royal Artillery and WRVS.
That said, that the people opposed here are opposed for the reasons they claim speaks volumes.
September 15th, 2005 at 10:48 am
Thanks to the two of you. I’m still holding my breath waiting to see who I may have offended with these thoughts…
September 15th, 2005 at 12:54 pm
Hi,
I consider myself an honorary Jewess (my husband is Jewish), and I am not offended! It’s absolutely appropriate that Germany, Poland and Italy should have this holiday, but the Brits? My husband, who is very proud of his Jewish heritage and whose grandparents were survivors, also agrees.
Besides, as I’ve traveled quite a bit and haven’t always had a Jewish surname, I’ve discovered that the world is rampant with anti-semitism and I’m not sure that Holocaust education is helping this battle as much as the Jewish community would like. Perhaps people need to know a bit more about Jewish culture, heritage and history apart from the Holocaust. Of course, there is no need to make a day of it.
September 15th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Ok, allow me to be the contrarian here. In principle Paul, you’re right — there should be no distinctions amongst historical atrocities. They’re all bad. Start commemorating one, and who knows where it’ll end up?
But due to the scale of the Holocaust, the fact that it was an industrialized killing perpetrated in the heart of the most advanced, ‘civilized’ country on earth, and because it carries with it important lessons (beyond just ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘don’t kill’ stuff) that remain valuable today, it is particularly worthy of commemoration as an educational excercise.
That said, that doesn’t mean Britain needs to commemorate it with a national day. But what bothers me about this whole thing is not that Britain might eliminate a holiday that’s only a few years old, but the motivations that lie behind it. This is coming from Muslims, and not because they care so much about fairness and equality, but because denigrating the magnitude of the Jewish tragedy serves their political interests. It weakens one of the key arguments for the existence of Israel and helps to balance in the public imagination the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians thanks to Arab rejectionism and Jewish eagerness, and the concerted effort of the Nazis to eliminate every last Jew from the face of the planet. For this reason, Brits should be wary of caving to their demands.
September 15th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
I don’t think you’re being a contrarian at all! You said it yourself:
September 16th, 2005 at 9:29 pm
Bummer. I like being a contrarian.
September 21st, 2005 at 10:45 am
It’s not a British Holocaust day, it’s a European holocaust day. And it includes not just Jews but also Gypsies, handicapped, gays, poles and Slavs, amongst others.
Arguing that it is not inclusive is silly. It would be just as daft to complain that July 4 excludes Brits.
September 22nd, 2005 at 9:03 am
Offensive to Muslims? Please.
Rod Liddle in The Spectator – “Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the eminent chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, recently refused to attend the Holocaust memorial day. When asked why this was so, he muttered something about how lots of people had been killed all over the place, not least the poor Palestinians and why shouldn’t we remember them, etc., etc. In the liberal press, extravagant excuses were made for Sacranie and his ludicrous chef de cabinet, Inayat Bunglawala. But I suspect that the simple answer, the one we didn’t want to hear, is the most accurate: Sacranie and Mr Bunglawala don’t like Jews. They are both unequivocal anti-Semites. You do not refuse to grieve for one bunch of people because another, much smaller, bunch of people have been murdered as well.”