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.”

Arguing that it is not inclusive is silly. It would be just as daft to complain that July 4 excludes Brits.

That said, that doesn’t mean Britain needs to commemorate it with a national day.

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.

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.

That said, that the people opposed here are opposed for the reasons they claim speaks volumes.