Those clever people appointed by the government to look into how to stop some Muslim youth turning to Islamist terrorism have come up with one of their first bright ideas.
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.
…..“The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others. It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit.”
Sends out the wrong signal? I wonder what kind of signal is sent out by senior Muslims comparing the dreadful policies of successive Israeli governments in the occupied territories with the systematic murder of six million Jews? There are lots of words that could describe what has happened in Palestine, genocide isn’t one of them.
( Genocide the systematic killing of all the people from a national, ethnic, or religious group, or an attempt to do this)
And what message does it send that the list of ‘genocides’ against Muslims comprises Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia. What about Kurdistan? What about Sudan? If we are to have the suggested ‘Genocide Day’ than surely we would have to remember the Armenian massacres too wouldn’t we?
I’m not at all sure why Britain, sixty years after the events, took it upon itself to suddenly have its own national memorial day for the holocaust but the notion that we should scrap it because remembering the horrors of the extermination camps is offensive to Muslims is, I would like to think, truly offensive to most British Muslims.
And here is a little prediction – the line “It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit.” will become the fall-back position for the likes of Sir Iqbal Sacranie every time they face something that they are uncomfortable with.
