Holocaust commemoration offensive to UK Muslim spokespersons

The Sunday Times today carries this wonderful account of how unnamed committees of Muslims appointed by no less than Tony Blair are proposing that the UK should scrap what the paper astonishingly calls "the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day" because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims. Yes, that's right. Having a day to commemorate the unparalleled industrialised murder of not just six million Jews, but also all the mentally and physically disabled, Gypsies and gays the Nazis could find is not only "Jewish" but it is offensive to Muslims.

Even better, these strangely anonymous committees and their strangely anonymous spokespersons have got a proposal:

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.

So there's a genocide involving the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine is there? Well, I wonder where the evidence of that is? Because we're constantly being told that the evil Israelis have only withdrawn from Gaza because of their racist plans to ensure that Israel stays demographically Jewish in the phase of the burgeoning Palestinian and Israeli Arab population growth.

But we do get two names of prominent Muslims who back this proposal here. And of course one of them has already established something of a track record of saying some surprising things about Jews and the Holocaust Memorial Day.

The recommendation, drawn up by four committees including those dealing with imams and mosques, and Islamaphobia and policing, has the backing of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

He said: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’, and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.”

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.”

Interesting definition of genocide from Mr Ibrahim Hewitt there. It seems to be that he's either claiming that 500 sets of buildings razed constitutes genocide, or he is claiming that there are some hundreds of Palestinian villages besides the famous Deir Yassin and the decidedly controversial Tantura for which the Palestinians have been claiming genocidal massacres for years.

But just as interesting is the account the Sunday Times reporter, one Mr Abul Taher, gives us for the origins of Holocaust Memorial Day:

Holocaust Day was established by Blair in 2001 after a sustained campaign by Jewish leaders to create a lasting memorial to the 6m victims of Hitler. It is marked each year on January 27.

In fact as this makes clear, Holocaust Memorial Day is the result of some years of action by governments on both sides of the Atlantic, and including many European nations to take action to commemorate the Holocaust as part of fighting racism and anti-semitism, and perhaps residual guilt also had something to do with it. The final agreement which established Holocaust Memorial Day was signed up to by 44 nations.

So who is Mr Taher, and how can the Sunday Times account for his lamentably inaccurate account of the origins of the day, which just happens to make it look as if it was a purely Blair thing in response to sustained pressure from Jewish leaders?

Well, a little investigation turns up that in 2001, Mr Taher was editor of The Eastern Eye, an Asian newspaper. Then there's this quite extraordinary exchange Mr Taher had online with a Muslim dissident, which includes these contributions from our intrepid and entirely balanced reporter:

Are a lot of the people that write for you actually Muslims, or militant Christians or Jews masquerading behind Muslim names?

In yr writing, I sense a hatred of Islam that some would say is deeply racist, and has its basis in some paranoia that Islam is going to take over. It's like the classic fear of foreigners taking over - why?

 

Not surprisingly, the correspondent declined Mr Taher's request for his address and a photo.

And Mr Taher back in 2000 was a 25 year old student journalist who entered a competition to win a trainee position as a journalist with his story about his investigations about a simulated nuclear accident on a Royal Navy ship. He was at the time completing an MA in journalism at Sheffield University.

Hang on. Doesn't that sound just a bit familiar? We couldn't possibly have another Dilpazier Aslam type case on our hands, could we?

No, there's nothing so alarming as evidence that he was writing for Hizb u'Tahrir. But in 2001, he did write this story for the Independent on the motives of potential British jihadi suicide bombers, in which he repeatedly suggests that the problem is the West, and especially the United States. He doesn't fully agree with George Galloway, but that's the politician he quotes in support of his view that US and UK intervention in Afghanistan, at that time still controlled by the Taliban, will produce and recruit more suicide bombers for Bin Laden.

Comments

[Huldah]

Hmmmm!

Well, if Muslims want to remember genocides, perhaps we could include the deaths of heaven knows how many millions of Armenians at the hands of the Turks in 1915, and the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese African Christians and animists massacred by Arab Sudanese over the past few years in the genocide memorial. Noone need feel left out then!

[Jay Singh]

Are you sure that he was the editor at Eastern Eye? Or just a correspondent?

[Jay Singh]

It turns out that he was the news editor at Eastern Eye - not the general editor.

I stopped reading Eastern Eye a while back - the need to represent the politics and reality of the three main Asian communities in Britain - Hindu, Sikh and Muslim - puts a strain on its news agenda and coherence. I fight against racism and prejudice against Muslims tooth and nail - but I dont assent to an Islamist agenda that is knee jerk and tainted by a general hysteria towards the West and British society and makes excuses for Islamist excess of the suicide-bombing kind.

In short, I dislike being associated with such views simply because I happen to be Asian - nothing could be further from my reality than that. Abul Taher's reporting is Islamist in its style and rhetoric - his journalism and the extremists and the MCB types are hand in glove.

[Judy]

Thank you Jay for this very interesting additional information. Do you have any real evidence of Taher's Islamism, other than the quotes featured in my story?

Anyway, he has long since left Eastern Eye. The interesting thing is the failure of the Sunday Times editorial staff to pick up obvious gross "inaccuracies" like his reference to the "Jewish Holocaust Day".

Huldah-- there's no limit to what one could add to the list, is there?

[Jay Singh]

Judy

I just have my instinct about him based on what I have read here and thw general tenor and stance of the Eastern Eye news pages in the past.

It is quite confusing though - the Sunday Times article is so egregious in what it says that it is diffcult to imagine how it could have done any favours to those who claim to be 'working against extremism' within these advisory groups.

That is the real story, about how such people could be appointed to positions in which they have the ear of government - their agenda is blatantly communal and their responses seem, to me, to be almost working in tandem with atrocity - do as we say or else. There is a strange and dark synchronicity that would run something like this: if you suicide bomb a few trains and buses in London, it will send such fear into the hearts of people that 'respectable' representatives will be able to extract concessions - in this case being the effective abolition of holocaust memorial day.

We have gone beyond the point of conventional politics of grievance - this is a much murkier and squalid double speak and (effective) blackmail we are dealing with - and any such concession would reward the suicide bombers and put those who make 'suggestions' in the strange position of having gained from the slaughter - to be generous lets say it makes their claims to be repulsed by the attacks seem at worst sinister, at best, cynical beyond propriety.

[Ripper]

Another example of how Britain is slip sliding her way into Dhimmitude. Where is Margaret Thatcher when you need her?

[Judy]

Ripper-- I actually think us bloggers might be able to do something useful in this area. We have good columnists too-- Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch are just two. It's good to be in their company.

[Liz]

Re: the claim of genocide, I would also suggest people check the numbers of Palestinians alive in 1948, when Isreal as we know it was created, and the numbers of Palestinians alive now.

Doesn't really speak to genocide, does it?

[Liz]

*Israel, obviously.

[Judy]

Liz -- er, no, but when were facts ever allowed to get in the way of a good political propaganda campaign?

[Lizzie]

I reckon we should just ask direct questions like that in response to any claims of genocide, rather than wind ourselves in circles trying to understand the "logic" of those who make such claims. In fact, I'm going to make a point of doing just that.

[Geoffrey]

Who, exactly, carried out the genocide against the Muslims? Where and when did this genocide take place? How many Muslims were killed in the course of this genocide?
What is required is evidence, not allegations. However, it is not unusual to find, if you look back at recent history, that the wilder the stories the Muslims disseminate, the more they are believed.
It is time they produced actual pictures of people being herded into killing machines, such as concentration camps, photographs of bodies being shovelled by the thousands into mass graves.... need I continue. All they know is to lie outrageously and to believe such lies.

[Judy]

Geoffrey-- even the extremely unsophisticated spokespersons of these unnamed committees try to be specific about which countries they claim genocides took place in. You may have noticed I was careful to refer to "Muslim spokespersons" in my story. I think it is wrong and unacceptable to assume that they stand for all Muslims. What seems to me to be the case is that particular (and well funded and organized) groups of Muslim extremists have gained increasing power thanks to the obtuseness of government policy makers who seem to have suckered themselves into regarding them as representatives. Muslims have been living in very large numbers in the UK since the 50s and 60s, and it is only in very recent years that these politicised and extremist groups have emerged. There was a time when much of our trade union movement (and many other movements besides) were being infiltrated by Trotskyist and other Marxist extremist groups. You may remember the Labour Party had quite a lot of bother with the Militant Tendency. Your generalisations about all Muslims are gross, unjustified and unacceptable.

[Lizzie]

Judy, of course they don't speak for all Muslims. My uncle and his wife are Muslim and they hate extremist Muslims. The extremists don't do the moderates any favours - they make their lives more difficult as non-Muslims are now more suspicious of them. It's just not fair. My uncle's wife has never been the burkha type, she prefers Western clothes and she's got gorgeous long hair. Her manner of dress has never stopped her practising her religion. I honestly don't see how it could.

[Grandma Lausch]

As most slaughters of Muslims in recent time - from the gassing of Kurds in Iraq to Darfur - are Muslim on Muslim genocides, I imagine Janjaweeds freeze in a minute of silence before carring on with murder and rape

[Judy]

Grandma Lausch-- but we don't seem to find it necessary to write as if Muslims whose who commit organized slaughter against other Muslims would behave any differently from say any group of Christian militias who slaughter other Christians (say in South America). Perhaps we should try to analyse and describe the ideologies and practice of Janjaweeds in relation to those groups as well as Islamist ideology.