Hyperbole 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 250,000 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 Day—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 Day—a politically loaded term over which nations are still struggling to agree—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.”

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.”

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 day—despite 60 years of saying “never again”.

As for keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive—one of the prime reasons, I assume, for having a Holocaust Day in the UK—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 faiths”.

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?

Also posted at Englishman in New York.

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