[Mb-civic] Muslims and the Holocaust - Cathy Young - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Muslims and the Holocaust

By Cathy Young  |  September 19, 2005

RECENTLY IN England, four Muslim-staffed committees appointed to advise 
Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet on issues related to Islam 
have come up with a recommendation: Get rid of an official event viewed 
as offensive to Muslims. What event would that be? A celebration of the 
Crusades, perhaps? No, Holocaust Memorial Day.

In the words of one committee member, ''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."

That ''one people," of course, are the Jews.

The committees aren't exactly proposing that the Holocaust commemoration 
be scrapped outright. They want it to be folded into a ''Genocide 
Memorial Day" that will also include such crimes as the slaughter of the 
Tutsis in Rwanda and the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by the Milosevic 
regime.

Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, 
there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as 
a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as 
Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book ''The 
Holocaust in Historical Context," that ''a state set out, as a matter of 
intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically 
every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."

But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other 
''genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli 
killings of Palestinians.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/19/muslims_and_the_holocaust/
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