From Ha'aretz:
Advisers appointed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair are proposing that Britain get rid of Holocaust Memorial Day because Muslims find it offensive, the British Sunday Times reported.
The draft proposals - which provoked a backlash from British Jewish leaders - want to replace Holocaust Memorial Day with a Genocide Day that would include recognition of Muslim deaths in the West Bank and Gaza, Chechnya and Bosnia, the Times said.
A Home Office spokesman said it would consider the proposals but said it regarded the Holocaust as a "defining tragedy in European history," according to the report.
"The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims," a member of one of the committees was quoted as saying. "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."
I can see the argument (though I'm not saying I agree with it) for replacing Holocaust Memorial Day with Genocide Day, especially because Britain played no direct role in the Holocaust. But to do so because "Muslims find" Holocaust Memorial Day "offensive" is, to say the least, offensive in itself. Even worse is the idea that a new "Genocide Day" would include "Muslim deaths in the West Bank and Gaza," thus giving credence to the absurd contention that Israeli policies in those areas amount to "genocide," and thus replacing a memorial to victims of the Holocaust with the fantastical political propaganda of those whose political ancestors (e.g., the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini) allied with the Nazis.
There is a significant liberal and significant conservative anti-Semitic element in most Western European countries. In many cases, they would even ally against the European Jews and/or Israelis and in support of Muslims or Palestinian Arabs, even if there is clear evidence of anti-Semitic intent. It would not surprise me if some of them quietly cheer on the suicide bombers in the darkness of their ideological caverns.
There are such people here, but in smaller percentage. Pat Buchanan has made some odd statements before, and certainly there is a number of progressives who buy into the Palestinian liberation movement wholesale, complete with accusations of Israel of genocide. Their reasoning may be different (some extreme lefties see this as world struggle, while Buchanan is just an anti-Semitic isolationist), but the result is the same.
And yes, I realize that the last sentence needs an adjective far stronger than "wrongheaded."
Not true.
When the Germans took control of the British Channel Islands, the local police helped to round up dozens of Jews who were then shipped to concentration camps and killed. There was an SS camp on Alderney with slave labourers.
The doco on PBS, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State had some of the original german propaganda films showing how well the german soldiers were getting along with a British bobby.
By the way, my grandfather fought on the British side in this war in a Canadian regiment. My only interest here is in reminding people of a historic fact that is too often and too conveniently forgotten: The British invented concentration camps and used them to kill women and children in order to win an otherwise hopeless guerrilla war.