Muslims, the Holocaust and Liberty

I am expecting this to be a long entry. The papers today have been full of reports of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi camp in southern Poland where several million people were done to death by various means. I have today’s Evening Standard in front of me, with the banner headline “Never Again”, under which is a report of a ceremony at the camp itself attended by dignitaries from the UK (the foreign secretary Jack Straw and the Queen’s youngest son, Edward the Earl of Wessex), the US (Dick Cheney), Russia (Putin), Israel (president Moshe Katsav), France (Chirac), Ukraine (pres. Yushchenko) and Germany (president Horst Koehler).

I’m generalising here, but I think it’s fair to say that a lot of Muslims are not very sympathetic to this issue. There are known to be Muslims who own Holocaust denial literature issued by various “historical review” organisations, and others who repeat, as if they were true, the dubious claims of the infamous Arthur Koestler that the Jews of eastern Europe are, in fact, of Khazari Turkish origin and are entirely non-Semitic. I’ve got no time for this kind of attitude. This literature is only issued by fringe groups with known Nazi sympathies. Besides which, the “minimised” event they present (sometimes with a million and a half people killed!) is hardly an exoneration of the Nazi régime. For example, when someone asked David Irving how their sister, who died at one of the Nazi camps, died, he said that she probably died of typhus, like Anne Frank. The point is, if Hitler had not invaded their country and not removed them from their homes into insanitary camps, they would not have died.

People of non-European origin don’t have the sensitivity over the matter that we Europeans do, because the Holocaust isn’t part of their history. Nothing of the sort has ever taken place, as far as we know, anywhere except Europe. In Europe, denying the Holocaust is a sign of Nazi sympathies, or of hostility to Jews or one of the other groups targeted. Among non-European Muslims, it’s most likely to be a means of denying the legitimacy of Israel. As sympathetic as I am for this aim, it’s no reason to espouse a false history. Our part of the world has had a free press since the war, and I find it unbelievable that we could believe, for decades, a figure exaggerated by several million.

The Muslim Council of Britain has, perhaps, voiced the ambivalence many Muslims feel about this by calling for the day to be replaced by a “Genocide Memorial Day”. The problem here is that the event would still be connected with Auschwitz or some other symbol of the Nazi holocaust, because the death toll of the one genocide in which Muslims were the main victims (Bosnia) was only half of the most conservative (Nazi apologist) estimate in the Nazi genocide (nor have the Israelis carried out a genocide). What Muslims fear is that Holocaust commemorations increase sympathy for the Jews, and by extension, for Israel. One does not expect that the anti-immigrant newspapers who covered today’s event will let up in their hostility to Romanies, who also suffered (in less numbers, but perhaps in greater proportion to the Jews killed).

What this event should teach us is to prize liberty and to fear racism, not minorities or alleged fifth columns. Before Europeans (and others) were shaken up by revelations of what the Nazis had done, anti-Semitism was a fact of life in most of Europe. Yes, things were improving, the Tsars and their notorious discriminatory laws were gone, and people saw anti-Semitism as a sign of an undemocratic society, but the hardship caused by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles allowed people to find a group to blame, and in Germany, the Jews were a ready target (see Ernest Kolman’s letter in today’s Daily Telegraph). There had long been a “Jewish question” or a “Jewish problem”: how do we integrate a group which is visibly different, which regards itself as Jewish by nation and not, say, German or Polish, and which sees its homeland as Palestine, not Europe? In the UK similar suspicion had fallen on Catholics, and some openly voiced fears of granting the vote to the minority of Catholics for fear that they would persecute the “heretic” Protestants. The long history of suspecting minority groups, particularly those with ties to other countries, had made people willing to accept openly racist policies.

In our time, people are willing to accept plainly oppressive and discriminatory laws against other groups: the old target of Romanies, and Muslims. The recent anti-headscarf laws in France and Germany are plainly designed to outlaw the visible signs of a minority group, while allowing the majority to dress as they like. What nobody mentions is that France is the only country which was forced out of a Muslim country it had occupied, and that many of France’s Muslims come from that country: Algeria. The notion that this is a cowardly way of getting back at the Algerians who rightly kicked them out is so often lost in the discussion of whether girls in headscarves are compatible with a secular state’s school system. (By the way, French people reading this, if your national integrity is threatened by teenage girls, you are a really quite pathetic nation. You lost when you fought men, so you attack young women instead. Shame on you.)

In some German states, similar legislation affects women in the civil service, including school teachers (but not, so far, pupils). Again, it seems that a group is being set up to be seen as the excluded other, even if they are citizens. This is a worrying trend, because Jews were excluded (explicitly, not with thin pretences like these) from positions of influence in the past. In our country, the Labour government wants to bring in a system of what amount to Apartheid-style banning orders: people will be confined in their homes (possibly their houses, excluding the garden!), or forbidden from meeting people, or from using telephones or the Internet. Winston Churchill warned – in the election after the end of the war, in which he faced a Labour challenger, Clement Attlee, who promised to introduce the comprehensive welfare system proposed in a report by the (Liberal) lord Beveridge – that the Labour party’s programme would result in the introduction of a Gestapo. People were outraged by this, and voted Labour, kicking out the person who had just led them against Hitler. It seems amazing that, while Churchill’s threat then was proved wrong, it seems to be coming true under Blair. We are faced with legislation the like of which has not been seen anywhere in the English-speaking world apart from Apartheid South Africa. (Former British diplomat Brian Barder, writing in the Guardian, also sees this similarity.)

And all for what? Because of a terrorist threat which has not materialised. Our government got an opt-out from the European Human Rights convention due to our close links with the USA (which we chose!) to imprison people, based on “secret evidence” (there’s another reason besides protecting informers why people want to keep “evidence” secret, which is that it’s just supposition, or otherwise inadequate, or non-existent). We are faced with ID cards; the USA, which has actually had an attack, isn’t. We are faced with laws which would allow the state to simply imprison people for whatever reason it chose – any so-called troublemaker. The only terrorism we have seen since the end of the IRA campaign has come from dissident Irish republicans, the Nazi nut David Copeland, and animal rights freaks with their campaign of intimidation against guinea-pig farmers and their acquaintances.

So, I don’t think we should boycott this event. It’s a reminder of where racism and suspicion of minorities leads. There’s a big difference between trying to prevent people using it to raise support for Israel (or Israeli policy) and boycotting it altogether, passing up an opportunity to remind people not to fall for bigotry and for politicians who use it.