“Muslims can’t stand the thought of Holocaust commemorations, because, with certain honorable exceptions, Islam’s attitudes toward the Jews frequently mirror those of the Nazi killers.” Don Feder offers his insights into the MCB’s proposal that Holocaust Memorial Day should be broadened out into a Genocide Day.

Front Page Magazine, 27 September 2005

In fact, Holocaust Memorial Day is often observed as a more general commemoration of the victims of genocide. The event I attended this year included a gay men’s choir and a speaker on the mass killings in Rwanda as well as a Jewish survivor of the Nazi extermination camps.

It’s also worth remembering that when the idea of a Holocaust Memorial Day was flagged up in the late 1990s, it proved controversial not only among Muslims but also within the Jewish community in Britain. Left-wing Jews criticised it on the basis that it ignored or at least downplayed the existence of non-Jewish victims of genocide. Right-wingers opposed it because they claimed that the history of Jewish suffering under the Nazis was being harnessed to Labour’s “equalities agenda”. And ultra-orthodox Jews rejected it because they argued that the Holocaust was divine retribution on the Jewish people for their sins and that condemning it was to question God’s judgement.