The logo of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Today, the 27th January is National Holocaust Memorial Day. It is the day that the British state remembers the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust and those who have perished in other genocides or democides such as in Rwanda and Cambodia.
This date was chosen to mark the day, 72 years ago, when the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz was liberated by the 332nd Rifle Brigade of the Soviet Army. The Russians found 7,000 sick and dying people who had been left behind by the Germans when they evacuated the camp in mid January 1945 and led the majority of the prisoners on a death march towards Germany itself. The liberation of Auschwitz and a large number of other Nazi death camps, revealed to the world the bestiality and cruelty of the Nazi regime. It has been estimated by the United States Holocaust Museum that between 1940 and 1945 approximately 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz alone and of that number 1.1 million were murdered. The Holocaust took the lives of 6 million Jews, along with the lives of 3 million Polish Christians, half a million Roma and others, taking the combined total number of those murdered as a direct result of Nazi ideology to 11 million people (source Jewish Virtual Library).
It’s right that the world remembers such a catastrophe and recalls such a bestial crime. It’s right that attempts are made to stop similar crimes happening in the future. I pray for the souls of all those who perished. I pray for the souls of those who were martyred in the name of Hashem.
As I said, it’s correct and proper that we remember, it’s right that we work to prevent similar crimes happening in the future, but we must also be aware that how we remember is equally important as just remembering. This is especially important now that the number of those who have first hand experience of Nazi persecution is dwindling. There are now less people around to say ‘I was there’ or ‘I saw what happened with my own eyes’.
The move away from remembrance via direct witness to the Holocaust to a more secondary remembrance is fraught with difficulty. For example it is all too easy for remembrance to become politicised in an effort to try to make things ‘relevant’ to an audience for whom the mid 20th century is now ancient history.
Such politicised remembrance is what we have seen coming out from the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for 2017. They have produced a video that many will consider insulting and dishonest to say the least. The video appears to draw a direct comparison to the way that Jews were treated under the Nazis to how Muslims are treated by non-Muslim societies. This video is complete and utter counter-factual rot.
The well known Israeli commentator ‘Aussie Dave’ and his ‘Israellycool’ website have examined this video and like me finds it extremely offensive that the inference is being drawn that there is an equivalence between mass murder of Jews and Muslims suffering from minor assaults such a bit of minor hijab snatching or a gay teenager getting a fat lip in a fight with some homophobes.
Apart from diminishing and insulting the memory of the dead and those who survived the Shoah, this film for me departs from what remembrance should be and has instead crossed the line into blatant political and social engineering.
Here’s the Israellycool article along with the video in question. As is normal policy for this blog, Aussie Dave’s text is in italics whereas my comments are in plain text.
Aussie Dave said:
While I sympathize with all victims of discrimination and hate crimes, this video is offensive to me as a Jew.
And to me as well. Like Dave I sympathise with all those who have been discriminated against for no real reason but I do find this video in particular offensive.
There is clearly an agenda at play here to compare hate crimes against Muslims with the Holocaust, a state-sponsored genocide. And it is not at all subtle.
I agree that the agenda is not at all subtle, it’s as subtle as a brick thrown in the face, to be quite honest. It’s blatant pro Islam propaganda, with a little bit of anti-homophobia stuff brushed on almost as an afterthought in order to soften the notable pro Islam bias. There is a universe of difference between a state sponsored genocide and the sort of low level harassment that some Muslims get.
The video opens with a Muslim lady being harassed. She then appears two more times, in various stages of upset. In fact, she appears in approximately 30 seconds of the video.
In comparison, the Jewish hate crime of present day depicted in the video is a cemetery desecration, which features in approximately 20 seconds of the video.
It definitely looks as if those who’ve made this film have deliberately drawn equivalences between murderous hatred directed at Jews and the dislike that may feel about the ideology of Islam, a dislike that is rarely expressed in a murderous form and especially not a genocidal form.
But not only that – check out the imagery at 53 seconds into the video.
If you did not notice:
That object on the Muslim woman looks a hell of lot like a yellow star.
I have to take a little issue with Aussie Dave on this section of the video. Although the item looks like a Yellow Star and can quite easily be taken by non-British viewer as a Yellow Star, it doesn’t appear to be such on closer examination. It looks very much to me like a Marie Curie Cancer badge as this cancer care charity uses a daffodil as its logo and on the badges that its supporters wear. However, it’s an easy mistake to make, to see this emblem as a Yellow Star and causing such a mistake on the part of viewers may have been a deliberate tactic on the part of the film makers.
Again, I am opposed to all forms of discrimination. But to give precedence to hate crimes against Muslims and compare them to what happened in the Holocaust? That’s just offensive and wrong.
Of course it’s wrong, it’s also profoundly dishonest.
Incidentally, if the HMDT wants to educate about the Holocaust so it doesn’t happen again, they could do worse than educating British Muslims about it, given they are more likely to be antisemitic than the general population.
Well said there, Aussie Dave. The troubles and violence that British Jews face are not coming from the dwindling numbers of bedroom dwelling Jackboot lickers of the neo-Nazi movement, but from the far greater number of Muslims who are brought up from birth to hate Jews. British Muslims are continually pumped full of the anti-Jewish and indeed anti-Christian texts from the Koran and Hadith and this is reflected in their attitudes to Jews. British Muslims are three times more likely to hold Jew-hating views than the general population and with Muslims being appreciably more gratuitously violent in their ways than members of other groups, then it is not surprising to find out that the greatest threat to Britain’s Jews comes from the followers of Islam.
So how did this offensive video happen? I suspect it has something to do with having Dilwar Hussain and Fiyaz Mughal on the board of Trustees.
I could not agree more, on this statement from Aussie Dave. I think that it has a lot to do with this bit of disgraceful pro-Islam propaganda masquerading as a remembrance of the Holocaust. Let’s look at this pair shall we? Dilwar Hussain is an academic who has seemingly spent his entire career on the diversity and Islamic victim-hood gravy train. A self-professed Muslim reformer, Dilwar Hussain has been an almost permanent fixture on the Establishment’s ‘bhajis and bagels’ ‘interfaith’ circuit. He seems to have earned a damn good living and some very useful contacts, such as an Archbishop of Canterbury for writing about Islam in the modern world and ‘Islamic identity’.
Dilwar Hussain’s academic work has been used as background sources for reports of dubious honesty and accuracy into anti-Islam ‘hate crime’ by Teeside University’s Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and Post-fascist Studies. These questionable reports have then in turn been used to back up claims made by the disgraced ‘Islamophobia’ monitor Tell Mama, whose chair and founder Fiyaz Mughal also serves on the Holocaust Memorial Day board of trustees.
For Dilwar Hussain, this trusteeship may be just another diversity gig, just another profile-raiser on the way to his next diversity earner. However I do think that the presence of Dilwar Hussain and Fiyaz Mughal may have influenced this particular video. On the subject of Fiyaz Mughal, it is his place on the Board of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust that should give people cause for concern. It’s not just that this man runs groups with a long standing record of dishonesty that should disbar him from involvement in the HMD trust, but also because, as this blog revealed on the 19th January 2017, Fiyaz Mughal has been recorded as having long standing and sometimes friendly relationships with Holocaust deniers.
Neither Dilwar Hussain or more especially Fiyaz Mughal should have been allowed anywhere near the workings of the HMDT. Hussain is just another academic Muslim grievance monger but Mughal is a different and more worrying kettle of fish. For a start the ‘hijab pulling’ theme of this bit of propaganda put out by HMDT, chimes very nicely with one of the narratives promoted by Tell Mama which is that there is a epidemic of Islamophobic misogyny aimed at Muslim women. This, Tell Mama say, is being expressed by a rash of Hijab-pulling incidents. The problem for the mendacious grievance mongers of Tell Mama and the taqiyya artist in chief Fiyaz Mughal himself is that many of these claims of ‘hijab pulling’ often turn out to be lacking in evidential proof.In other cases the claims of Hijab-pulling’ are revealed to be outright lies by Muslim women claiming to be attacked in order to gain sympathy from the wider community. In some of these cases the women have been brought before the courts for making these false claims. One of these dishonest Hijab pulling cases from Birmingham was up until quite recently being treated as true by Tell Mama on their website, even though the complainant had been fined by the courts for wasting police time
When you take Fiyaz Mughal’s reputation for presiding over organisations that have more than the whiff of dishonesty about them, couple that with the credible allegations that Mughal has been on friendly terms with, and has even used the services of Holocaust deniers to attack his critics, then having someone like Mughal on the board of the Holocaust Day Memorial Trust looks like an act of crass stupidity or wanton mockery of what Holocaust Memorial Day is supposed to be about.
I think the presence of Hussain and Mughal has a great deal to do with the production of this appalling bit of social engineering that seeks to paint the victims of genocide as being equivalent to those who are victims of minor assaults of an often inconsequential and transient nature. This is a disgraceful bit of dishonest propaganda from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and something of which the HMDT should be greatly ashamed. This is a video that I would not show my child if I wanted to educate them about the Shoah, there’s better and more honest stuff than this about. However I would use this video if I wanted to illustrate, or give an example of, dishonest propaganda and as such would show it alongside similar examples of this genre, such as the work of Walter Duranty and Leni Riefensthal.
As Aussie Dave says in his piece, it’s reasonable to not want to see people discriminated against or harmed, I think many people of diverse types of religious path and of no religious path at all would go along with that sentiment. But it is quite another matter, as this video does, to put out dishonest propaganda that puts on a moral par those who saw their relatives beaten and bloodied in the street by the Nazis with the sort of minor incidents shown in the film.
This video is a classic example of what happens when the idea of remembrance meets and is corrupted by stupid naïve liberal lefties and cynical Islamic grievance mongers such as Hussain and Mughal. The HMDT needs to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for this blatant piece of dishonesty.
I didn’t want a post on this subject on this day to become a piece of political criticism, as I feel that it would normally be inappropriate to make such juxtapositions. But I feel that I would be morally remiss if I had not commented on this example of remembrance of the Holocaust being used to promote some pretty base and nasty political ends and a film whose content seems to have been influenced by some base and nasty people.
Links
Aussie Dave’s ‘IsraellyCool’ website story on the HMDT’s troubling new video
http://www.israellycool.com/2017/01/26/holocaust-memorial-day-trusts-offensive-video/
HMD Trustee has long standing and friendly contacts with Holocaust Deniers
Trustees of Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
http://hmd.org.uk/page/trustees
Possibly dodgy report into ‘Islamophobia’ in the UK from Teeside University who appear to be yet more of Tell Mama’s ‘tame academics’ who seem to publish exactly what the grievance mongers of Tell Mama want to hear
http://tellmamauk.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/finalreport.pdf
British Muslims three times more likely to be anti-Semitic
Marie Curie Cancer Care whose logo is a daffodil
