I was intrigued to learn from the BBC Today programme on Tuesday that ‘buildings across the UK will be illuminated this evening to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime more than 80 years ago’. Who were these unfortunate ‘people’, I wondered? Just anyone at all? Was it a wholly indiscriminate spot of slaughter? I have some vague memory that it was one race in particular that was singled out for extermination, but the BBC dared not say their name.
In fact, the sentence I quoted is wholly inaccurate: the ‘six million’ figure relates only to Jewish people. If you include the homosexuals, Sinti, Roma, disabled and Russian prisoners of war, then you would have to come up with another figure – some say as many as 11 million – who were murdered by the Nazis.
Meanwhile, the Holocaust Memorial Trust is a little clearer about the business. ‘We commemorate the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered during the Holocaust, and the millions more murdered under Nazi persecution. Prejudice still continues today within our communities and across the UK.’
Sho’ nuff does indeed, not least within the BBC. I suspect that it, like the left in general, is uneasy about a commemoration dedicated to one specific group of people, especially that group of people, a group of people to whom they perhaps do not feel kindly disposed. One might infer that from their speed at conferring the title ‘genocide’ on the war in Gaza, being thus unable to distinguish between tens of thousands of people killed via missile attacks during a prolonged war and a deliberate and stated policy to wipe out an entire race, of which the six million was just the start.
If you cannot distinguish between those two rather differing scenarios then I would suggest you are either an idiot or an anti-Semite or, more likely, if you’re writing the BBC news bulletins, both. If we were to confer the title genocide upon Israel’s war in Gaza then we would also be obliged to do so for the UK’s carpet-bombing of German -cities as the second world war drew to a close, or the Vietnamese Tet Offensive in January 1968, or even the (successful) attempt by Millwall’s Bushwackers to take Bristol Rovers’ home end in the late 1970s.
I am not trying to be facetious here. Genocide refers to the deliberate attempt to wipe out a race. It should not refer to acts of aggression in which innocent civilians are killed or, in the case of Millwall’s assault, hurt. We can condemn them all, as we see fit, but to describe them as genocide is a category error which, in the case of Gaza, has been made solely for political reasons. The fact that post-Marxist halfwits who festoon the United Nations make the same category error does not dissuade me too much from this point of view. Rather, the reverse. Nor are Palestinians, or Bristol Rovers supporters, a ‘race’. The Palestinians are an Arab ethnonational group. I’m not sure how one should describe Bristol Rovers fans, but they are certainly not a race.
I suspect that it, like the left, is uneasy about a commemoration dedicated to one specific group
This is how lies get propagated, by what might seem the slenderest of infractions. You gerrymander the vocabulary, you change the story – and right now, I would suggest, the left is attempting to do so on a number of fronts. You will be aware that anti-Semitic attacks have been at their highest level in the UK since records began and a subtle change in how we describe the Holocaust gently feeds into that climate of racial hatred. The BBC is not alone, of course, in such derogations. The decision of the West Midlands Police to prevent Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from supporting their team during a cup tie at Villa Park in Birmingham was anti-Semitic, I think. The Jews in Birmingham just didn’t have the clout to sway the minds of either the idiot of a police commissioner or the coppers themselves: their needs were considered subsidiary to volatile members of the Muslim community who had, police were told, suggested they would ‘arm themselves’, turn up and kick their heads in. The police then took a decision which was utterly devoid of principle in order to placate a local mosque and groups that have a history of hosting anti-Semitic speakers. This loathsome amalgam have bought into the ideas of democracy and plurality of thought less eagerly than maybe we hoped they might.
But it is not just the Jews who feel the brunt of it. Nothing, now, must inflame our rapidly – almost exponentially – growing Muslim minority, in case some of them get cross and start ‘arming themselves’ all over the place. A Ukip protest planned to be held in Whitechapel, east London, has been effectively banned by the Metropolitan Police from taking place. The Met said: ‘The conditions prevent anyone taking part in the Ukip protest gathering in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. They have been imposed to prevent serious disorder and serious disruption. Breaching the conditions, or encouraging others to do so, is an arrestable offence.’
Now, I don’t doubt that the Ukip march was intended to be provocative. But that is not the point. The resident population should be inculcated in the virtues of tolerance and turning the other cheek, rather than clamouring that the march should be banned simply because they do not like the look of it. They should be told that over here, we have – or had – freedom of speech and freedom of protest. Once this principle was cherished by our Establishment – I remember the ludicrous figure of the National Front’s Martin Webster performing a solo walk through Hyde, Manchester in 1977, protected from assault by 2,500 coppers. That Webster was odious was not the point: freedom of speech and assembly must be protected. But those days are long gone.
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