|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
The Holocaust is deeply distressing to many Muslims. Not the fact of six million Jews being murdered — that’s not what distresses them. No, what is so distressing is that the mere mention of the Holocaust, discussion of the Holocaust, observances held to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and to honor its victims, all tend — Muslims fear — to create sympathy for Jews and the Jewish state, and that, of course, will never do. So it should not be a surprise that in the UK, an Islamic group with ties to Iran, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, has been doing its level best to persuade towns and schools not to observe the Holocaust Memorial Day. More on this grotesque attempt to efface the memory of what is one of the greatest crimes in human history can be found here: “British Islamic org. calls for boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day,” Jerusalem Post, January
The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) wrote to 460 town halls and educational centers asking them to boycott the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day.
The IHRC, which British media has linked to Iran, said it was “morally unacceptable” that Gaza was not considered a “genocide” alongside the Holocaust….
Is the IDF committing “genocide” in Gaza? Of the 46,000 Gazans who according to Hamas have been killed, the IDF believes that at least 20,000 were Hamas fighters. In addition, before the war an average of 800 Gazans died each month from diseases and accidents. There is no reason to think that monthly average has changed, so in the 15 months of the war, 12,000 civilians have died of causes unrelated to combat. That means that the total number of combat-related civilian deaths in Gaza is 14,000. Out of a total population of 2.2 million, does 14,000 dead strike you as a “genocide”? And if the IDF is committing “genocide,” why does it make such tremendous efforts to warn civilians away from areas, neighborhoods, and buildings soon to be targeted? By March of this year, the IDF had already dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls to warn civilians away from danger. A military hellbent on “genocide” would not be spending so much effort — would not, indeed, be spending any effort — to minimize civilian casualties.
It’s not just the Islamic Human Rights Commission in the UK that wants us to charge Israel with “genocide” in Gaza; millions of people, screaming their spittle-flecked hatred on campus in America, and on city streets in Europe, are consumed with an anti-Israel animus that grades so easily into antisemitism (and the reverse is also true: antisemitism always includes hatred of the Jewish state), have convinced themselves that the embattled Jewish state, fighting a seven-front war, is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Those who have kept their wits about them, and have looked steadily and whole at how the IDF has been fighting its war in Gaza, have come to a very different conclusion about that combat. British Colonel Richard Kemp was the Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan. He has fought in combat zones around the world, including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Iraq. He was also present throughout the earlier conflict in Gaza in 2014. This is his conclusion: “Based on my experience and on my observations: the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.” West Point Professor of Urban Warfare John Spencer has come to a similar conclusion from his studies: “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires.”
The Islamic Human Rights Commission in the UK and a cast of millions beg to differ. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, Pope Francis, Senator Bernie Sanders, Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, Professor Rashid Khalidi, Hamid Dabashi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, and others of that simpleminded or sinister ilk, will all continue to insist, no matter what counter-evidence is presented, that the IDF has been committing “genocide” in Gaza.
IHRC also wrote a letter to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust itself, imploring the body to include Gaza on the list of genocides.
The “imploring” from the IHRC that the “Gaza genocide” also be remembered on Holocaust Memorial Day is both preposterous and disgusting.
The letter quotes the Holocaust Memorial Day’s website, which states the aim of the day is to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, as well as victims of recent genocides in “Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.”…
In all of the genocides listed at the website, there were deliberate mass killings of civilians, with hundreds of thousands or even millions of victims. The relative handful — in the thousands — of civilians who have died in Gaza as a result of the war were never the deliberate target. Those who were killed were the unintentional victims, the result of Hamas’ policy of embedding its fighters and is weapons in civilian areas. The IDF tries always to minimize civilian casualties; Hamas tries always to maximize them, to exploit the propaganda value of such deaths. Of course there have been civilian deaths; there always are in war. But there was no intent to kill civilians, and the number of civilians killed because of the conflict is much less, by more than an order of magnitude, than the numbers killed in the real genocides that took place in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.
This is the time for the Holocaust Memorial Day organizers to answer the factitious claims being made by the IHRC, without giving an inch. To wit: there is no “genocide” in Gaza. The IDF makes efforts to protect civilians that is without parallel in the history of warfare. The IDF has provided millions upon millions of warnings by leaflet, by text messaging, by robocalling, to inform civilians about places that are soon to be targeted. Was that done in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur? Of course not. The killers in those real genocides were not about to warn their victims.
The IHMC doesn’t want anyone to forget the imaginary “genocide” in Gaza. But this attempt at moral blackmail will not work. You can cry to high heaven, Islamic Human Rights Commission of the UK that there has been a “genocide” in Gaza, but there is not a shred of evidence to support that claim. Instead, all the evidence shows how tremendous and unprecedented has been the IDF’s effort to save civilian lives. Let those organizing the Holocaust Memorial Day take on the nonsense and lies of the IHMC directly. And give special attention to the one “genocide” that is not past but very much present — the “genocide” that is going on today in Sudan, where the Arabs have already completed the slaughter of 70,000 mostly unarmed black Africans and are still killing. I don’t think the IHRC will like having that current genocide mentioned, but that’s too bad.
I am half Jewish and in no way support islam but why are we in the UK celebrating ,if that is the word,Holocaust Memorial Day when it had nothing to do with the UK?
Maybe because on the Channel Islands (a UK territory) during WWII British policemen handed over the handful of Jews on the Channel Islands to the German Nazi occupation force. These Jews were then sent to France and from there to their deaths in the gas-chambers of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Might that be reason enough for you and the uk??
So what? Always victims.
A ton of victims/victim groups all over Europe the Nazi’s left in their wake. England bears no particular shame for something so small and certainly not when they were occupied. Who would you choose, your family or the Jews? You probably would have done the same, maybe if only to save yourself. For every collaboration or terrorist event the Nazi’s would kill thirty villagers, also if one of their men were killed. It was routine. it’s easy to talk like you would be a freedom fighter. Me I don’t know if I would have had the courage, nor could I live with the consequences that there would be 30 innocent people killed everytime I acted.
It’s not because someone should feel guilt, it’s because what happened was abhorrent and should never happen again. It’s a remembrance that it doesn’t take much for us to hunt our neighbors and slaughter them.
Why am I not surprised given England’s traditional antipathy towards the Jews and Israel.
As was revealed to me rather late by a lot of reading on the mid-East, I’ve stumbled upon the anti-Semitic nature of socialism and how rabid it is and how anti-Semitic Europe was and remains. It’s like they are the blacks of Europe and Europe has not only failed to evolve, it has in fact devolved into more hatred that seems uniformly embraced.
Even the deep south evolved from it’s hatred of blacks. It has to be because of the further embrace of socialism of Europe, but they seem consumed with this hatred so it seems irrational that socialism alone could contribute so much ignorance and intolerance.
Intrepid… England is merely a part of a country commonly known today as The United Kingdom, though some call it Britain, so I wonder if you would refer to the United States of America as Texas, or California, or New York when they are merely part of a country.
If anyone is committing genocide in Gaza it is Hamas. They are the ones who began the war killing over 1200 civilians (who they regard as less than human) bringing the war down on the heads of the people of Gaza. Then Hamas regularly places its most important targets in schools, hospitals and mosques, deliberately mixing the war fighting and civilian populations, making them impossible to separate. This is itself a war crime.
It means that all the blood of all the innocent lives lost is on the hands of Hamas.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission is going by a totally False Name since Islam forces women to run around in Circus Tents and throw Gays off the tops of tall buildings
Who is surprised. The UK has become a target rich environment for subjugation. ‘Now we wouldn’t want anyone calling us islamophobes would we, ole bean? Why, I would give them me house, me car and me job to prevent that.’ It’s so disappointing to see how far the empire on which the sun never set has fallen. The Redcoats have become turncoats spurred on by simple letter from an organization intent on conquering them.