News

The Newspaper

Archives

Press Releases

Subscribe

Advertise

Mailing list

Links

About us

What's on and where

Messages for
The Muslim News

Contact The Muslim News

The Muslim News on your PDA

Back to index

Issue 224, Friday 21 December 2007 - 11 Dhu al-Hijjah 1428

MCB ends boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day

By Inayat Bunglawala

Earlier this month, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) voted to end its non-participation in the annual Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD).
Ever since the inauguration of HMD in 2001, the MCB had turned down the invitation to attend and had argued instead for a more inclusive title such as Genocide Memorial Day which would clearly signal that we honour the lives of all victims of genocide equally, whether Jews, Rwandans or Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.
The decision not to attend HMD in previous years had always been a very controversial one with the British Muslim community divided right from the outset over the issue. Some argued that the HMD would be misused by Zionists to try and garner support for the policies of the Israeli state. They pointed to works such as Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry in support of their position.
Others said that the reasons for non-attendance would not be properly understood and that it would be an own goal and would give the MCB’s many detractors, not least in the media, an opportunity to portray the MCB as being insensitive to Jewish suffering and anti-Semitic.
The MCB, with its several hundred affiliates, reflected those divisions. The only national poll that was carried out on this issue - it was commissioned in 2006 by the Jewish Chronicle - found that 52% of British Muslims supported the MCB’s hitherto position of non-attendance - showing that British Muslims appeared to be almost evenly divided on the issue.
In October 2006, Ruth Kelly, who was at the time Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government, launched a widely publicised attack on the MCB, saying: “I can’t help wondering why those in leadership positions who say they want to achieve religious tolerance and a cohesive society would choose to boycott an event which marks, above all, our common humanity and respect for each other.”
Now this was, of course, pure cant. After all, if the HMD event really does set out to mark “our common humanity and respect for each other” then what was the objection to renaming it as a Genocide Memorial Day? The MCB had been putting this question to the Government - which funds HMD to the tune of over £500,000 every year - for over five years and had not received a single intelligible answer.
Ironically, it is my belief that the MCB would have voted to attend HMD last year if Ruth Kelly had not intervened in such a cack-handed manner. Her ill-advised remarks merely served to increase the determination of many senior MCB members not to be seen to be caving in to pressure from the Government.
So, this year’s MCB’s decision to now finally attend HMD will certainly have some critics among British Muslims.
On the whole, however, I believe the MCB made the right decision and it sends a welcome and positive signal about its commitment to a shared future in a multi-faith Europe. In previous years, I too had argued for non-attendance but a number of discussions with sympathetic figures from the world of politics and media convinced me that the MCB was actually doing itself far more harm than good by its refusal to attend the HMD.
It is notable that not a single prominent figure in the UK publicly agreed with the MCB’s previous position of non-participation. The MCB had been out on its own and a fair question to be asked after all these years was what had British Muslims achieved by the MCB’s decision to stay away from HMD? Indeed, the reality was that on the ground each year more and more Muslim organisations - including many of the MCB’s own affiliates - were participating in local HMD events across the country making the MCB seem increasingly out of touch with grassroots Muslim opinion on this issue.
In a comment piece for the Guardian last year, the Birmingham Respect Councillor, Salma Yaqoob - who also happens to be a member of the MCB’s central working committee - argued that the Nazi holocaust: “…embodies the reality of fascism in power. As fascists once again make political inroads across Europe - increasingly with Muslims as their target - it is all the more necessary that new generations are never allowed to forget that reality…refusal to participate in Holocaust memorial events is an own goal. We rightly want to draw attention to those for whom there are no official commemorations, and whose oppression is barely acknowledged; but we have instead allowed ourselves to be further isolated, and allowed the false smear of anti-Semitism to be directed at us.”
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who is no friend of pro-Israel lobby groups, welcomed the MCB’s decision to attend the HMD, saying: “Every community has an interest in marking Holocaust Memorial Day, both in memory of those millions who were murdered, and in ensuring that no such racist crime is ever allowed to happen again. Londoners from all faiths and backgrounds have to unite to condemn the evils of prejudice and racism in all forms and the Muslim Council of Britain have shown their commitment to inter-faith work and building ties by supporting Holocaust Memorial Day.”
We should not give up on the goal of establishing a Genocide Memorial Day. However, there is no reason why that noble goal should preclude us from attending the HMD event alongside members of other faith communities.
Inayat Bunglawala is the Assistant Secretary-General of the MCB