Boycotting the dead

This report appeared at the weekend in the Sunday Times:

British Muslims are to boycott this week's commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz because they claim it is not racially inclusive and does not commemorate the victims of the Palestinian conflict.

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has written to Charles Clarke, the home secretary, saying the body will not attend the event unless it includes the "holocaust" of the Palestinian intifada.

He said similar events held in other European countries was [sic] an "inclusive day" that commemorated deaths in Palestine, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, as well as the former Nazi death camps.

"We wrote to the Home Office three or four weeks ago. We said the issue of the Holocaust is not really the concern. But we have now expressed our unwillingness to attend the ceremony because it excludes ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine," he said.

Home Office officials have told the council, which represents more than 350 Muslim organisations, that they are considering the request. But officials have no plans to broaden the remit of the occasion because they fear it would infuriate the Jewish community.

It may be tempting to respond without more ado to this as just one more egregious display of anti-Semitism. But it's worth taking the time to think about the MCB's point. The demand for a certain kind of inclusiveness is not in itself unreasonable. On the contrary.

The commemoration of any genocide - the point applies more generally, but I'll limit myself in this way for the sake of concision - has (at least) two purposes. The first of them is precisely commemoration. To remember these particular people and the horrors that were perpetrated against them. To express our solidarity with them, even in death. To give them an eternal name. There is, however, another more universal purpose - emphasized, this, by everyone who ever spoke about the importance of remembering, or the importance of Holocaust education - and that is that people may know what some human beings did, in this place and at this time, to other human beings. To teach, or to remind, about the enormities of which our species is capable. To warn - in the hope (repeatedly dashed) that we may prevent such things happening again.

It is reasonable to expect that those in charge of commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz will attend adequately to both of these purposes, to the requirements of specific memory and to the more general demands taking in the needs of humanity. I would be astonished if they didn't attend to it, however. I have been present at quite a few events devoted to Holocaust commemoration, and at not a single one of them was it the case that the generality, so to put it, was altogether lost in the specificity.

If the Sunday Times is accurate in what it reports, the standpoint of the Muslim Council of Britain is objectionable not for urging inclusiveness as such. It is objectionable because of the terms in which this is put. The inclusiveness has, in some way, to be guaranteed in advance. It should be about other named experiences as well, and a list of particular instances is cited - 'Palestine, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia' - as if the MCB is in a position to specify which. Why not, then, the genocide by the Turks against the Armenians, or what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia, or Indonesia in East Timor? And why not also what the Belgian colonists did in the Congo? Why not the fate of the indigenous peoples of Tasmania, or of the Americas, with the advent of European colonization? Note also 'the "holocaust" of the Palestinian intifada'. One doesn't have to believe that the Holocaust was completely incomparable with other humanly-produced catastrophes, and one can have any (sane) view one likes about the competing claims of Israelis and Palestinians... but that is a grotesque linguistic manoeuvre. It would seem, therefore, that what has moved the MCB is not so much a concern about inclusiveness, which it had no good reason to doubt in the first place, but the overly Jewish focus of the event. And this is not a sensibility which the organizers of that event should indulge. Inclusiveness, to some degree, yes; losing sight of the special place of the Jewish people in the annihilation project of the Nazis, no. In any case many, many others than Jews were murdered at Auschwitz.

The MCB's response is, upon due reflection, an egregious display of anti-Semitism. They're worried that commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz might be just a bit too much about Jews. Here's a detail the leaders of the MCB might like to ponder:

Musselmanner (Moslems) was Auschwitz slang for people near death from starvation and privation... The exact derivation of the phrase is not known, but it was common to all concentration camps.

The seeds of prejudice against whole categories of other human beings are small.