HOLOCAUST NONSENSE

Apparently, today is 'Holocaust Memorial Day', something of which I was happily oblivious only a few short years ago.

This day is an entirely modern invention, mainly intended to make sure the world doesn't forget how horribly the Jews were treated in the past, with specific reference to the German concentration camps of World War 2. Inevitably, the scope has had to be extended in order to prove that views such as mine are wrong, however, the emphasis is still largely on the Jews.

Of course, the Jews suffered shockingly under the Nazi regime, but so did other minorities - gipsies, the disabled, homosexuals etc - though these are rarely mentioned in the headlines. While we are now sometimes reminded of the atrocities committed by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and the more recent events in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, what do we ever hear of the treatment of the Armenians by the Turks, or of the millions murdered by the regimes of Stalin and Mao Tse-tung ? What are we told of the virtual extermination of the native North American population or of the disgusting treatment of the Irish during the years of the potato famine ? While it may not be a genocide, what about the treatment of the native Palestinians by the immigrant Israelis ?

It would be much easier to accept this nonsense of a 'Holocaust Memorial Day' if its coverage properly recognised not just the atrocities of the Nazis and a handful of other modern events that have gained media topicality, but also the atrocities committed by today's power-brokers, the USA, Russia, China and the UK. It is also time that Israel stopped using the past as an effective excuse for its behaviour towards the indigenous population of the land that it expropriated in 1948 and later.

Until such time as these countries admit their own parts in the barbarisms of their recent histories, 'Holocaust Memorial Day' will remain nothing more than a bit of Jewish propaganda in my eyes.