Times OnLine UK
September 16, 2005
Bet my genocide’s bigger than your genocide: the sad cult of suffering
Notebook by Mick Hume
HOW DID a discussion about combating Islamic extremism turn into
an infantile game of `my Holocaust is as big as your Holocaust’?
After July 7, the Government set up several committees to advise it on
tackling extremism in the Muslim community. Now these advisers
reportedly want Tony Blair to scrap the annual Holocaust Memorial Day
and replace it with a Genocide Day that would recognise the plight of
Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere. They say a special memorial to
Jewish victims `sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims’ who `feel
hurt’ that they are not included.
If anything in our hyperbolic culture still merits being seen as an
exclusive event, I would have thought it was the Nazi’s industrialised
campaign of genocide that killed six million Jews. Yet today it seems
that millions more – by no means all of them Muslims – want to be
recognised as having had a Holocaust of their own.
A quick internet search reveals an (almost) A to Z of groups whom it
is claimed have experienced genocide: Armenians, Bosnian Muslims,
Chechens/Cambodians, Darfur Christians, East Timorese, Falun Gong
followers, Gay men, HIV/Aids sufferers, Iraqis/Irish, Jews, Kosovans,
Laotians, Maoris, Native Americans, Palestinians, Roma, Slaves in
America, Tutsis/Tibetans, Unborn children, Victims of motor cars,
White South African farmers, Xhosa, Yugoslavs, Zulus.
(My apologies to any forgotten genocide victims with the initials O or
Q.)It might seem a wonder that there are any of us left behind to
commemorate the dead.
No doubt some have strong evidence of mass slaughter. But when almost
any experience of suffering, past or present, can be branded genocide,
so thata US news network carries the headline `New Orleans evacuee:
`It’s Genocide!’ ‘ , it inevitably demeans the word and belittles the
singular horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.
The UK Holocaust Memorial Day now threatens to blow up in the faces of
its well-meaning founders. Frankly, they were asking for it. New
Labour set itup in 2001 not only as a commemoration of the past but
also as an expressionof the modern cult of suffering, which puts
victims on a pedestal and invites us all to feel good about ourselves
by feeling their pain. That in turn acted as an invitation to some
Muslim worthies and other self-styled spokespersons for victims of
genocide to claim their piece of the grief pie.
Perhaps we would be better off scrapping these stage-managed,
victim-fests altogether. Far from `feeling hurt’ about being left out
of the experience, some of us are only too happy to have been
`excluded’ fromthe Holocaust – a terrible historical event that has
Never Happened Again.
I WAS INTERESTED to see `police sources’ reporting that all of two
fuel protesters approached the Shell refinery at Ellesmere Port this
week, but were ` frightened off by the size of the media pack’. We
often hear boasts about the media being `the new opposition’, but `the
newriot police’ is a new one on me. Still, perhaps it was fitting that
the media pack burst the protesters ‘ bubble. After all, it was the
media that so ludicrously inflatedtheir hopes of `causing chaos’ in
the first place.
ALTHOUGH cricket is not normally my game, I concede that beating the
great Shane Warne and his assistants was a significant sporting
achievement. Butthe cricketati couldn’t leave it at that. Even amid
the victory celebrations, the snobs had to find time to have a go at
football, boring on again abouthow cricket is altogether a more
skilful, sportsmanlike and civilised game than brutish
`soccer’. Apparently cricketers such as Andrew `Freddie’ Flintoff even
binge drink like gentlemen.
One could offer various impassioned replies to these petty-minded
allegations. But why bother? Let us just admit that football is simply
notcricket, old boy. Which is why the world (as opposed to the
Empire) loves it. With a bit of luck the Ashes hysteria will encourage
some of the sporting tarts (male and female) who have attached
themselves to football to dress up as Flintoff rather than Beckham,
and pretending that they understand the law of lbw rather than
offside. That would be something to celebrate. So come on, allyou
new-found Freddie fans. Can we have our ball back now, please?
_Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com_ (mailto:Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress