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We must all support Holocaust day
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AS a British Muslim and co-founder of the Anne Frank pledge for a better world in 1998, the pledge was signed by Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton and other world leaders including Tony Blair and Roman Prodhi, I find it extraordinary that the Muslim Council of great Britain should seek to boycott a day to remember all those victims of Nazi persecution and hatred.
For the past few years I have been producing and promoting a play about my close friend Eva Schloss, an Aushwitz survivor, and step-sister of Anne Frank. Hers is a story that reminds us where irrational hate can lead to. Five million eight hundred thousand Jewish people died a horrific death in the Holocaust.
Unlike other genocides the Holocaust was the systematic and industrialised process to eliminate the jewish race and all others Hitler and the Nazi’s considered inferior human beings – including muslims, people of African and Asian origin, gays, the disabled and people with an opposing political ideology.
I am sure that the vast majority of British muslims have no problems with their brothers and sisters in the Jewish community having one day a year to mark their loss and others at the hands of the single biggest act of brutality against one community in history.
So I plead to the MCB support Holocaust memorial day and show your humanity - anything else could be interpreted as a denial of it.
Holocaust Day is a chance to show the world that Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder with their Jewish brethren and people of other faiths and none in a mark of respect to all those who perished in the Holocaust and other genocides since and to show those who try and divide us that we will stand together against intolerance and irrational hate where ever it rears its ugly head.
Unless the insidious and pervasive nature of irrational prejudice and hatred is challenged, in whatever shape or form it shows itself, it can quite easily become part of normal behaviour and history has shown where this can lead to.
Turning a blind eye to the suffering of humanity is a denial of our own humanity.
NIC CAREEM
Co-founder
The Anne Frank Pledge
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