Israel Matzav

But will they still find it offensive next year?

Incredibly, even the Brits found the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign's 'Holocaust Memorial Day' commemoration offensive.

The British government has branded a Holocaust Memorial Day event organized by a radical anti-Israel campaign group earlier this year “offensive,” banning any mention of it on the official Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s website.

The matter came to light after Mick Napier, head of the fringe group Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC), posted the government’s letter on the organization’s website on Monday.

Napier wrote to Home Secretary Theresa May in July asking why its event, which had been organized to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day – commemorated internationally every year on January 27, the day Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated – was not listed by the trust.

Speaking at the event, on the subject of “Israeli mass killings in Palestine,” had been Holocaust survivor and anti-Israel activist Hajo Meyer, author of the book The End of Judaism.

Meyer has claimed that Judaism was supplanted by the “Holocaust religion” that was “invented by the High Priest Elie Wiesel.”

Meyer is also known to rebuke Israel for “treating the Palestinian people in the same way the Nazis treated Jews during the Second World War.”

On Holocaust Memorial Day last year, SPSC hosted Azzam Tamimi, a Hamas supporter who condones suicide bombing in Israel, at an event titled “Resistance to Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing: from Europe in the 1940s to the Middle East Today.”

In 2006, it staged Perdition, a play that implies Zionist complicity in the Shoah. The same year, it hosted Gilad Atzmon, an alleged Holocaust-denier and anti-Semitic musician.

In his writings, Atzmon has said, “To regard Hitler as the wickedest man and the Third Reich as the embodiment of evilness is to let Israel off the hook,” and, “Perhaps we should face it once and for all, the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus.”

In a written response to SPSC last month, the government said it deemed the content of the event “offensive” and that it was the trust’s policy to bar anything “inappropriate.”

It's great that the British government finally woke up in 2010 and decided it found the SPSC's 'Holocaust memorial' offensive. Given that Britain has since elected a Prime Minister who refers to Gaza as the World's largest prison, is there any chance that the British government will find next year's SPSC 'commemoration' to be offensive?

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:18 PM