A British Islamic organization that is linked to Iran and has consultative status with the U.N. Economic and Social Council is calling for a boycott of the U.K.’s Holocaust Memorial Day.
It is “morally unacceptable” that the war against Hamas in Gaza is not considered a genocide alongside the Holocaust, the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission wrote in a letter it sent to 460 town halls and educational centers in the United Kingdom.
Holocaust Memorial Day, marked in Britain on Jan. 27 each year since 2001, is dedicated to the remembrance of the Jews and others who suffered under Nazi persecution. It is held on the anniversary of the liberation of the German death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, the date also chosen for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is one of six principal organs of the United Nations.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission also wrote a letter to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a charity set up in 2005 and funded by the British government, urging it to include the current war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip on the list of genocides.
“Failure to recognize Gaza as a site of genocide is to remain silent in the face of profound injustice,” it said.
Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, an NGO established in 1988, told The Telegraph that the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s call to boycott the memorial day was “shocking and disgraceful.
“This is a cynical attempt to denigrate and undermine the memory of the Holocaust by drawing false parallels between the Holocaust—a unique and unprecedented episode in history—and unrelated current events,” she said. “Such demands, including calls to make the day ‘more inclusive’ or to insert contemporary political agendas, not only insult the memory of the 6 million Jewish men, women, and children who were systematically murdered, but also undermine the fundamental purpose of Holocaust Memorial Day.”
Separately, two Belgian schools have refused to commemorate the Holocaust due to the 15-month-old war in Gaza triggered by the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre that was the largest single-day attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
