'Who now remembers the Armenians?' Hitler asked as he brushed aside objection to the extermination of European Jewry. (*) About one and a half million Armenian Christians were slaughtered by the Turks in 1915. Few cared about them in 1941, let alone 2000.

Certainly the Home Office and the BBC are insouciant. They have decided that the first Holocaust memorial day commemoration -- which, I suspect, will be a triumph of professional mourning over history -- should contain no mention of the genocide that suggested to Hitler he could get away with mass murder.

There are good political reasons for amnesia. Turkey is an Armenian Holocaust denier. Last month Ankara told Washington it would not let the US Air Force use its bases if Clinton accepted that what happened was genocide.

The same pressures may be at work in Britain. When Sarah Topalian, a British citizen with an Armenian father, complained to Neil Frater, the Home Office master of Holocaust ceremonies, she was told that the Foreign Office had intervened. 'Some people might conclude' that Turkish pressure had been effective, Frater said.

It's an old story. The designers of the Washington Holocaust Museum promised Armenians that their past would be mentioned. They broke their word when the museum's council decided that discussion of Armenians diluted the 'unprecedented' character of Jewish suffering and the Israeli government said it was anxious not to offend its ally, Turkey. American Holocaust museums are not keen on finding space for the communists, the socialists, the trade unionists and the mentally ill -- Hitler's first victims -- either. No one goes on about Hitler's killing of 500,000 gypsies. They are even more unpopular than the Reds.

Holocaust commemoration is too often the manipulation of the past for present purposes, and the Turks and museum directors aren't the only culprits. US and Israeli Jewish leaders have disgraced themselves by claiming that the suffering of European Jews was 'unique' and used it to brand protest against the persecution of the Palestinians with race laws and overwhelming force as 'anti-semitism'. If what happened to Jews is unique, replied the brilliant (and Jewish) historian Peter Novick, what are these 'lessons' Holocaust Days are meant to teach us?

Surely the unique can never be repeated and we can all therefore ignore it?

To me, the only lesson to be learned is to support asylum-seekers as they are libelled and denied sanctuary by Jack Straw and Ann Widdecombe. We should ask the British politicians to reform themselves rather than wallow in a phoney concern for the Jews whose 'bogus' claims for asylum they would have rejected had they been in office in the Thirties.

The Observer (UK)
Nov 5, 2000

(*) Editor's note: The writer has incorrectly quoted Hitler's famous remark. It was not "Who now remembers the Armenians?" but "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Furthermore, this remark was not made with reference to the extermination of the Jews but rather the "men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language," just prior to the German invasion of Poland.