Howard Jacobson: Muslims who reject Holocaust Day deny not only Jewish history, but their own

It no more knocks out other memorials than VE Day denies other countries their victories

A man must be careful what he writes. When the idea of a Holocaust Memorial Day was first proposed in this country I wrote about it with suspicion. To me it seemed just another of those national Saying Sorry Days to which Blair-Care, in its early years, was addicted. Not so much cynical as flip. A show of hand-me-down compassion without risk. Who, after all, could resist or begrudge a service remembering the near destruction of the Jews - every European country's guilty secret - to be held on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz?

Since then, having discovered that there are many people who can and will begrudge it, and no small number (governed more by ignorance than malice) who do not know or give a fig where Auschwitz is and what it stands for, I have changed my mind. Nothing has brought home to me the wrongness of my original assessment more vividly than the decision by the Muslim Council of Britain first to boycott this year's ceremony and then, along with other Muslim bodies advising the government, to ask for Holocaust Memorial Day to be scrapped altogether. For the very reasons that these bodies do not want Holocaust Memorial Day, it is essential that we have it.

And what are those reasons?

Well, for one, "Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals."

These words so beggar belief that readers who have not been following the story for themselves might think I have made them up, but I have not. Too exclusive - imagine that! As though only the best people got to be sent to Auschwitz. As though others had been clamouring to get in, but we Jews in our exclusiveness went on denying them the privilege.

Without doubt, one consequence of persistent victimisation can be a perverse pride in your victimhood, that being the sole validation you are left with. But people so reduced are to be pitied not resented. And certainly not envied.

Behind the phrase "young Muslims" I detect both cowardice and threat. Beware what you are brewing Mr Blair, for though we in our maturer wisdom might feel differently to the headstrong, we cannot forever guarantee their peaceability. In fact, when we cut to the chase, the words of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, General Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, are barely to be distinguished from those a "young Muslim" might use. "We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time."

It is not for someone not himself a Muslim to comment on the degree of hurt a Muslim feels. Pain is pain. You cannot talk a person out of it. But it is fairly open to us to say that however much a sense of inferior status is the signal which Muslims receive from Holocaust Day, that is not the signal that is being sent. That there should be any inference of competition here astonishes me. The Holocaust was an historical event of no small significance; its commemoration no more knocks out other solemn commemorations than VE Day denies other countries their victories or Ramadan refutes the validity of Yom Kippur. There is not a trace of double standard in Holocaust Memorial Day unless you choose to feel it, and the decision to feel it belongs either to pathology or to politics.

In their suggestion that it would be more equitable to have a free-for-all Genocide Day, which would take in, for example, the genocide of the Palestinians, the Muslim bodies in question show their hand. Politics. Because of Israel, those who were murdered in Auschwitz must lose their special claim upon our memory. And in their rush to equalise the lives of Palestinian and Jew - an equality which no Jew I have ever met would have the slightest inclination to deny - they blur a distinction which is at the very heart of why we have a Holocaust Memorial Day. However brutal the Israeli occupation, the word for it is not genocide. There has been no attempt to wipe the Palestinians and their memory from the face of the earth. You don't - not to labour the point - return territory to those you mean to exterminate.

To insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust is neither to quibble with the meaning of words nor to find, as a Jew, some special distinction or dispensation in it. "The war," Saul Bellow has his philosopher/teacher Ravelstein conclude, "made it clear that almost everybody agreed that the Jews had no right to live ... Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction."

This is what we recall on Holocaust Memorial Day. Not bitter divisions or brutal depredations, not war, not conquest, but the will to destroy utterly a people, and the vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their extinction.

So explain to me how a memorial to victims of this collective agreement sets a double standard. Explain to me how it sends a wrong signal to Muslim youth.

In truth there is the same warning in it to them as there is to everybody. To such an extremity can indurated racial hatred lead. And there is occasion in it, too, for Muslims young and old to post proud notice of their own far better record with regard to Jews. The Holocaust was a European, not a Muslim disgrace. No matter that a Mufti here or there made overtures to Hitler, the Holocaust was the culmination of 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism the like of which was neither felt nor practised in the Muslim world.

In their rejection of Holocaust Memorial Day, Muslims deny not only Jewish history but their own.