Dear Sir/Madam,
Hijacking of Holocaust Remembrance Day: Screening of Al Jazeera Gaza Documentary refers
I am writing to complain and protest with regard to the hijacking of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day event to screen an Al Jazeera documentary on Gaza: “Al Shifa The Crimes they Tried To Bury”
No matter how one may feel about the recent conflict, in particular the claims made by various parties, such an event is a time of sombre reflection and not a platform for political posturing by organisations and individuals, especially those who are not directly affected by the Holocaust.
A similar event occurred in Ireland this week, resulted in the removal of Jews who turned their backs on President Higgens, in protest at his address where he referred to the Holocaust as ‘an attempted genocide’.
The screening of the documentary in this manner, alongside the lighting of candles, at the Groote Schuur auditorium in which the context of the Holocaust was stripped of its connection to AntiSemitism, was calculated to grandstand.
“In remembering the Holocaust, we recognize threats to freedom, dignity, and humanity – including in our own time. Today – in the face of growing economic discontent and political instability, escalating white supremacist terrorism, and surging hate and religious bigotry – we must be more outspoken than ever. We must never forget – nor allow others to ever forget, distort or deny the Holocaust.” António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General,
Repackaging the Holocaust as if it were a mere trope, to be superseded by more contemporary issues, is not only offensive, but completely inappropriate given South Africa’s role in the tragedy involving industrial scale euthanasia of Europe’s Jewish population barely 80 years ago. A role our country refuses to acknowledge.
It appears the following organisations were involved in this week’s event: Desmond & Leah Tutu Foundation, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Gift of the Givers and SAJFP.
The result must be rejected as curated propaganda and replacement theology. Our constitutional rights to dignity, religious freedom and freedom from war are not served by obliterating history.
Here is what they don’t teach you in our local history books:
One year before the 1938 Evian Conference, Minister of the Interior under the Smuts government, D F Malan passed a piece of Anti-Semitic legislation aimed at preventing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany entering South Africa. The last ship to arrive before the law went into effect, the SS Stuttgart was thus met by Malan’s brown-shirts in Table Bay with force. South Africa later attended the Evian Conference in France where the leaders of the world discussed the “Jewish Problem” and determined to act collectively to not allow the deportation of German Jews under Hitler to continue.
With thousands entering British Palestine, both the British and Arabs began a well-publicized campaign to stop the flood. It was the Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini, later President of the All-Palestine government in Gaza (1948-1956) who personally met with Hitler in November of 1941, appealing to the Fuhrer himself to deal with the problem. By that time, the Farhud (Arabic for Pogrom), a violent dispossession of Jews from the Middle East & North Africa at the behest of Husseini, was well under way.
This motion was backed by Arab leaders from Saudi Arabia and Iraq in a round of shuttle-boat diplomacy the same year between Berlin and the Arab world. By January of 1942, Adolf Eichmann was presenting his plan for what became known as “The Final Solution”.
It was a ‘solution’ to precisely the topic under discussion by our own government. Thus at the Wannsee Conference, in the southwestern Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Germany, and with Hitler notably absent, the Nazi Party delivered its infamous address to the German High Command. A diabolical plan to deal with the 11 million Jews then under Nazi Occupation.
