The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

News 2020

Putting the wind up the first draft of history

The Foreign Secretary made his pilgrimage to the site of Auschwitz this week in the annual condemnation of Nazi atrocities and commemoration of the founding of the state of Israel. The Middle East's only democracy was founded so that such atrocities could never happen again.

The Nazi concentration camps were a perversion of a British idea which had been introduced during the Boer War to stop the spread of apartheid, so many British people felt "an understandable if exaggerated sense of guilt," the Foreign Secretary said.

He spoke of the bravery of the British troops who won the Second World War, and whose liberation of Auschwitz would have gone down in history as one of the world's great altruistic acts of humanitarian intervention if the Russians had not happened to get there first.

He also condemned what he called the "cheapening of the Holocaust's memory" by those who compared Nazi actions in Europe during the 1930s to present-day Allied actions in the Middle East and in south-east Asia and in Cuba and in Central America and in detention centres all over Britain.

To detain potential terrorists because of their possible Islamofascist connections was "quite a different thing" from imprisoning real people because of their race or religion, the Foreign Secretary said. "It should always be remembered that the Nazis ran death camps, while democracies merely have occasional interrogatory overreactions," he said.

The use of "Nazi analogies" to condemn the Palestinians' treatment of Israel was also "something of an overstatement," the Foreign Secretary said, although it was regrettable that more was not being done by at least one side of the conflict to achieve a lasting peace. Although he went on to express his "deepest sympathies" for Israeli civilians killed in suicide attacks, the Israeli government expressed "displeasure" at the gaffe.

The Foreign Secretary was one of many British and foreign dignitaries taking part in the ceremony, which included members of the Israeli government and Austria's aged President, Jorg Haider. Prescott Bush, grandson of the late US Commander-in-Chief George W Bush, was also present.

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