Mick Hartley

The Islamic Human Rights Commission [IHRC] thinks it's "morally unacceptable" that Gaza is not considered a "genocide" alongside the Holocaust. From the Telegraph:

An Iran-linked group funded by a registered charity is urging councils and universities to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has written to 460 town halls and educational institutions calling on them to snub the official commemorations at the end of the month.

The group argues it is “morally unacceptable” that Gaza is not included as a “genocide” alongside the Holocaust.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, on January 27, will mark 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said the IHRC’s call for a boycott of Holocaust 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.

“It is vital that commemorations maintain their focus on the Holocaust, that Jewish victims are properly honoured, and that the central role of anti-Semitism in this genocide is unequivocally recognised.”

She's right, of course.

Last summer, the IHRC claimed “Zionist financiers abroad” were to blame for “enabling” far-Right groups during the riots which spread across cities in the UK following the death of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. Axel Rudakubana, 18, is charged with their murders and will stand trial later this month.

Massoud Shadjareh, the chair of IHRC, took part in a vigil in 2020 for the late Qassim Soleimani, a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who was credited with masterminding the spread of Iranian influence across the Middle East.

Mr Shadjareh said at the vigil: “We hope and we pray and we work hard to make sure that there will be many many more Qassim Soleimanis. We aspire to become like him.”

In an independent report carried out in 2023, the Prevent counter-terror strategy called the IHRC an "Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime", and noted that several of IHRC's leaders have shown support for violent jihad and expressed a desire to eradicate "Zionists." The IHRC responded…well, you know how they responded. The report was, of course, Islamophobic. Very fitting, given that, at least according to some sources, the term "Islamophobia" was coined by Iranian Islamists back in the Seventies, on the lines of "xenophobia", with the aim of making criticism of Islam akin to racism.