Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Muslims who don't deny the Holcaust want to cheapen it

Cathy Young:

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The committees aren't exactly proposing that the Holocaust commemoration be scrapped outright. They want it to be folded into a ''Genocide Memorial Day" that will also include such crimes as the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by the Milosevic regime.

Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book ''The Holocaust in Historical Context," that ''a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."

But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other ''genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli killings of Palestinians.

Clearly, Palestinians have suffered under the occupation. Over 4,000 have been killed since the renewal of violence five years ago. Some of these dead were completely innocent victims; others were fighters, violent protesters, or suicide bombers. (Nearly 1,000 Israelis have died as well.) This death toll is tragic; but to call it ''genocide" is to cheapen the word.

Any equation between the Holocaust and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is absurd. The effect of such a parallel is not to promote ''inclusiveness" -- it is to erase and minimize the tragedy of the Jews as past victims of genocide by slanderously assigning them an equal role as its present-day perpetrators.

The most important thing Muslims need to remember about the Holocause is not some collective guilt, but the determination of the Jews, particularly those in Israel, to stand up to any attempt to eliminate them again. That is why their attempts to insult Jews by belittleing the experience only make the Muslims look ignorant at best.