Saturday, January 29, 2005

Ami Eden's NYT op-ed, Playing the Holocaust Card, will stir controversy. He makes the important point that it is still important to measure one's outrage. Prince Harry's antics are not in the same ballpark as Egyptian mainline newspapers that write about Indian-Israeli-U.S. nuclear testing causing the tsunami -- and that this was part of a larger program of mass-murder (cited by Melik Kaylan in yesterday's WSJ).

Well meaning people often feel an impulse to evoke the memories of the victims of unspeakable crimes. Others love to drape themselves in the mantle of other people's suffering. Many have no idea in which of the two categories they find themselves.

In a better world, bigots would not be bigots. In this world, evoking the terrible suffering of the victims of genocide must also be done with some
thought and some trepidation.

Watching young school kids being marched through Anne Frank Haus last year and seeing the bored look on their faces gave me the impression that some fine-tuning would not be a bad idea. The European extreme right is already linking Holocaust remembrance with PC.