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Holocaust Memorial Day

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. When I was at the Holocaust centre on Monday—the hon. Member for Buckingham will know about the fantastic work that it does through the Aegis Trust and the all-party group on genocide prevention—a phone call was received for Dr. Stephen Smith from colleagues in Darfur, where a village had been surrounded by people who may well have committed further genocide. Let us be clear: the victims there are Muslims, so the idea that the victims of genocide are only Jewish people is not true. There are lessons that we can learn about contemporary genocide where the victims have been Christians, Muslims, Jews, those of other faiths, and those without faith. We need to learn that lesson across society. It is the sheer enormity of the holocaust and Nazi persecution that is difficult to comprehend. The victims of the holocaust were Jews, Roma and Sinti Gypsies, black people, Slavs, disabled people, gay people, political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses and trade unionists. However, our inability to comprehend must never become an excuse for reluctance to remember. We must never forget the great horrors that haunted this continent in the last world war and have done so since. Even though the scale of the Shoah was unprecedented, since world war two the same cycle of evil has been played out—if such things can be measured—in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur. The list goes on. As I said, the victims of genocide have been Muslims, Christians, Jews, and those of other faiths and none. It is precisely for this reason—because the list does go on, and because evil does recur—that the holocaust should be written in our present, not just consigned to the past. Let me deal with the issue of holocaust denial. Holocaust denial and obfuscation are anti-Semitism masked under a veil of pseudo-historical revisionism. It is a gross insult to the victims of Nazism and to survivors of the holocaust. The best weapon against holocaust denial is education. The memory of the holocaust needs to be preserved and its contemporary lessons passed on to future generations. I pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust, whose work with schools and communities has had a big role to play in this. Karen Pollock and her team do remarkable work all year round, not just around Holocaust memorial day and week.