Ahmereen Reza OBE is a Trustee of Nisa Nashim, the Jewish Muslim Women’s Network in the UK.
When my husband and I decided to start a family, we agreed our children would be well-versed in and guided by an event in history that simultaneously captured both the worst and best of humanity.
We wanted a piece of recent, lived history that speaks to the frailty of man’s moral fibre and serves as a testament to resilience in the face of unfathomable, unspeakable horrors. It had to be an event that was universally recognised as having occurred, so appallingly, self-evidently exceptional that it successfully squelches whataboutism, and was well enough documented that they could learn from it.
We settled on The Holocaust.
And so it was that our Muslim, alternatively Pakistani-American and British-Pakistani nuclear family embraced an unlikely new tradition: visiting Holocaust museums, memorials, and exhibitions on our city holidays. This somewhat novel parenting approach hit its first road bump when our sons seemed anxious, even unnerved at the prospect of visiting a museum that documented the murder of millions. We remained steadfast. The Holocaust is a stain on all humanity, we told our sons. It was incumbent on all of us to go.
I was invited to join this year’s March of the Living in Poland this May. The March is a three-kilometre walk between the original extermination camps at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where between 1942 and 1945, three million Jews and others were murdered by the Nazi regime. It is an opportunity, rapidly diminishing with time, to hear first-hand individual accounts of the courage of victims to survive and to visit sites synonymous with the Holocaust’s machinery, which facilitated the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others.
The Holocaust was no accident. It was the culmination of centuries of deliberate discrimination targeting Jewish people that was allowed to fester across much of Europe and elsewhere openly. Anti-Semitism evolved into a virus that infects the mind, impeding our moral faculties. Individuals, communities, and institutions are vulnerable to this social disease.
There is an insidious symbiosis between anti-Semitism and other forms of hate and discrimination, including Islamophobia. Hate and discrimination are societal diseases that hide wherever they are left unchallenged, targeting communities that don’t have the voice to fight back. Each infection tears away society’s moral fabric, lowering its will to fight injustice and discrimination. Ignoring or deemphasizing hate directed against one community inadvertently affects all communities. Silence of bystanders, erroneously believing it can’t happen to them, feeds this virus. Martin Niemöller, in his celebrated poem “First They Came”, powerfully describes guilt through complacency and shirking individual responsibility.
His words resonate once again. Clusters of anti-Semitism persist in many places around the world, incubating its growth. And like any virus, anti-Semitism is mutating.
A new virulent strain of anti-Semitism is circulating. It masquerades as political criticism of Israel and hides behind our deeply cherished freedoms of speech and thought. I recognise this new strain of anti-Semitism. For decades, I have witnessed Islamophobia disguise itself as criticism of Pakistan, Israel’s ideological twin. Both nations were born to protect their respective religious identity and cultural groups from persecution, real or perceived, at the hands of a majority. Israel was a place of refuge for Holocaust victims, and after Britain’s withdrawal, Pakistan was a new home for British India’s Muslim minority.
Since October 7th, incidents of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have risen by over 300 per cent. Demonisation and discrimination are at our doorstep once again. Our world is at risk of being engulfed in a firestorm of hate. This firestorm has reached college campuses, including MIT, my alma mater, pitting student against student in protests relating to the Israel-Hamas War. Some protests have turned violent.
Blame for this ongoing conflict must partly rest with the Muslim world. A clear-eyed analysis of events should have led to universal condemnation of Hamas across the Muslim world. In attacking as they did, Hamas blatantly violated one of Islam’s unambiguous edicts: that women, children, clergy, and non-combatants must be kept out of any conflict. Rather than demand Hamas’s leadership surrender to face justice, the Muslim world rapidly fell behind tired parochial lines, conflating a human tragedy into an ongoing political struggle, giving Hamas a free pass.
A fleeting moment of moral clarity was lost to the fog of war. Whatever the war’s outcome, the firestorm of hate it unleashed must now be extinguished. To contain its community spread, we need a temporary lockdown of sorts. University administrators are right to shut down campus protests. But society also needs a long-term immunisation plan, a vaccine. Fortunately, one is at hand.
The Holocaust is the most egregious example of untrammelled hate in living memory. It is exceptional, not only in terms of scale but also because it had only one belligerent to a conflict, the Nazis, and a target, helpless Jewish civilians, who weren’t a belligerent to any dispute. It is time we put its historical findings on the course syllabus in schools everywhere. This single tragedy can serve as the reference point, the foundation of a dialogue that can extend to all forms of hate.
The coursework must begin young before community biases affect a child’s worldview. Coursework must be completed before children begin to actively engage with social media, preparing them to identify and call out anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate when they see it.
History neglected will repeat itself. Widespread knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust can help us move one step closer to a society void of all forms of hate.
