A committee appointed by the British government, composed of Muslims, wants the nation to scrap its Holocaust Memorial Day, in the name of inclusiveness and sensitivity. No word yet on whether they also want to eliminate Passover – said to be insensitive to Egyptians.

The committee recommends replacing the observance (started in 2001 and held annually on January 27) with a Genocide (a.k.a., Victimhood) Day, which would recognize the alleged mass murder of Muslims in "Palestine," Chechnya, Bosnia, and wherever else followers of the Religion of Peace have come into conflict with the accursed infidel.

In making its case for inclusiveness, the committee somehow neglected to mention the many victims of Muslim mayhem – Armenians, Sudanese Christians, Kosovar Serbs (ethnically cleansed in the wake of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia), and Hindus – to name but a few. If an Arab stubbed his toe on the boot of a Christian knight sometime in the 11th century, it’s a crime against humanity that must be memorialized throughout the ages, according to the imams. On the other hand, the slaughter of infidels is seen as the will of Allah, and worthy of a Heavenly reward.

The committee maintains that Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day fuels feelings of isolation and alienation among Muslim youth. And, well, to have a special commemoration of the systematic slaughter of one in every three Jews on earth (in an effort to annihilate an entire people), is grossly unfair, the committee suggests.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, cautions: "We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time."

Perhaps Sir Iqbal also believes that 9/11 memorials should pay homage to the Muslims in the planes, as well as the infidels in the office buildings – so that his coreligionists won’t feel that their lives have less meaning.

To understand the obscenity of Iqbal’s equation of the Holocaust with casualties in the aforesaid armed conflicts, consider the Muslims favorite "genocide": that supposedly inflicted on the Palestinians.

Since the onset of the latest Intifada (started and maintained by Muslims), 4,000 Palestinians have died, out of a population of more than 1 million. Most were combatants. At the same time, almost 1,000 Israelis have lost their lives – overwhelmingly civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Palestinian society celebrates jihad and suicide bombings. Israeli society unilaterally relinquishes territory in its quest for peace.

For the Palestinian/Holocaust analogy to be valid, Israel would have to be operating death camps – herding naked Muslims into gas chambers and burning their remains in crematoria. And Jerusalem would have to have slaughtered every third Palestinian in the world.

Instead the Palestinian population has increased dramatically – as has their life expectancy and standard of living – since Israel came into possession of the territory they inhabit at the end of the Six-Days War. To put it in Shakespearean terms, genocide should be made of sterner stuff.

Muslims can’t stand the thought of Holocaust commemorations, because, with certain honorable exceptions, Islam’s attitudes toward the Jews frequently mirror those of the Nazi killers.

Islamic polemicists have three responses to the destruction of European Jewry: 1) It never happened; 2) It happened, but the numbers are grossly exaggerated, and Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis; and 3) It happened, and the Jews, those enemies of humanity, had it coming.

Mahmoud Abbas, capo mafioso of the Palestinian Authority and renowned moderate, is the author of a 1983 book entitled, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement. In it, the first president of Palestine (if Washington has its way) maintains that Hitler killed "only a few hundred thousand Jews," not six million. Moreover, the Zionist leadership "was a partner in the slaughter of the Jews" – supposedly to create sympathy for the Jews, thus facilitating the creation of the Jewish state.

Holocaust denial is rampant in the Muslim world.

* In 1964, then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nassar (who precipitated the Six-Days War) insisted:, "No one...takes seriously the lie about six million Jews who were murdered."
* In 2000, a columnist for The Syria Times wrote, "The most famous myth is that of the so-called Holocaust… We strongly believe that gas chambers were not used for burning (sic.) Jews."
* Also in 2000, Sheikh Adel Bin Ahmad Bana’ma, a Saudi religious authority speaking at a Jeddah mosque, charged that Jews "disseminate everywhere the lie of the Holocaust and claim that Hitler killed six million Jews in gas chambers…This is pure falsehood."
* A year later, Palestinian religious leader Sheikh Ibrahim Mahdi declared, "One of the Jews’ evil deeds has come to be called the Holocaust." However, the Sheikh insisted, it has been irrefutably proven that "this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews’ leaders."

Like other Holocaust-deniers, those of the Islamic world aren’t just flat-Earth cranks, but virulent anti-Semites. Except for a handful of European skinheads and Aryan Nation types holed up in Idaho, The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion is still taken seriously only among Muslims – where it’s the Harry Potter of Middle East publishing.

This Czarist forgery (which purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to control humanity) is ubiquitous in jihad land. Saudi Arabia’s late King Faisal often gave copies to foreign visitors. Yasser Arafat was a fan. Arab periodicals quote it religiously, to demonstrate the perfidy of the Jews. In 2002, Egyptian television broadcast a 41-episode, dramatized version of The Protocols, entitled. "Horseman Without A Horse."

The roots of Islamic anti-Semitism run deep. Mohammed never forgave the Jews for rejecting his message. After he came to power, Jewish tribes in the Arabian peninsula were converted by the sword, or massacred. The Koran is rife with the Prophet’s disdain for Jews. (He called them descendants of apes and pigs.) Alongside this are calls to fight the Jews, who are indicted as the enemies of Allah.

Over the centuries, this theological anti-Semitism has evolved into a conviction that Jews are the repositories of evil in the world and Islam’s principal enemies.

It’s not surprising that the resurgence of widespread anti-Semitism on the European continent, after years of quiescence, parallels the influx of Middle East Muslims.

When Pope John Paul II paid a state visit to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in 2001, he must have thought he’d stepped off the plane and into a Nuremberg rally. In welcoming the pontiff, Assad proclaimed, "They [the Jews] try to kill all the principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing Him, and in the same way that they tried to commit treachery against the Prophet Mohammed."

One who took the Prophet’s call to its logical conclusion was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem before World War II. The mufti spent the war years in Berlin as an honored guest of Adolf Hitler.

Working from his office in the capital of the Third Reich, al-Husseini devoted himself to a Nazi victory, recruiting spies to serve in the Middle East and raising a Bosnian Muslim division of the Waffen SS. Described at Nuremberg as one of Eichmann’s best friends, the mufti even visited Auschwitz and urged those who ran the gas chambers to "work more diligently."

In a radio broadcast from Berlin on November 2, 1943, Hitler’s partner in genocide condemned the Jews in language that echoed Mein Kampf : "The overwhelming egotism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God’s chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals" is the reason "[t]hey cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals…The divine anger and curse that the Holy Koran mentions with reference to the Jews is because of this unique character of the Jews."

After the war, the mufti met a young Yassar Arafat in Cairo, and the torch was passed to the next generation of Islamo-fascists. (Arafat often referred to the Nazi henchman as "our hero al-Husseini.")

In his book, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, Rabbi David Dalin discloses, "Arafat continued the mufti’s Nazi legacy by recruiting Nazis and neo-Nazis for Fatah and the PLO. In 1969, for example, the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, an SS officer in the Mauthausen extermination camp. Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was found supplying arms to Fatah."

There are unavoidable parallels between Nazis and Islamists. Both adhere to totalitarian ideologies (though one is disguised as a religion); each group trains its adherents to kill without compunction and to show mercy to neither the young nor old; both nurse historical grudges and long for a settling of accounts; and each see Jews as the principal obstacle to the achievement of its utopian vision.

Of course, British Muslims are offended by Holocaust Memorials. While Nazism was a European phenomenon, post-World War II Hitler wannabes are found almost exclusively in the Arab and Muslim world. After the fall of Berlin, the center of anti-Semitic agitation shifted to Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, and Ramallah.

If the Blair government is really in an appeasement mode, it could balance Holocaust Memorial Day – and lessen the awful sense of alienation among Muslim youth – with a Hajj Amin al-Husseini Appreciation Day.