Peter McKay's faux pas

Peter McKay, a columnist for the London Daily Mail, wrote a column in which he claimed that British government support for sending schoolchildren to Auschwitz was based on “the misguided belief that it’ll make them always take Israel’s side.” He preceded this comment by writing:

So far as I know, there aren’t any school trips to the scenes of Stalin’s crimes in Russia, Mao’s in China, Pol Pot’s in Cambodia — or any other genocide centres. So why are British children herded round Auschwitz, for which we had no responsibility?

The column stirred up the usual firestorm of criticism. (Whatever could he have been thinking?)

Amazingly, this column has disappeared from the Daily Mail website, even as comments on the column appear on other websites, particularly in the Jewish media. An article on the affair at TotallyJewish.com notes that Mckay's comment has been  condemned by the British Board of Deputies, the main Jewish organization in England.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Mckay's days as a columnist for the Daily Mail have drawn to an end. We rather doubt that Mckay's apology will appease his critics, since he is sticking with his main point. And he is disagreeing with a fundamental feature of Jewish activism, at least since the 1970s, in which the Holocaust has  been promoted as a core cultural icon throughout Western culture, not only in Germany.

However, we would go beyond Mckay's comment to note the function of the Holocaust is not only to advance the cause of Israel but to promote multiculturalism generally. See Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life.

David Mckay's apology:

McKay told the Jewish News that he was sorry for any offence caused to the Jewish community or Holocaust survivors but stood by his comments regarding Israel, he said: “My complaint is against the 'we're all guilty' zealots who shy away from assigning specific responsibility on the Germans.

“I don't see how children could be reminded of what was done to the Jews of Europe by being taken to Auschwitz without this inclining them subsequently to support Israel. Visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington (for an article) certainly had this effect on me. It occurred to me this might have been why the museum is sited on Capitol Hill - to keep the crimes against the Jews at the forefront of lawmakers' thinking.” [more]