Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-26-Speech-3-132"
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"en.20050126.8.3-132"2
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".
Mr President, today and tomorrow Parliament marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In this House there has been some controversy regarding geography and the nationality of those responsible. The key players were German Nazis with their racial ideology that saw the Jews as an evil, inferior race that should be exterminated, on the basis of their deeply flawed and distorted eugenics. There are those, unfortunately, who espouse this sickening ideology still among us today.
The German Nazis were aided and abetted by those of all races and nations who actively colluded in this extermination and by those who said nothing and allowed evil to flourish. Yet no nation in Europe was entirely innocent or entirely guilty. In Britain only the Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis, but Britons in authority there registered the Channel Islands’ Jews, stamped ‘J’ on their passports and arranged all too efficiently for their transport to Auschwitz, where without exception they were murdered. All this was after the British Government of the time refused some of the same Jews the right to flee for their lives to the UK mainland because they were considered enemy aliens. We also had the British Free Corps of dupes, deserters and fascists who fought alongside the Nazis on the Eastern Front.
However, this debate is not primarily about the past. It is about the future. Earlier this week I attended an event organised in London by the Anne Frank Trust, where 50 survivors of the Holocaust gave their testimonies. They were not demanding more and better history, they were not arguing about the nationality or the geography of their captors and their guards. Instead they were joined by survivors of Kosovo and Rwanda to demand ‘never again’. Unfortunately, the forgetting has started. A fellow MEP, Mr Le Pen, recently stated that the Nazi occupation of France was not particularly inhumane, despite the murder of 73 000 Jews in the Struthof concentration camp in France.
Prince Harry – hopefully – illustrated his woeful ignorance of history by finding it amusing to attend a fancy-dress party as a Nazi officer. The best memorial we can give here today, and in the vote tomorrow, is to reinforce the fight against anti-Semitism and racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. The Commission, Commissioner Frattini in particular, and the Council should look at how they can best push forward the welcome framework directive against racism and xenophobia.
We need to consider the need for new legislation against race-hate crime and whether action should be taken at a European level to deal with the public display of Nazi insignia. We have been told on many occasions of the merits of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism, Xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Perhaps we need to look again at downgrading that monitoring centre by making it a much more general human rights observatory.
Finally, we should look at how we can educate at European level the younger generation about the horrors of the Nazi extermination of the Jewish race, about the Roma, the mentally ill and the Christian Democrat and Liberal, Socialist and Communist anti-fascists who died in the concentration camps."@en1
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