The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) held its annual Genocide Memorial Day in London yesterday to raise awareness about genocides against oppressed peoples all around the world.
While the mainstream media often focuses on one particular genocide (The Holocaust against the Jews in the Second World War), Genocide Memorial Day highlights that Muslims, Jews and others have historically been victims of oppression by Europe, and that it is only in recent times that the two religious groups have been pitted against each other.
The IHRC’s Raza Kazim said: “The theme of this year’s memorial is the lessons we can learn from the Cultural Genocide of Muslims and Jews in Europe. By highlighting the people and power structures who have perpetrated genocides or genocidal acts, the Islamic Human Rights Commission want to hold the perpetrators to account, as well as remember the victims of these genocides.”
He added: “The Jews and Muslims have lived side by side without any issues, without any huge problems or anything of that type, and it has been the ‘otherisation’ of what the European powers have done over the past 500 years which has really caused some of these problems to actually start to occur.”
Meanwhile, Professor Ramón Grosfoguel, of the University of California, Berkeley, said there is also a cultural genocide taking place and Islamophobia is part of that.
“The colonisation of Jews and Muslims have always been together for a long time, what has split the two communities in the world today is the Zionist project, that has in a sense made Jews believe that they are part of the Western colonial expansion, because the Zionist project is a continuation of the Western colonial expansion in this case in Palestine.”
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