Britain - MCB ends Holocaust boycott

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the UK's largest Muslim body, has voted to end its six-year boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day.

A working committee of the MCB voted 18 to eight to end the protest, with those in favour of calling off the boycott claiming it had allowed the MCB to be tagged anti-Semitic.

In a statement released to the Guardian, the MCB assistant general secretary Inayat Bunglawala explained: "We have always sought a more inclusive title such as Genocide Memorial Day so that it would also give recognition to more recent massacres such as in Rwanda and that of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. We wanted to uphold the principle of the equality of all human beings.”

"However, there was a growing recognition among our affiliates that non-attendance of HMD was inadvertently causing hurt to some in the Jewish community."

The statement added: "The MCB has always placed a lot of emphasis on inter-faith work and building ties... so this was becoming a problem."

Source: www.inthenews.co.uk

Date: Dec. 3, 2007

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