Elie Wiesel addresses the UN General Assembly on Monday

On Monday (Jan. 24), the United Nations and European leaders marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, testifying to that greatest crime in human history ¯ the industrial murder of 6 million Jews.

While much of the British media (including BBC) provided helpful educational material on the Holocaust, The (London) Spectator ran an article by Anthony Lipmann, who declared that on this day

I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.

'Jenin'?! Lipmann suggests some comparison between Auschwitz and Jenin ¯ where less than sixty Palestinians (the majority armed combatants) were killed in an IDF counter-terrorism raid in 2002. Columnist Mark Steyn was outraged that 'to Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews.'

Lipmann, an Anglican whose Jewish mother survived Auschwitz, goes on to make his Nazi-Israel comparison even clearer:

"What would I have done?" I ask myself. "What should I be doing now? What am I doing for those being persecuted today - among them the Palestinians, who are suffering at the hands of Jews? But for a turn of fate, could I have been a Nazi too?... This little band of 600 [Holocaust survivors attending a reception hosted by the Queen] has a terrible responsibility - to live well in the name of those who did not live and to discourage the building of walls and bulldozing of villages.

One would think that the Holocaust anniversary would compel all British media to promote understanding for a secure State of Israel, defending Jews from those who would perpetrate another extermination campaign. Yet The Spectator chose, on this of all dates, to suggest the IDF are modern-day Nazi storm troopers. Says Melanie Phillips:

To imply that the Jews have turned into Nazis in the Middle East does two things. It tells a wicked lie about that tragic impasse, reversing who is victim and who is victimiser. It is the Palestinians who have a programme to eradicate the Jewish state and ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land, as the Arabs have been trying to do for the past 100 years. Israel is merely defending itself...

And of course the second thing Lipmann does through this travesty is to minimise the Holocaust itself and the crimes of the actual Nazis, and thus to betray the memory of those who died.

The Spectator, the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language (since 1828), should have exercised better editorial judgment on this historic occasion.

Comments to The Spectator: letters@spectator.co.uk