3 min read
Rosa Doherty writes:
A few weeks ago, pop star, Lily Allen, visited “The Jungle” refugee camp in Calais.
While she was there she spoke to a 13-year-old boy who told her he had left Afghanistan, escaping the threat of Daesh and the Taliban, and had travelled alone for six months to try and get to his father, who was living in Birmingham.
He told her he had spent weeks trying to jump on the back of lorries to enter the UK, risking his life in a way that has claimed many already.
He described being beaten and kicked by French police when his attempts failed.
Understandably moved, the pop star used her celebrity status in the best way she saw fit, and was filmed having this conversation for a documentary to raise awareness of the issues.
And as often is the case when a celebrity, especially a young female one, sticks her head above the parapet, she became the subject of an onslaught of negative stories.
Refugees were no longer the focus and the media and people (including myself on Twitter) picked up on the fact she apologised to the young boy for his circumstances, “on behalf of my country.”
Admittedly, it was at this point in the documentary Allen lost me, but I didn’t feel the revulsion that large swathes of people ran with.
I just thought: “That’s very silly, maybe not the best thing to say, but then again you are just an ordinary person, responding in a human way to a dreadful situation.”
I put it down as something awkward and unscripted people say, under intense emotional pressure.
I lost my dad recently and I know how easy it is to say the wrong thing or have people say the wrong thing to you.
But most of the time I think it is safe to assume people’s intentions, especially when responding to things that are upsetting, are good.
But in an article for Vice, she wrote: “From a very early age we were taught about the Second World War and how evil Hitler was.
“You always wonder how he managed to get the whole country to go along with that. Now we're seeing it. But I don't want to be a good German. I want to be on the right side of history.”
I get that Allen might want to use a powerful comparison, but Hitler killed six million Jews – plus millions more including Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and homosexuals.
I regularly hear the moving stories of survivors and witness thier tireless devotion to teaching others about the horrors of the Holocaust so that it never happens again.
Up and down the country today there are survivors living in the safety and sanctuary of Britain, who lived and breathed that experience Allen casually drew upon in her article.
These people, who if they read Vice, (luckily not their demographic,) would recoil in horror at her comparison.
They faced the reality of living next door to people who looked the other way when the Gestapo came to take them and their families off to death camps.
They were marched past homes that lined the road leading up to Auschwitz, homes with people living in them who would have smelt the daily burning of Jewish bodies as they made their afternoon tea.
Seventeen million Britons may well have voted to leave the EU, and many of them may have voted because of immigration, but they are not Nazis.
And in fact thousands of British people have donated millions of pounds to help refugees.
British doctors have quit their jobs to go and work on rescue boats in the Mediterranean and British volunteers have set up makeshift schools to teach Syrian children in refugee camps, as well as lobbied the UK government to agree to take them in.
In fact it was Alf Dubs, a Kindertransport refugee, who persuaded the current government to agree to let in 3,000 children.
By comparing the current refugee crisis and British attitudes to refugees to conditions in Nazi Germany, Allen makes Jews a political football yet again.
And that is the same football that Allen warns others in her article not to make of today’s refugees.
Like her, I’ve visited a refugee camp and had similar conversations to the ones she had.
A year ago next month, I accompanied Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who, like the singer,wanted to see for himself the reality of refugees, fleeing war and terror.
We went to the Greek refugee camp of Idomeni on the Macedonian border, and I was also moved, as I saw pregnant women, and mothers holding new-born babies, queueing to make the tiring journey onwards.
I observed the Chief Rabbi having a very similar conversation with an Afghani boy to that which Allen had.
Rabbi Mirvis’s reaction of sadness and frustration was very similar.
But today’s refugee crisis is a crisis on its own terms, the evil people flee is a new evil, and it doesn’t help anyone to draw wrong comparisons with the Holocaust.
Rosa Doherty is a staff reporter for the JC