Song was so wrong (From York Press)

Song was so wrong

9:47am Friday 1st February 2013 in Letters By Reader's letter

AS A York resident who was opposed to the announced cuts in funding for Holocaust Memorial Day, I am, therefore, very pleased the event went ahead last year.

But what is the purpose of such remembrance if it is not to move beyond the crimes of the Nazis and to advance universally applicable principles against such racially based outrages?

That this was the idea is supported by the title of the forum which followed – ‘And then they came for me.’ I was, then, appalled to discover that the music used for the event was the song God Save This Land To Me, a Zionist song whose lyrics are in no way universal, and which is underpinned by ideas of racial preference, the very basis of the Nazi ideology we rightly decry.

This song was the theme music to the film Exodus which specifically endorses the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homes to make way for Jews in 1948-9.

The lyrics of the song include the words: “Then I see a land where children can run free”, sadly, though, not the children of those who already lived there. The only running they did was away from their country in fear of their lives.

Steve Cox, Ouse Lea, Shipton Road, York.