Afif Safieh
General Delegate to the UK and the Holy See.

      Children of a lesser God?
“I have never compared the Palestinian Naqba of 1948 to the Holocaust. My conviction has always been that there is no need for historical analogies and comparative martyrology. No one people has a monopoly on human suffering and every ethnic tragedy stands on its own. If I were a Jew or a Gypsy, Nazi barbarity would be the most atrocious event in History. If I were a Black African, it would be slavery and apartheid. If I were a Native American, it would be the discovery of the New World by European explorers and settlers that resulted in near total extermination. If I were an Armenian, it would be the Ottoman massacres. If I were a Palestinian, it would be the Naqba/Catastrophe of 1948. Humanity should consider all the above morally repugnant and politically unacceptable.

I do not consider it advisable to debate hierarchies of suffering. I do not know how to quantify pain or how to measure suffering but I do know that we are not children of a lesser God.”
                                                           Afif Safieh