1. Why is the number "6 Million" so prominent in Jewish/Zionist history?

2. Why did the number stay at the mythical "6 Million" even after the "official" count of Jewish deaths at Auschwitz was dropped from 4mm to 2mm and beyond?

Estimates of the number of Jews murdered ranges from 4-6 million. I used to agree with Raul Hilberg, who used a 5 million figure, but Soviet data suggests that he overestimated.

As far as I know, the figures provided by the Polish government at the Auschwitz memorial were not input to any scholar's calculation of the number of Jewish victims during WW2.

In recent years, the Polish government adjusted the Auschwitz memorial numbers to agree with those provided by historians.

The rap on people who critize Israel is that they are anti-Semites. You, on the other hand, are a humane, thoughtful critic of Zionism who is not an anti-Semite. Yours is an important voice. But you have attracted a growing number, it seems, of extreme anti-Jewish racists to your blog. I fear Gresham's Law may be at work here. And it is a shame. It is very easy for those who should take you seriously to dismiss your ideas because of the company you keep here.

I feel it is long past time to debate people who quibble over 5 million or 6 million and argue that the Jews used their mythical power to bring industrial-strength mass murder upon themselves. It doesn't need to be countered because it is so marginal. It just needs to be ignored. Why give such views a forum? My feeling is: Yuck! Who wants to have anything to do with that?

Strange, I have only participated in this blog for a short time but I have (except for the Martillo post) seen nothing of the kind.

In fact my prize for the most racist comments goes to Bill Pearlman, a rabid defender of Israel. At first I half and half suspected that he was a creature of Phil's imagination, put in to provide some counterpoint (if we all agreed with each other we could soon stop talking couldn't we?). However I have dropped that idea. Phil would have given him more intelligent lines if that were the case.

About racism and anti-Semitism, it is all a bit confusing, because one of France's most prestigious public intellectuals and philosophers, Alain Finkielkraut, has assured us that anti-racism is in fact anti-Semitism.

I have quoted him under an entry nobody seems to look at any more so here he is again:

When Mr.Finkielkraut visited Canada two years ago he declared in an interview published in the Canadian Jewish News of 9/22/05 inter alia:

"…traditional French anti-Semitism is bloodless, tired, moribund….the new anti-Semitism is, by contrast, vigorous, lively and continuously expanding. The old anti-Semitism of French pedigree is in its death throes, the new developing anti-Semitism expresses itself in the name of the religion of humanity. Not, in name of the nation, against the belief in the equality of people and the equality of human rights, but in name of the religion of humanity. The Jews are reproached for betraying these rights. It is an anti-Semitism one cannot accuse by referring to the past because it has nothing to do with the past. It is not an anti-Semitism of a racial type, against which people generally mobilise. It is an anti-racist anti-Semitism."

And also,

"We are not dealing here with racial hatred against which Jews could protest by dragging their detractors before tribunals. How can one combat anti-racist hatred? That is very difficult."

I bet it is.

The insinuation that there was, somehow, a justification for this mass murder is absolutely and totally beyond the pale.

In fact the 'defense' given: 'Germany was engaged in a life and death struggle' could have come straight out of the mouth of Hitler.

In fact this, or something very similar, did come out of the mouth of Hitler. It was when Henny Hoffmann, the wife of the Nazi party's youth leader, Baldur Von Schirach, protested to Hitler about the treatment of the Jews. She had just come back from occupied Amsterdam where she had seen a 'razzia' against the Jewish population there and was apparently very upset about it.

Why wasn't she shot? She was, apart from being Von Schirach's wife, the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer and friend.

Because of this element of collective revenge in the mass killing of Jews in Eastern Europe during WW2, I do not consider the Holocaust a particularly "pure" example of genocide.

I also do not consider the Holocaust particularly unique when viewed in the context of the wave of genocide that starts in the Czarist Empire in the 1820s (against the Chechens) and that spreads westward (through the Balkans).

Relatively speaking far more Eastern European Ashkenazim (relatively and probably absolutely) seem to have been directly involved in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide during the Russian Revolution and during the first 20 years of the Soviet Union than were Germans directly involved in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide during the Nazi period.

Occasionally Harvard research Sarah Roy has asked rhetorically as the child of Holocaust survivors, "How can Israeli Jews commit such atrocities against Palestinians?" And I answer her as someone who lost even more relatives to the German Nazis than she, "Study the history of the Russian Revolution and early Soviet Union."

[I have occasionally given a lecture on "The Myth of Jewish Powerlessness in Eastern Europe and Czarist Russia during the Late 19th and Early 20th Century."]

As for heinousness of the Holocaust relative to the experiences of Palestinians, it is a psychological issue. When a soldier is blown up in battle, it is not usually considered heinous, but if a child is dropped from a bridge onto a highway where it is smashed by high-speed traffic, such a murder is heinous.

A segment of the Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim chose to be players in Eastern European politics, and without them the Communists would never have stolen the Russian Revolution. Without the Soviet Union, no Hitler. Without Hitler, no Holocaust. There seems to be some sort of karmic principle operating in this case.

But in the case of Palestinians what did they do but live in Palestine? Unlike ethnic Ashkenazim they are descended from Greco-Roman Palestinian populations. Their ancestors wrote the Hebrew Bible, the Mishna, the Baraita, and the Jerusalem Talmud, which were to a large extent sliced and diced by Zionists to justify the genocide of the modern Palestinian populations.

The history of Palestinians seems almost anti-karmic, and I am completely creeped out that Zionist scholars like S.D. Goitein, who could out-Mengele Mengele, were or are praised and honored within the Jewish community and beyond.

BTW, I treat the Nakba as only part of the crime committed against Palestinians. I normally refer to the Holoexaleipsis, which is the Great Erasure, which includes the past and ongoing demonization of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims along with the physical erasing of Palestinians from their native land — a process that continues to this day.

The Holoexaleipsis also refers to the erasing and rewriting of both the history of Palestine and of Jews to conform to Zionist propaganda.

The Holoexaleipsis began in the 19th century and continues in the 21st. It is a crime that spans three centuries.

“German Nazi mass murders of Jews do not start until after Operation Barbarossa, and after reading a tremendous amount a primary German and Soviet documentation, I believe the Nazis killed Jews because they equated them (for the most part correctly) with the Soviet elite class with whom Germany was in a death struggle.”

I know of no reputable scholar of the holocaust who would support that view. Is that why you refer to all that primary documentation you have allegedly studied? The idea that German anti-Semitism in general and the Nazi-variety of it in particular became murderous only after the Nazis had correctly identified their enemies is outrageous.

This is not just a matter of factual correctness or incorrectness. You came very close to the border where ‘explanation’ becomes justification. Because even if Nazi ideas about the nature of the Soviet political class had been correct and even if they did regard them as another type of combatants, how could that possibly explain their extermination of Jews in Russia, and all over Europe, who had absolutely nothing to do with this class? The fact that you ignored this question makes one suspect that you regard the holocaust in toto as one of the ‘harsh necessities of war’. And that was the Nazi justification.

I support Phil’s decision to let you have your say but I would rather not enter into any further discussion with you.

The market speaks!

Do tell. It is relevant.