We should all be against Holocaust revisionism/denial. The points that Deborah Lipstadt raised lately at Harvard Hillel are painfully valid:
Lipstadt also discussed what she called “soft-core Holocaust denial,” a new form of denial in which the Holocaust “gets mixed up with other things” and is “used as a misrepresentation.” As an example, she cited the comparison of George W. Bush to Hitler, which she said suggested an implicit denial of the Holocaust.
“To compare [Bush] to Hitler is to turn history on its head,” said Lipstadt.
Or on her blog:
Whatever you may think about Israel's policies vis a vis the Palestinians, to compare it to the Holocaust is to distort what is going on today as well as what went on during WWII.
But what about Holocaust revisionism that compares Arabs, Iranians, and Palestinians to the Nazis. Does that count?
LOS ANGELES - Drawing a direct analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu asserted Monday that the Iranian nuclear program posed a threat not only to Israel , but to the entire western world. There was "still time," however, to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he said.
"It's 1938 and Iran is Germany . And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs," Netanyahu told delegates to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly, repeating the line several times, like a chorus, during his address. "Believe him and stop him," the opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this."
How about the Israeli government’s denial of the Palestinian Naqba?
In the US they teach school children about Wounded Knee, but in Israel school textbooks don’t even mention the Palestinians as existing at all in the 19th and 20th centuries. The land was empty, according to those books.
how old are you Nolan? you are like a little child, well Israel does this, Israel doesn’t do that…..
Its ridiculous…… I understand, I agree with what you are saying, but why EVERY time, no matter what is said its either “well Israel does this” or something to do with Richard Witty, no matter what is posted.
I don’t know if you noticed Yonira, but Israel doing its own holocaust comparisons was mentioned in the post. Hence, Nolans criticism is called for.
Why is it ok for Israeli leaders to compare Arafat to Hitler but its not “ok” to compare Bush to Hitler? Granted both are stupid comparisons, but its NEVER questioned when Israeli leaders make a comparison at this level of retardation. In fact when Israeli leaders compare some random leader in the Muslim world to Hitler, its used as a fact, as a justification to invade and destroy another country.
Its ridiculous…… I understand, I agree with what you are saying, but why EVERY time
Perhaps one day, when you have enough of life’s experiences you’ll understand.
Try finding a reference in any but the most specialist textbook to the Herero and Namaqua Genocide committed by the Germans, you’d think it’d be a pretty major event but it’s hardly ever mentioned.
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law.
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the “Devil? Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
More: Oh? And when the last law was down–and the Devil turned round on you–where would you hide? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Robert Bolt : A Man for All Seasons
Lipstadt is correct. I hear Obama compared to Hitler. If that’s so, then what did Hitler do that was so bad, eh?
But what about Holocaust revisionism that compares Arabs, Iranians, and Palestinians to the Nazis. Does that count?
It proves Netanyahu is a nutcase. He may have attended MIT, but as some of his countrymen have noted, he’s a vulgar culture ignoranamus. His statement at the UN was so over-the-top that had it been any other leader, he would have been laughed off the stage. He functions from the amygdala section of the limbic brain, which causes him to extrapolate his emotion into fact, however false. Of course, look who he is appealing to.
I would like for Israel to be judged by the actions of Israelis. Shouldn’t that be enough to soundly condemn Israel?
The fundamental mental instability that Zionists suffer from is that they still live in the 1940′s. And ALL their enemies are Nazis.
64 years later, indeed a different century all together, and they’re still shell-shocked due to wrong post-traumatic medication.
The progressives still live in the 60s and 70s, and their enemies are white supremacists of the Southern variety. The strategy has worked well for each group, so I don’t see things changing any time soon.
Let’s see, those who says Israel’s actions –enabled by the USA –are not really actions in tune with the moral-ethical universal assumptions displayed by the Nuremberg Trials, and their progeny International agencies, are not progressive?
In his biography of Ahmadinejad, Yossi Melman quoted an Iranian military leader who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war and had witnessed Iraq’s gassing of Iranian civilians.
“Never again,” he said, will Iranians be unprepared to protect their people from a ‘holocaust.’
Nobody came to Iran’s aid when Iraq was gassing Iranian civilians. Iranian appeals to the UN went unanswered. American leaders 1) ignored Iran’s pleas; 2) counter-charged that Iran was retaliating against Iraqi forces with gas; 3) participated, with Germany, in selling the gasses to Iraq, gasses not used since they were internationally proscribed in the aftermath of World War I.
The international community Denied the holocaust of Iranians even as it was taking place.
The world community, led by Israel, continues to deny the facts and reality of the suffering of Iranian civilians at the hands of Iraq, assisted with US intelligence aid.
According to Ronen Bergman, for its part, Israel was happy to keep Iraqis and Iranians killing each other: Israel was selling munitions to Iran (much of which was of inferior quality and performance) and, according to one Israeli general, “Never gave a thought to the ethics of the practice; Israel was in it for the money.”
One notes that, not only did no one else come to Iran’s aid when its civilians were being gassed, the United States was actually providing satellite intelligence to Iraq so that they could utilize effective the chemical weapons we provided component materials for.
We all should be against Holocaust denial AND revisionism?
By revisionism, Anonymous means “the critical re-examination of presumed historical facts and existing historiography”?
Deborah Lipstadt and Anonymous are concerned about how historians interpret the Holocaust, but are they pro-dogma for other events and areas, too?
“Never again” as a life-orientation means no rational inquiry into the Holocaust? (Kind of like “Jesus saves” means being against scientific stem-cell research?)
If the “Jesus saves” people shouldn’t be in charge of science, should the “Never Again” crowd be in charge of history?
(Or foreign policy?)
We should also support Holocaust Revisionism. The main aspects of the Holocaust narrative were put together as Zionist propaganda before there was access to Soviet archives and important E. European witnesses.
The work of Zionist Holocaust scholars like Goldhagen and Lipstadt is mostly garbage, and there are even problems with a careful scholar like Browning.
In addition, not only are Zionism and German Nazism very similar, but studying one can help explain the other.
Further reading:
1. Why is this Nationalism different …
2. Holocaust: Gentile Deaths Don’t Count!
3. [wvns] U.S., Israel Move To Keep Goldstone Report From Going to Security Council.
you are a twisted ****
Do you have children, Yonira? If every one of your communications with other human beings is punctuated by personal attacks and epithets, I find myself feeling incredibly sorry for your children, if you have them. (I’ll feel sorry for your spouse too, but to be fair, she probably knew what she was getting into)
Incisive analysis!
Yonira – best to ignore. “GalenSword” is one of the many pseudonyms of a nutcase by the name of Joachim Martillo whose mouth is bigger than his brain. Look him up – you can find his rants against Jews and blaming them for the Holocaust, along with tirades against feminists, gays, you name it.
He’ll probably be banned again shortly as he has been in the past.
See, Witty, this is why nobody is stupid enough to give Zionists their real names here unless it’s already too late. The “anti-defamation” defamation league is in full force. We’ve seen all you Zionists do it — you viciously attack the reputations of anyone brave enough to contradict your B.S.
Mr. Martillo – thanks for the laugh. You can crawl back into your cave, now that you’ve proven once again that Einstein was right when he said that perhaps only stupidity is truly infinite.
Thanks for posting Joachim. You must be doing something right when you have Zionist scum like carnas going bonkers.
And now the rest of the Klan comes crawling out of the woodwork. Phil, you’ve got a lovely crowd here.
Then, leave, carnas. Because this is site that looks at uncomfortable truths and lies and dissects them. Joachim Martillo speaks Hebrew, he lived in the ME for a time. He can translate docs for us. We dont live in the Israeli haze here. Sometimes the tempers flare, but so what. Your brand of ‘It’s so because I say it’s so and no one is allowed to counter a Zionist’ is neither welcomed nor appreciated. Go speak cobra someplace else.
MRW, you certainly live in a haze – it’s called ignorance. Anyway, you can investigate the Holocaust all you like. Here’s a conference you might try to get into next time it’s held.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Hell, with your credentials in historical research you might even get to sit next to David Duke!
Oh yes, the so-called “Holocaust deniers’ conference”… that was attended by rabbis.
Carnas, the only holocaust denier here is you — only you’re a little ‘h’ holocaust denier. No mass murder matters to you if it didn’t happen to Jews!
Israeli culture at its finest, people. No wonder the academic and cultural boycotts are gaining momentum.
All Historians are revisionists. That is what the study of History is. Much History is only revealed when documents are de-classified sometimes as long as one hundred years after the event.
The stupidity of muzzling the “revisionists” is easily demonstrated.
A huge archive at Bad Arolsen containing 16 kilometres of documents from the camps was de-classified last year.
Should the contents be examined? If so by whom? Only those who swear allegiance to the accepted narrative?
If they conflict with the accepted narrative, should they be published?
If the contents show that the event was even more horrific than previously thought, should that information be suppressed as “revisionism?
Nothing has served to boost the extremist deniers more than attempts to stifle revisionism.
Examination of Holocaust History has resulted in the discovery that no extermination by gas occurred on German soil – contrary to the common belief immediately post-war. This knowledge is the result of genuine scholars examining the evidence. Some of them paid the price for their scholarship by being labeled “revisionist” despite the fact that their discoveries are now accepted by all major historians including Simon Weisenthal.
It would be nice if we could eliminate loony polemicists from debate but the price is too high.
Truth has no need for gatekeepers.
Eric Cline is a professor of Jewish studies and ancient Jewish history. In one of his series’ of lectures, Cline said,
In the same series of lectures, Cline tackles the fact-value of the NUMBER of Jews who fled Egypt, which the Torah (and even that most unassailable of all sources, Wikipedia! link to en.wikipedia.org
) sets at “600,000.”
Cline explains that 600,000 is an impossible number, noting that the number of midwives accompanying that many people would have been wholly inadequate to care for that many people, and that it would have taken that large a number at least six months to cross the Sea of Reids. Cline concludes that the actual number of Hebrews in the exodus from Egypt is most likely 600, or perhaps even as few as 60.
The “huge archive at Bad Arolsen,” which it is in fact, has 17 million documents. That’s what I remember. Which means: 2.83 documents per dead Jew; not the entirety of the people killed in the camps, only the Jewish prisoners. That count alone does not make sense. Those Germans kept records of the number of pieces of toilet paper you used, and what you ate for dinner, and your snacks. <> The archive is important to be able to see. But where is it now since they moved it? I thought a copy of the scans went to the Smithsonian, with an edict that no one could look at it. If that’s true, something stinks. Why?
I have the full Nuremberg trial docs on my computer now with all the evidence, courtesy of the Library of Congress. It will take me a year to go through this stuff. So I’ll let you know if I come across anything interesting. Why am I doing this? Because I saw documents from the Red Cross supposedly presented at the Nuremberg trials that dont comport with the numbers we’ve been told since 1945. And I find it beyond puzzling that after Yehuda Bauer, director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel, announced in the first few years of the 90s that the figures at Auschwitz were wrong: there weren’t four million Jews killed, there were approx. 1.1, that all of a sudden the number of Jewish dead rises back to six million. Why? Why would anyone want to embellish the numbers? Why? That in itself is a horror and despicable. I mean, look at the lather we get ourselves into over 1400 dead Palestinians last December. It’s not the number, it’s the fucking truth we’re after.
The Wannsee Conference was in early 1942. link to scrapbookpages.com
As eminent scholar and statesman Bibi Netanyahu likes to remind the world, Ahmadinejad is Hitler and Iran is Germany:
FACT: As is noted in the Wannsee site linked above, that the conferees at Wannsee “planned” to “kill Jews” in massive numbers is highly ambiguous. Relocate, yes, but genocide? Not supportable by the evidence.
FACT: If the plan of the Wannsee conference WAS, indeed, to exterminate Jews, the conference was held in 1942. Did Germans compose the PLAN to exterminate Jews four frickin years AFTER , according to Bibi, the Germans began to put the plan into effect?
FACT: Ahmadinejad is not only NOT planning the extermination of Israel, he doesn’t have the power to do so even if he wanted to; in the Iranian government system, (as Fred Kagan helpfully points out link to irantracker.org
) Ahmadinejad is not the political equivalent of Hitler in 1938 or even 1942 Germany.
Logical QUERY: If the Germans did NOT plan the genocide of the Jews in “1938,” and given that even Fred Kagan recognizes that Ahmadinejad does not have the power to enact a “1938″ that may or may not have occurred until 1942, then what degree of credibility should the world’s decision makers place in the statements of the leader of the Jewish and democratic state of Israel?
Come on guys. Focus. Even if Holocaust numbers were wrong, who cares? Palestinians are dying. Their cause is so much more important than bickering over European history. By talking about historical revisionism and the Holocaust, right or wrong, you discredit everything you say about Israel/Palestine in the eyes of most people. Either become a professional historian and focus on the Holocaust full time (and in good faith), or be an activist on Israel/Palestine. The two really needn’t be connected. To do so looks petty at best, anti-semitic at worst. The Holocaust was real, its trauma was real. Don’t be like the Zionists who downplay Nakba numbers – the impulse to minimize another group’s suffering is ugly, and to even consider doing so is suspicious. Just don’t go there, for the sake of pragmatism if nothing else.
1. tell it to Bibi.
2. you can’t achieve justice without truth; unearthing the truth of the holocaust IS working for justice
3. truth-telling IS activism on behalf of Palestinians
4. Ahmadinejad and Iran have been ‘activists’ for Palestinian justice for many years, and to the detriment of Ahmadinejad’s reputation and the well-being and economic vitality of the Iranian people. They have been specifically targeted by Israel and Israel’s American influence-peddlars precisely because they spoke inconvenient truths and defended the rights of Palestinians. Iran is the model for pro-Palestinian activism.
5. That being the case, advocating against the demonization of Iran in the US by Israel and its influence peddlars is ALSO activism on behalf of the Palestinian people.
How is Iran the model for pro-Palestinian activism? Other than funneling weapons what are they doing?
I am not trying to spew Zionist psycho-babble(for once) I am genuinely curious as to what Iran does for the Palestinian cause.
Iran’s sole contribution to the Palestinian cause is to keep repeating that whatever the facts of the Holocaust, they can not justify the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
3. truth-telling IS activism on behalf of Palestinians
But the Holocaust has nothing to do with the Palestinians. It has to do with Jewish history, and when you focus on it, it leads to the suspicion that you are fixated on Jews (in a negative sense) rather than primarily concerned with Palestinian rights.
No matter how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, the number does not change its effect on Jewish consciousness or the obligation to prevent similar tragedies in the future (for any people). Debate about the number killed really is irrelevant to the Palestinian situation, and conflating the two betrays (at least in appearance) an “anti-Jew” lens as opposed to either a “Palestinian human rights” or “Holocaust history” lens.
I agree with you that Iran should not be demonized, and the problems it should be recognized and dealt with in a more realistic way.
Phil is right in his observation that “new Holocaust” Zionist scare tactics do meet good criteria for anti-semitism.
And let me point out that I am not a Jewish person. So it’s not as if I have any conceivable privileges to protect in saying this. I am concerned with Palestinian (and Israeli) human rights, and I’m saying seriously that this stuff hurts our cause.
And let me add that when you, as someone who (I’m assuming) is not a professional historian, endorses numbers that are well below those of the consensus, it looks like minimization, rather than a concern for accuracy.