After the snake in the Garden of Eden, Man learned to do evil’s bidding in tempting and beautiful ways. From then on forbidden fruit was no match for a silvery tongue. On the wings of fine sentiments, depraved causes seduce the human mind; tinny mantras draw utopians in droves; wishful thinking flattens facts on the ground; parroted lies pass for truth. And who does it put out of business? Honest Holocaust deniers, a dying breed, outside the Muslim world.
Adel Bin Ahmad is an honest denier. Preacher at the Jeddah mosque, Bin Ahmad is not one to mince words. “The Jews disseminate everywhere the lie of the Holocaust and claim that Hitler killed six million Jews in gas chambers. Although pure falsehood, they have made it part of their history”. Crude and over-the-top for sensitive folks, honest deniers are met with bemusement. The venom of honest deniers is too sharp for Western palates.
Iran’s Mullahs and Ayatollahs are honest deniers who cater for the sophisticated palate. They know that American and European progressives want to believe that moderates govern Iran, so the Mullahs give them what they want. Credit where credit is due. They do a convincing job. One Ayatollah who will never mark Holocaust Remembrance Day speaks in words of catchy finesse. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei because of a certain subtlety, is a more dangerous denier than the hot cleric from Jeddah.
“Observe that no one in Europe dares to speak about the Holocaust even though it’s not clear what the reality is about it, whether it even has a reality, or how it may have happened.”
Silvery tongue and all, Khamenei at the end of the day is an honest denier good for a polite chuckle. Western progressives want to be pitched in round about terms – Eve’s serpent would stand a good chance with them. Ruled by the heart, they are bowled over by moral sentiments. Englishman David Ward, MP is a good example of a denier who appeals to sophisticates.
“I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians …on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza… The suffering by the Jews has not transformed their views on how others should be treated.”
Politician Ward is quite unlike your honest denier, and so is Ward’s tweed-jacketed friend, Andrew Wilkie of Nuffield College, Oxford: “I have a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians.”
Attend to how these gentlemen contrive to deny the Holocaust without denying it, how Ward and Wilkie contrive to kill two birds with one foul shot.
(a) They upgrade Israeli acts to “atrocities” and “gross abuses” while
(b) they downgrade the Nazi genocide to “persecution” and “treatment."
Surely lots of people in the world are persecuted unbelievably or treated appallingly. Yet many live to tell the tale. Their plight is worlds away from the methodical extermination of six million, not sparing the newborn.
Notice as well how the Ward-Wilkie types shift victimhood: Jews don’t suffer atrocities, they commit them. We are led to think not too badly of the Nazis. The Nazis treated Jews “appallingly”, like third-class citizens; they denied them rights and opportunities, deprived Jews of the basics, imprisoned them without trial, worked them long hours for low pay, subjected Jews to curfews and check points, gave them cramped quarters and fed them bad food, locked up or eliminated the troublemakers. Hardships indeed.
But no hint of the elements which made the Holocaust a standalone genocide: working people to death; exterminating people by factory methods, liquidating populations town by town, ghetto by ghetto; butchering Jews in fits of fury.
The play on words by the clever denier is deliberate. I know because I asked Professor Wilkie. He was at a loss to explain his peculiar pairing of Holocaust victims and abused Palestinians – a neat sleight of hand. And how expertly these well-camouflaged deniers drum up support! They deflate the Holocaust to a massive crime while they inflate Palestinian suffering to a massive crime so that the two are level pegging. We are led to think that what the Nazis put the Jews through gave Israel the impetus for making Palestinians go through similar hell. The old cycle of violence again.
Is it possible? Jews turning the tables, Jews becoming Nazis? The novelist Howard Jacobson explains the trick.
“What do we think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? We want to wound Jews in their anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. It is as though…Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday. Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity is the latest species of Holocaust denial, more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney size.”
Which of the two is more dangerous: the clever denier or the foolish? We are about to see. America and Europe swim in progressives. They are academics and the mob, celebrities and champions of change (Linda Sarsour), groups with a grudge (Me Too, Women against Trump, LGBT, Antifa, BLM).
In the US Congress itself ‘Nazi’ is scattered like confetti. Trump and supporters are Nazis for not wanting waves of ‘asylum seekers’ to crash the border, or for insurrection by invading the Capitol.
Perhaps worst of all is when Israelis sling ‘Nazi’ at Israelis. Of course not for commiting genocide. The Israeli Holocaust down-grader is not such a fool. Haaretz columnist, Adira Haas is a good model. No one, she says, has the right to rank and rate suffering. Whether the death camps or Gaza border clashes, suffering is suffering. Hail Holocaust denial with a twist of moral theory.
Whatever the method used people who deny the Holocaust without denying it have been effective. The progressive media, CNN and the NYT no less, have bought into Holocaust denial.
Observe here something beyond sly. Jews are not the direct object of hatred. Israelis treat the Palestinians badly. This back door invites us to enter. We are tempted, because Israelis give Israel-haters good reason.
If they hated Israel viscerally they would not be enlightened and only a few suckers would be attracted. But when haters attack Israel in a round-about way, via sympathy for Palestinian victims, sympathy is aroused and people are drawn. When hatred is clothed to look enlightened, disgust for Israel has a glow.
Those who deny the Holocaust without denying it have thought it all out. By claiming that Israelis are the Nazis of our time they polish up Hitler’s record while tarnishing Israel’s. Comes a point where the two meet, where like is like, and deniers can say that Jew = Nazi.
What seemed all light nonsense before seems all dark purpose now.
Steve Apfel is an economist and a cost accountant, but most of all a prolific author of non-fiction and fiction, published in many journals and sites. His books include: ‘The Paymaster’ (Fiction); Hadrian’s Echo (Non-fiction); ‘A bias thicker than faith’ (non-fiction, for publication during 2020), and ‘Balaam’s curse’ a WIP biblical novel