All because of a foul-mouthed live streamer, the Zionist Organization of America issued a drastic and self-defeating ultimatum to the President of Heritage Foundation. It told Kevin Roberts that ties with it would be severed unless he made a public apology for defending Tucker Carlson, as well as dump him for platforming Nick Fuentes.
Supposedly the affiliation and interview were red flags. Roberts duly caved. To believe the ZOA, flirt with Carlson and you can’t begin to combat antisemitism. We shall see how much of a difference blackballing him makes. But to put it bluntly, the ZOA was prepared to cut off its nose to spite its face.
The demand was not rooted in the symbiotic relationship between ZOA and Heritage, a think tank to reckon with. The Zionist body was guided by an obdurate mindset, not by common sense. So what if Carlson let Fuentes go through his shtick of denying the Holocaust and poking fun at it. Is it worth making a bunfight that’s bound to be counterproductive?
On the one hand it will drive clicks for the manipulative bigot, an attention-seeker bar none. On the other hand it will upend the Heritage National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Such a breakup makes no tactical sense. After all is said and done, the playacting Nazi inflicts minimal harm with Holocaust insults meant to provoke and make a spectacle that elevates him to a holy cow celebrity.
The fact is, Fuentes is not an authentic Holocaust denier. He lauds Hitler’s aura, compares the crematoria to cookie baking, fusses over the accuracy of 6 million, and generally goes for ridiculous but riveting theatre on podcasts. This works too well - the Tucker Carlson interview racked up 16 million views. As regards the blockbuster star punting Nazi dogma or Holocaust denial, that’s an altogether different kettle of fish.
For, contrary to popular belief, there is Holocaust denial and then there is Holocaust denial.
For one thing, there’s hard core and soft core denial, and the latter is the one posing a high order threat.
Fuentes’s denial is not hard or soft, it’s clownish, and the less attention paid to him the better.
Exactly how does all of this work?
After the snake in the Garden of Eden, Man learnt to do evil’s bidding in tempting and self-serving ways. Forbidden fruit was never a match for silvery tongues. On the back of noble sentiments, depraved causes seduce receptive brains; tinny mantras draw utopians in droves; puerile falsehoods evade detection.
Adel Bin Ahmad is a Holocaust denier, but not that seductive soft core subtle type. Preacher at a Jeddah mosque, he never bothered 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”.
Venom so crude or ‘over the top’ has no hope of inflaming Jew-haters of discernment - the educated and political classes and radicals on the left or right. We may call Bin Ahmad’s type, ‘baseline hard core Holocaust denial’.
Iranian mullahs, also hard core, at least work finesse into their shtick about the Holocaust. This made the late Ayatollah a bigger threat than the volcanic cleric of Jeddah. In this manner he pitched target populations in seductive terms:
“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.”
Woke ideology based on victimhood, however, is amenable to morality planted in Holocaust denial - Eve’s serpent would stand a good chance with progressives.
Consider in that regard British politician, David Ward. His soft core Holocaust denial is delivered attractively packaged:
“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.”
The words and tone are distinct from hard core denial. Andrew Wilkie, late of Nuffield College Oxford, is David Ward’s fellow artiste.
“I have a huge problem with the way that Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians.”
Mark the way Wilkie and Ward contrive to deny the Holocaust without denying it in so many words. History provides many instances of people being, “unbelievably persecuted” or “treated appallingly”. Many however live to tell the tale. This bears no comparison to a methodical extermination of six million Jews, not sparing the newborn.
Mark also how they contrive to kill two birds with one foul shot. They first upgrade Israeli acts to “atrocities” and “gross abuses”. They then downgrade the Holocaust to “persecution” and “treatment”. At the point of meeting Israel can be accused, with a straight face, of perpetrating a similar genocide in Gaza.
Staying with Wilkie and Ward as soft core deniers, they lead people to think not so badly of Nazi Germany treating (a non-lethal word) the Jews “appallingly” as if like third-class citizens: basic rights denied; imprisoned without trial; worked long hours for low pay; or troublemakers executed. “Unbelievable persecution” and “appalling treatment” give no hint of the elements which make the Holocaust a stand-alone genocide: working people to death; exterminating millions by factory methods; liquidating populations town by town, ghetto by ghetto; butchering individuals randomly in mad fits of fury.
The play on words in soft core denial is no accident. I know because I asked Professor Wilkie. He couldn’t explain the sleight of hand, the way he lumped together Holocaust martyrs with ‘abused’ Palestinian Arabs.
How clever of a politician and a law professor to deflate the Holocaust to a massive crime while they inflate casualties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an equally massive crime. We’re led to believe that what Jewish populations suffered in Nazi occupied Europe gave Israelis the motive and impetus to make Palestinian Arabs go through similar hell.
In the telling of anti-Jew bigots, Professors Norman Finkelstein and Marianne Hirsch - children of Holocaust survivors - Gaza is another Warsaw Ghetto.
British author Howard Jacobson explains this carefully laid trap.
“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 specie of Holocaust denial, more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney size.”
Trivialisation of the Holocaust is at its worst when Israelis sling ‘Nazi’ at each other. Haaretz columnist Adira Haas effectively does that in her ‘all suffering is equal’ statement.
“No one has the right to rank and rate suffering. Whether the death camps or Gaza border clashes, suffering is suffering.”
Soft core denial is a dangerous spreader precisely because Jews are not the object of hate: Zionists that treat Palestinian Arabs like dirt are. By this means antisemites can b e enticed through the back door. When hate is couched in enlightened terms, disgust for Israel has a glow.
Those who deny the Holocaust without denying it have thought it all out. To make Israelis the new Nazis, deniers polish Hitler’s record while they tarnish Israel’s. There comes a point where the two meet, where like is like and Jew = Nazi.
What seemed all light nonsense before seems all dark purpose now.
Steve Apfel is an economist; former director and founder of the School of Management Accounting; veteran authority on anti-Zionism; activist combating antisemitism; and prodigious author of non-fiction.