Damn those self hating Jews.
Professor Norman Geras, the Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester, has linked
his blog readers to an intriguing story about the coterie of neo-Nazi cranks and fraudsters who populate the so-called “Institute of Historical Review”. The Director of this “Institute”, Mark Weber,
has been forced to admit that thirty years of Holocaust Denial have ended in failure.
Holocaust denial is not new: this disgusting phenomenon can be traced back to 1974, with the output of the
French pseudo-scholar Robert Faurisson. Yet thirty years on, Weber has posted
an article on his site bemoaning the fact that sustained attempts by himself and other far-right sympathisers to “debunk” the Final Solution and to cast doubt on the historical record of Nazi Germany’s campaign of genocide against European Jews have got nowhere.
Weber whines that “[it’s] been almost 30 years, and Holocaust revisionism has gotten almost no support in academic circles or society at large”, and he attributes this outcome to the malevolent influence of “Jewish-Zionist power” over academic and public opinion in North America and the West in general. The fact that Holocaust deniers have failed because they are incompetent hacks whose rantings about the Shoah are generally recognised as historically illiterate, intellectually dishonest and factually unsound seems to have escaped him.
Weber notes that the cause of Holocaust denial has “gotten some support in Iran, or places like that, but as far as I know, there is no history department supporting writing by these folks”. The reference to Iran is interesting. This country currently has the misfortune to have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President, a man who embarrassed his own countrymen by hosting the
International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust in December 2006. The conference included such charmers as Faurisson, David Duke and Frederick Toben.
Funnily enough, the only individual uninvited from the conference was an Israeli Arab lawyer, Khaled Kasab Mahameed, the founder of the
Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education. Mahameed was the only speaker at the conference who proposed to tell his listeners that the Holocaust was a historical fact, and that claims that it did not take place were academically unsound. Holocaust deniers who loudly proclaim that their rights to free speech are being eroded by Western governments were strangely unwilling to lobby President Ahmadinejad to have Mr Mahameed’s invitation renewed.
It is also interesting to see where Holocaust denial still possesses some credibility. The deniers’ efforts to push their claims in democratic countries where the rights to free speech and a free press are protected by law have resulted in abject failure. They have, however, managed to gain an audience in
a country where peaceful political dissent is brutally suppressed, where
journalists who embarrass the government are murdered in police custody and where
state-sanctioned racism towards ethnic minorities is
rife. Holocaust deniers survive by pandering to petty despots like Ahmadinejad, but no one in their own countries will touch them with a bargepole. How appropriate is that?