"Acceptable" Holocaust Denial (David Bedein On Israeli Government Hypocrisy Alert)

On Monday, the Israeli government issued vehement denunciation of the conference convened by the Iranian government in Teheran to promote the denial of the mass murder of the Jews in World War II, in an act of holocaust denial. Our news agency asked the spokespeople of the government of Israel if they would also denounce the leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, for the holocaust denial which has been an integral part of his legacy.

However, the government of Israel would issue no such denunciation of Abbas, who wrote his doctorate in 1982 in Moscow, at the Institute for Oriental Studies. The institute was headed by Yevgeny Primakov, a Jew, an Arabist, an avowed friend of Saddam Hussein and other Arab rulers, and eventually the prime minister of Russia. Of all these qualities, Abu Mazen emphasized mainly Primakov's Jewish origin.

The heading of his doctoral thesis was: "Zionist leadership and the Nazis." The introduction dealt, among other topics, with a loaded issue: How many Jews perished in the Holocaust. In the Soviet period, especially in the anti-Israel institute that Abu Mazen attended, they often dealt with such questions. The Soviet Union, more than any other country, was addicted to Holocaust denial. The victims were not recognized by their origin, but rather by their nationality. And this is what the diligent researcher Mahmoud Abbas wrote:

World War Two caused the death of 40 million people from different parts of the world. Ten million Germans, 20 million Soviets, and more…Rumors at the end of the war said that 6 million of the world's Jews were among the victims in the war of extermination that was waged against the Jewish people and later on against other peoples. The fact is that no one can confirm this number or deny it. The number could be 6 million, but it could be much smaller, perhaps even smaller than one million. The controversy over the number must not divert us from the severity of the crime committed against the Jewish people. The murder of a human being is a crime that the cultured world must not accept. "Many researchers who discussed the number reached the unconventional conclusion that it is no more than several hundred thousand," he wrote. Later on, Abu Mazen quotes a Holocaust denier who claimed that "at first the Zionists spoke about 12 million Jews who were killed in the death camps. They later narrowed the number down to 6 and to 4 million. It is not possible that the Germans murdered more Jews than existed in the world at the time." He quotes another Holocaust denier who counted 896,000 Jewish victims in all.

In May 2003, shortly after Abbas became the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, correspondents from the Israeli media confronted him with his thesis. In that meeting with Israeli reporters, Abbas would not apologize nor retract the Holocaust denial thesis that he had written. Abbas has consistently refused to distance himself from his thesis. However, the Israeli government is not pushing him to do so.

After all, there are political considerations, since the Israeli government is currently in negotiation with Abbas. In other words, to deny the holocaust in Teheran is reprehensible; to do so in Ramallah is acceptable.

You might call this the first case of “politically correct” Holocaust denial.

There is just one anti-semite and Holocaust Denier a hypocritical Israeli government will NOT denounce. None other than Mahmoud Abbas, who as Abu Mazen, in his days as a student at Moscow University, wrote a thesis denying the historical reality of the Holocaust. This may be the first time in history an Israeli government has set aside truth and justice to avoid offending offending the man it views as its negotiating partner. As Bedein puts it, this is history's first instance of politically correct Holocaust Denial.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus

It was a grotesque genocide of those deemed undesirables by the Nazis. It wasn't the first attempted extinction, wasn't the last and wasn't the largest either. Somehow it's the one we hear most about.

If it was 800,000 then it was 800,000. It it was 4 million or 6 million or 20 million... I think we do ourselves and those murdered a disservice if we don't try to get some kind of accurate accounting.

It's been done. The number is between 5.1 and 6.2 million when one looks at Nazi accounting, and differentials of pre and post-war censuses.

This is not about figures. It is about the far left and anti-Semites having the ability to say that the Holocaust was unimportant or did not exist. (If too few Jews were killed, then who could tell?) Of course thsi does a disservice to the 5 million non-Jews killed in the Holocaust too.

It was a grotesque genocide of those deemed undesirables by the Nazis. It wasn't the first attempted extinction, wasn't the last and wasn't the largest either. Somehow it's the one we hear most about.
Which one was larger?

Seriously, Saddam was just tried and sentenced to hang for his campaign of genocide and it's largely ignored even in the midsts of an unpopular 'war'. We don't hear about Stalin. Sudan is shrugged off.
Leftist media.
They liked to use the Holo cause for a number of a reasons
1. It was a convenient club against nationalism.
2. Somehow the communists were made to look good, despite complicity.
3. The Soviets used it as cover for their own misdeeds.

I can understand and appreciate the Zionist movement and Jewish desire to "never forget" but I'm concerned it's taking on a life of its own in a harmful way. Evidence of this is any criticism aimed at Israel's policies (or American policies re: Israel) is shouted down (falsely and corrosively) as antisemitism. That kind of slanderous heckler's veto is historically dangerous to freedom and an open exchange of ideas..
90% of the time we are talking about anti-Semites, who like the current situation. They get to play victim. Look at St. David Irving.

I attack American and Israeli policies all the time. I just don't do so with the hope of taking away land from Jews, leaving them open to slaughter, or pulling a Munich deal with the Islamists who want to conquer us too!

Even folks who say it wasn't 12 million but maybe 4-6 million get tagged as "Holocaust deniers" which is so far from a fair basis of reality as to demand decent people of conscience to say, "Hold the phone!" The more you dilute terms like "antisemitism" or "Holocaust denier" the more you belittle the victims of the real thing.

Belittling quickly becomes denying. Whose deaths do not exist if you drop from 12 to 4 million? Do you write of the Roma, all political dissidents, the undesired handicapped, the intelligentsia of conquered nations, or most Jews? Do you ignore Hitlers open plans of killing 1/3 of Slavs, enslaving 1/3 and expelling the rest past the Urals?

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