A week and a half ago, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the courtroom defeat of the Holocaust denier David Irving -- Irving bankrupted by the very libel trial he had initiated -- I posted this diary describing the courtroom drama that led to Irving's downfall. I also promised to do another diary, this time tracing what's happened with the Holocaust denial movement in the ten years since Irving humiliated himself.
Well, this one's it.
Edit: Think of this as a not-birthday-present to Old Uncle Adolf and those who would lie away his crimes.
First, an opening thought from Holocaust denier "Israel Shamir":
Jews only exist to drip the blood of Palestinian children into their matzas.
The Sinking of Irving
What happened to Irving afterwards? As predicted, he spiraled into obscurity. He filed for appeal, was refused, and was bankrupted by the legal bill over the suit he had filed in the first place. He goes on furtive little speaking tours in the US, packing his books into a rental van and bouncing -- sometimes alone, sometimes with a hired assistant -- from city to city, giving talks in hotel conference rooms secured under false names. The actual locations are disclosed only hours in advance of a talk because the talks get shut down otherwise; Irving learned to hold those cards close to his chest because otherwise anti-racist organizations contact the hotel and say, "Do you know that that guy from the 'history book club' is giving a Holocaust denier talk?" and that's the end of it.
Maybe it was a failed bid for publicity, but in 2005 Irving followed up the stupidity of the libel trial with the stupidity of deciding to make a little visit to Austria, hoping to slip in, give a talk, and slip out again. But Austria is one of the more than a dozen nations who include Holocaust denial in their anti-fascist legislation. The result: Irving was arrested and spent a year in prison. In an interesting twist, one of the people who defended him by criticizing Austria's law against Holocaust denial was none other than Deborah Lipstadt, the professor who had exposed Irving for what he was in 2000.
Last time I checked, with only two exceptions -- Israel and Switzerland -- every country which includes Holocaust denial in its anti-fascist codes has something in common: it was either part of the Reich or occupied by the Reich. I'm with Lipstadt on this; I don't think that it should be illegal to be a Holocaust denier, just as it isn't illegal to be inexpressably stupid in lots of other ways too. But, to be fair, I also say that while sitting comfortably in a country that hasn't ever been invaded by Nazis, in a country that has been historically stable enough that it can afford not to muzzle its crackpots. Had things been different, maybe my position would be different as well.
What the law in Austria does do is give Holocaust deniers their only argument that carries any substantial weight: "What are the Holohoaxers afraid of? That people will see through their lies?" followed by all the usual comparisons to Galileo and the Inquisition.
Throwing The Switch
The Irving defeat didn't kill off Holocaust denial, but it triggered an important transformation. It was the realization on the far right that Holocaust denial was simply not a winning card for them. You can't postulate such a giant Jewish conspiracy unless you were already the sort of person who was not unfriendly to the thought of giant international Jewish conspiracies. So it's hardly a good recruiting tool for expanding your Jew-hating base.
Now, the problem with antisemitism, of course, is that it's so antisemitic. The Holocaust made it a little bit awkward to parade around with signs about how you hate the Jews. A euphemism is needed.
Here is the picture I pointed to last week. Spot the euphemism.
Oh, I get it. The Holocaust isn't a big Jewish fraud. It's a big Zionist fraud!
Well, that certainly changes EVERYTHING, doesn't it? And it opens up your audience too.
To be clear: same dumb-ass lies, same dumb-ass sources as before. Same bullshit that Ernst Zündel used to say. Just two little differences. One, the perpetrator of the whole Holohoax scheme is now Thuh Zionists, not Thuh Jooos. And secondly, because it's no longer Thuh Joooos, why then there's nothing antisemitic about it, is there -- and if you think there is, you're just a brainwashed victim of Thuh Zionists.
A good example of this attempt to reposition the Holocaust denial movement after Irving was the ad placed by the denial organization "Institute for Historical Review" in the May 3, 2004 issue of The Nation. The ad plugged a book by Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, presenting the "no gas chambers" bit under the title "The Founding Myths of Israel." When The Nation found out what the ad was really selling, they pulled it from subsequent issues and the web.
That is what happens almost every time Holocaust denial aims left. Almost every time.
Let me be very clear here, because I'm pretty sure somebody's going to try to tell me I'm saying something I'm not. I do not think that anti-Zionism is automatically antisemitism. I don't think it's automatically not antisemitism. But the historical record is clear: as long as there has been anti-Zionism, there have also been antisemites trying to cloak their antisemitism under the garb of anti-Zionism. And nobody shows that better than --
Mahmood Ahmadigonad
Ahmadigonad doesn't say there were no gas chambers; he just says that there are two sides to the question and it needs to be examined more closely.
How reasonable! Kinda like saying, "there are two sides to the question of whether Jews kill Christian boys to drain their blood for matzoh. I'm not saying they do, oh no no no, just that there are two sides to the question and we sorely need an impartial investigation on the topic, which our government will host."
Here's our buddy spewing nonsense in an interview with Der Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: Are you still saying that the Holocaust is just "a myth?"
Ahmadinejad: I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it.
SPIEGEL: Even though no Western scholars harbor any doubt about the Holocaust?
Ahmadinejad: But there are two opinions on this in Europe. One group of scholars or persons, most of them politically motivated, say the Holocaust occurred. Then there is the group of scholars who represent the opposite position and have therefore been imprisoned for the most part. ...
SPIEGEL: Who is that supposed to be? Which researchers do you mean?
Ahmadinejad: You would know this better than I; you have the list. There are people from England, from Germany, France and from Australia.
SPIEGEL: You presumably mean, for example, the Englishman David Irving, the German-Canadian Ernst Zündel, who is on trial in Mannheim, and the Frenchman Georges Theil, all of whom deny the Holocaust. [Note: the one from Australia is probably Frederick Töbin, who attended Ahmadigonad's Holocaust Party.]
The Mad Hatter's Party
You might remember that in 2006 Ahmadigonad threw himself a little Holocaust denial party. Most of the front rank of Holocaust deniers were invited guests -- Robert Faurisson, Frederick Töbin, Jurgen Graf, but not the then-imprisoned David Irving -- along with such sweet not-at-all-antisemitic people as David Duke. It was a bizarre little bit of hate-theater in its most genteel dress.
Ahmadigonad had two central rhetorical goals with this conference.
The first goal was to cleanse Holocaust denial of the specific stigma of antisemitism; he wanted to separate Holocaust denial from its antisemitic origins. He wanted to make it respectable to be able to say, "IF there were gas chambers" in a way that it isn't respectable to say, "IF the Jews run the world." The organizers were at great pains to stress that this wasn't a Holocaust denial conference, no sirree, just a conference in which "it's the Holohoax" was presented as if it were merely another serious option for serious people seriously studying WWII. The panels weren't packed exclusively with Holocaust deniers; they just made sure that people like David Duke and Robert Faurisson had a seat at the table as if they were themselves scholars in a scholarly discussion.
Secondly, he wanted repackage our historical understanding of the Holocaust -- all that business about gas chambers and such -- as the product of, not historians the world over who have
studied WWII since it was actually happening, but nefarious Zionist propagandists. He's not rejecting fully documented history, no sir; he's only helping the struggle against "the Zionist version of the Holocaust."
Sadly -- and to their undying shame -- Facebook accepted Ahmadigonad's first argument, that Holocaust denial is not inherently antisemitic.
Morons.
Meet The Fred Phelpses of Judaism
Ahmadigonad also invited representatives from the only Jewish group in America who would be caught dead (so to speak) at such an overtly antisemitic occasion: the Neturei Karta. Well, actually, the small, radical splinter within the Neturai Karta that's led by Rabbi Dovid Weiss. These guys look legit if you're seeing them the first time, but they're the Fred Phelpses of Judaism. Shock-jock publicity hounds.
Now, if you look at the photos of the conference, you'll see Smilin' Mahmoud shaking hands with some Orthodox rabbi-looking guys in a competition over who can smile the most warmly. And that was why Ahmadigonad invited them: to be there and smile, so that Holocaust deniers could point to them and say, "How can you say this was an antisemitic conference? Look at how warmly those Jews are smiling!"
These guys can be counted on to join any anti-Israel march with their "Jews Not Zionists" banner. They do their best to present themselves as pro-Palestinian. What they don't tell you, of course, is that they believe as a central part of their faith that in the days of the Messiah God will destroy the Dome of the Rock and reestablish Solomon's Temple on the rubble. So you might want to take their Kumbaya moments with a little grain of salt.
Not everybody was smiling when these guys came back home. What you couldn't tell from those smilin' photos was just what fringe-of-the-fringe pariahs these guys are.
Gilad Atzmon and the future of Holocaust Denial
I want to finish up by talking about someone you've almost certainly never heard of: a British jazz saxophonist and Israeli expat named Gilad Atzmon. What makes Atzmon worth bringing up here despite his deep obscurity is not the peculiar pathology of his being a Jewish antisemite -- he's neither the first nor the last of those; you might remember where Bobby Fischer's illness led him -- but rather that he had established himself as a leftist anti-Zionist activist in the UK before his antisemitism became apparent and before he latched onto Holocaust denial as an expression of "anti-Zionism." That was a dangerous combination because, for a short time, he was a figure with both some credibility on the left and an antisemite who consistently wrapped his antisemitism as "anti-Zionism." He was in a uniquely dangerous position of simultaneously being able to get through the defenses of (some of) the left and being willing to inject his antisemitic toxin there.
Here is the Atzmon method. Take any standard antisemitic canard, scrape off the word "Jew," and stick the word "Zionist" in its place. Presto-chango! "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"? Describes the Zionist machine. Who runs the press and the government's foreign policy? It's the Zionists. International banking conspiracies? Zionists caused the 2008 market crash! Blood libel? Zionists kill Palestinians for their organs. Oh, but none of this is antisemitic, he would say, oh no no no. He's talking about the Zionists, not the Jews, so this couldn't possibly possibly be antisemitic, oh no no no. Heaven forfend.
Atzmon, after hanging around with an antisemitic Swedish fascist who himself posed as an Israeli expat (using the pseudonym "Israel Shamir", author of the quote starting this article), started to pass along Holocaust denial essays and more generally echo "Shamir"'s Holocaust denial:
... it took me many years to understand that the Holocaust, the core belief of the contemporary Jewish faith, was not at all an historical narrative for historical narratives do not need the protection of the law and politicians. It took me years to grasp that my great-grandmother wasn’t made into a ‘soap’ or a ‘lampshade’. She probably perished out of exhaustion, typhus or maybe even by mass shooting. ... It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense.
Like Irving, the Atzmon story ends pretty happily. Five years ago some people were still willing to consider Atzmon's antisemitic world view as merely "provocatively anti-Zionist." But he opened his mouth a few times too many, and his supporters have dropped away. In 2005 the UK Socialist Workers Party was still willing to have Atzmon at its fundraisers, defending him from the charge of Holocaust denial; now he's persona non grata.
But that didn't happen without a struggle; plenty of people at the time argued that Atzmon was being called an antisemite simply because he was an anti-Zionist, and they found reasons to excuse away his increasingly inexcusable stances. I've encountered some folks like this on the net even lately; absolutely serenely convinced that they're not even slightly antisemitic, absolutely assured of their own progressivism, but absolutely willing to strike a blow against Zionism by passing along Atzmon's argument that the Holocaust may have been a Zionist fake. Even now, they don't get it.
If you've never heard of this guy Atzmon, don't worry. Even as a saxophonist, he's a minor figure at best, and his star is setting. What he represents, though, is what could be the future of Holocaust denial. If Holocaust denial comes to the left in any degree, it will be because antisemites on the right, smarting from the defeat of David Irving, unable to grow their antisemitic base there, were able to concoct a version of their junk that cosmetically veneered the hate, and antisemites on the left -- people like Atzmon -- were ready and willing to carry that ball.