Rex Murphy / Holocaust Deniers
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Next, Back, Thread Ahead: Shiraz Dossa, Thread Back: None.
This one really scares me: 18/12/06, David Motadel, Interview with Harun Yashayaie, (Archive), Technorati Blog Search.
15/12/06, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Confronting Holocaust Denial, (Archive), Technorati Blog Search.
15/12/06, Rex Murphy, Eichmann in Tehran: horror revisited.
Mocking the absolute misery, of another human being has to be — next to deliberately and wantonly designing that misery — the lowest of human behaviours.
Mocking the misery, torment and death of six million human beings, therefore, belongs to some unspeakable category of epic depravity.
What form, what shape would the keenest of such mockery take? Would it be to jeer publicly and laugh at the torments and death of so many, to take open delight at the nearly unimaginable pain and terror visited on so many?
To cheer the misery of millions would surely be an offence to scorch the ears of hell itself. But, if you are a Jew, I suspect that the last and perfect insult, the one that surpasses even open mockery of the Holocaust — its last cruelty so to speak — is to say there was no Holocaust.
And, yet, here we are, barely six years out of the bleak century forever stained by Adolf Hitler's near extermination of European Jewry in the great murder factories of the concentration camps, and the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hosts a “conference” on the myth of the Holocaust.
He assembles a clutch of “scholars” to launch an inquiry into the Holocaust, most eminent among whom is that paragon of erudition and dispassionate inquiry, a veritable Causabon-under-a-white-sheet, former Ku Klux Klanner, David Duke. Dr. Duke, as he pretentiously styles himself, may be a depleted merchant of old and expired hatreds in North America, but he's the headline guest and revered scholar at the conference in the soon-to-be-nuclear Iran.
Lesser Aristotles include Robert Faurisson, a French professor who denies the existence of the gas chambers; an Australian, Michele Renouf, who hails Mr. Ahmadinejad as a hero just for holding the conference, and another Australian, Frederick Toben, who delivered to the assembled illuminati this ferocious particular: “The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007.” The “about” in that sentence is amazing.
There was also a Canadian professor, Shiraz Dossa from StFX, who evidently travelled to this zoo of mountebanks unawake to the thought that a conference called to discuss the myth of the Holocaust would be a gathering dedicated to the idea of the Holocaust as a myth.
When the news broke that the professor was attending this festival of blight, he lamented that the gathering was full of “hacks and lunatics” and that he wouldn't even “shake hands with most of them.” One can only hope for the students of StFX that Professor Dossa is not teaching either logic or holiday planning.
The target of it all, as it always is, was Israel and the Jews. For Mr. Ahmadinejad, the nearly illimitable suffering of the six million is a Jewish lie. On state television he proclaimed: “They [the Jews] have fabricated a legend under the name Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.” The same Mr. Ahmadinejad, who mocks and derides the historical Holocaust, opens this demented seminar with the clear promise of one soon to come: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.” He has so often proclaimed that Israel will be “wiped off the map” that the phrase hardly needs quotation marks. But note, too, how he links Israel's being wiped out with humanity, all humanity, “achieving freedom.”
The death of Israel, i.e., the death of Jews, as millennial panacea, the removal of the one impediment to universal harmony — where have we heard this before? We are not far, not far by one inch, from the racist dogmas that found such terrible audience in 1930s Germany. The Jew now, as then, is always out of scale — in power, in insidiousness, in perniciousness to the common good of mankind.
“If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “But if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream.”
This is anti-Semitism's latest diabolic twist. The Holocaust was powered by the great lie of the Jewish world conspiracy, and now the Holocaust itself is another “Jewish conspiracy.” Anti-Semitism as the snake that swallows its own tail. The malice here is profound. While most of the sane world looked upon this conference as deranged and hateful, and many worthy people said as much, hatred and mockery of Israel and the Jews has become so common that this outlandish gathering in Tehran this week seemed almost ordinary, predictable.
Let us recall that was Arendt's reading of Eichmann — ordinary, predictable, banal.
Tags: Rex Murphy, Holocaust, Ahmadinejad.
This one really scares me: 18/12/06, David Motadel, Interview with Harun Yashayaie, (Archive), Technorati Blog Search.
15/12/06, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Confronting Holocaust Denial, (Archive), Technorati Blog Search.
15/12/06, Rex Murphy, Eichmann in Tehran: horror revisited.
Mocking the absolute misery, of another human being has to be — next to deliberately and wantonly designing that misery — the lowest of human behaviours.
Mocking the misery, torment and death of six million human beings, therefore, belongs to some unspeakable category of epic depravity.
What form, what shape would the keenest of such mockery take? Would it be to jeer publicly and laugh at the torments and death of so many, to take open delight at the nearly unimaginable pain and terror visited on so many?
To cheer the misery of millions would surely be an offence to scorch the ears of hell itself. But, if you are a Jew, I suspect that the last and perfect insult, the one that surpasses even open mockery of the Holocaust — its last cruelty so to speak — is to say there was no Holocaust.
And, yet, here we are, barely six years out of the bleak century forever stained by Adolf Hitler's near extermination of European Jewry in the great murder factories of the concentration camps, and the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hosts a “conference” on the myth of the Holocaust.
He assembles a clutch of “scholars” to launch an inquiry into the Holocaust, most eminent among whom is that paragon of erudition and dispassionate inquiry, a veritable Causabon-under-a-white-sheet, former Ku Klux Klanner, David Duke. Dr. Duke, as he pretentiously styles himself, may be a depleted merchant of old and expired hatreds in North America, but he's the headline guest and revered scholar at the conference in the soon-to-be-nuclear Iran.
Lesser Aristotles include Robert Faurisson, a French professor who denies the existence of the gas chambers; an Australian, Michele Renouf, who hails Mr. Ahmadinejad as a hero just for holding the conference, and another Australian, Frederick Toben, who delivered to the assembled illuminati this ferocious particular: “The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007.” The “about” in that sentence is amazing.
There was also a Canadian professor, Shiraz Dossa from StFX, who evidently travelled to this zoo of mountebanks unawake to the thought that a conference called to discuss the myth of the Holocaust would be a gathering dedicated to the idea of the Holocaust as a myth.
When the news broke that the professor was attending this festival of blight, he lamented that the gathering was full of “hacks and lunatics” and that he wouldn't even “shake hands with most of them.” One can only hope for the students of StFX that Professor Dossa is not teaching either logic or holiday planning.
The target of it all, as it always is, was Israel and the Jews. For Mr. Ahmadinejad, the nearly illimitable suffering of the six million is a Jewish lie. On state television he proclaimed: “They [the Jews] have fabricated a legend under the name Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.” The same Mr. Ahmadinejad, who mocks and derides the historical Holocaust, opens this demented seminar with the clear promise of one soon to come: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.” He has so often proclaimed that Israel will be “wiped off the map” that the phrase hardly needs quotation marks. But note, too, how he links Israel's being wiped out with humanity, all humanity, “achieving freedom.”
The death of Israel, i.e., the death of Jews, as millennial panacea, the removal of the one impediment to universal harmony — where have we heard this before? We are not far, not far by one inch, from the racist dogmas that found such terrible audience in 1930s Germany. The Jew now, as then, is always out of scale — in power, in insidiousness, in perniciousness to the common good of mankind.
“If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “But if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream.”
This is anti-Semitism's latest diabolic twist. The Holocaust was powered by the great lie of the Jewish world conspiracy, and now the Holocaust itself is another “Jewish conspiracy.” Anti-Semitism as the snake that swallows its own tail. The malice here is profound. While most of the sane world looked upon this conference as deranged and hateful, and many worthy people said as much, hatred and mockery of Israel and the Jews has become so common that this outlandish gathering in Tehran this week seemed almost ordinary, predictable.
Let us recall that was Arendt's reading of Eichmann — ordinary, predictable, banal.
Tags: Rex Murphy, Holocaust, Ahmadinejad.
