Home | News | Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

The Fight Against Holocaust Denial

by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, Midstream - April 2001

Posted: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 at 09:46 PM CT

Amidst the rising tide of terrorism in the Middle East directed at Israeli children and the parallel ideological assault by Syria's new young president, Bashir Assad, labeling Israelis "worse than Nazis," a small positive countermovement went largely unnoticed.1

In the shadow of its all-powerful Syrian neighbor and occupier, Lebanon's government has shown some real courage by distancing that small country from Holocaust denial.

Just one week before a global hatefest was scheduled to convene in Beirut, Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri banned the meeting because, in his words, "Lebanon has more important things to do than holding conferences that hurt its international standing and smear its name."2 A day later, Lebanon's ambassador to the US, Farid Abboud, told officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Center that ideological antisemitism and the virus of Holocaust denial are alien to Lebanon's pluralist political traditions.3

The planned four-day gathering, entitled "Revisionism and Zionism," was being organized under the auspices of the California-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), notorious for denying the historic veracity of the Nazi Holocaust. The event coordinator was Jürgen Graf, a professional bigot who fled Switzerland to Teheran after being sentenced to jail for defaming the memory of Hitler's victims. The IHR was coy about the details, but reportedly the Beirut event would have featured the participation not only of an international rogues gallery of anti-Israel Arab and Muslim ideologues and European and American Holocaust deniers but also such violent extremists from around the world as German Far Right leader Hörst Mahler and National Alliance head William L. Pierce, author of the infamous racist tract, The Turner Diaries, which served as blueprint for Timothy McVeigh's terrorist attack in Oklahoma City.4

The heartening decision by the Lebanese government to make the IHR persona non grata in Beirut followed a two-month campaign spearheaded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Swiss government. It gained additional momentum when 14 Arab intellectuals, among them prominent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, signed a letter calling for "this anti-Semitic undertaking" to be canceled.5

Lebanon joined a growing list of countries worldwide concerned about the resurgence of Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial. Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as Israel are among the countries that have made it a crime to defame the memory of Hitler's victims. Americans may have reservations about such laws on free-speech grounds, but we all can applaud last year's declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, encouraging all European countries to include the study of the Holocaust "in all its dimensions" in the curriculums of their schools.6

Tragically, despite Hariri's initiative, too many in the mainstream Arab and Muslim worlds teach their children just the opposite: that there was no Holocaust. These falsifiers see the erasing of the historic and moral lessons of the Shoah as a key component of the demonization of "the Zionist entity" and "International Jewry." Their onslaught, including the rewriting of textbooks denigrating Israel's and Jewish history's legitimacy, came at the very time that then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was publicly offering the Palestinians an unprecedented peace deal which would have even included the Temple Mount.7

No wonder the IHR believes it has found new fertile ground in the Middle East.

With the continuing violence of Intifada II and the resultant collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, the Orange County, California-based group dreams of contributing to and riding the crest of the tidal wave of Mideast hate to an unprecedented level of international prominence and influence.

The IHR's dream remains a frightening possibility. From Teheran to Baghdad to Damascus to Gaza to Cairo, the
Holocaust-denial ideology is being fused with a "holy war" gospel by those dedicated to delegitimatizing the Jewish people and destroying the state of Israel. In December 1999, the English-language Iranian paper, Kayhan International, editorialized about "The Myth of the Holocaust." It criticized the German government for allegedly persecuting Holocaust denier Fredrick Töben: "An Australian historian of German origin who is known for his authoritative research on the myth of the Holocaust.... He was jailed and he was fined for having exposed the fabrications of the gas chambers where, Zionist propaganda says, six million Jews perished...." The paper referred to the "preposterous figure of six million" and praised revisionist scholars for their "courageous research and highlighting of facts of the Second World War." Then in May 2000, the Iranian embassy in Vienna granted refuge to Austrian Holocaust denier Wolfgang Fröhlich who testified as a defense "expert witness" on Zyklon B and the gas chambers at Graf's trial in Switzerland.8

Such sympathy for Holocaust denial is not limited to Iran. According to Palestinian intellectual Abdallah Horani, "Instead of talking about the so-called Holocaust, [we] should have followed the doubts [about it] that are gaining momentum in the international arena and among leading European intellectuals." Sheikh Nafez Azzam of the "Palestinian Jihad" movement in Gaza insists that any "intention to teach the Holocaust in the Palestinian schools contradicts the natural order of the universe." And columnist Anis Mansour, writing in Egypt's official Al-Ahram newspaper, says it should "become clear to the world that what happened to the Jews of Germany, Poland and Russia was justified."9

And on the eve of America's Academy awards, this outrageous news came from Beirut's Big Brother, the Syrian regime in Damascus. Syrian Defense Minister Field Marshal Mustafa Tlass has signed a contract with Egyptian producer, Munir Radhi, to make a film based on Tlass's 1983 book, The Matzah of Zion. That book, whose full-color cover is adorned with
hook-nosed Chasids draining the blood of a child, endorses as historical fact the notorious Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, when Syrian Jews were persecuted for allegedly conspiring to murder Muslims and Christians, Tlass's book argues that Zionists are still plotting to "drink the blood" of their victims. The movie, which is supposed to be an answer to Schindler's List, may be titled "Harari's List." David Harari was the head of the Jewish community in Damascus in 1840 who was accused of masterminding the murder of a Christian priest, Father Toma (al-Kabushi), in order to use his blood to bake Passover matzahs. Let us hope that Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri (no relation to David Harari!) will escape vilification or worse for his courageous stand against global hate.10

Unlike in Lebanon, where it takes heroism to be "a moderate," all that is usually required in the United States to stand up to Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial is common decency. There are exceptions, however. A possible exception involves the troubling report earlier this year from the Dartmouth College murder scene of outspoken anti-Nazi professors that one of the two teens arrested for the killings may have been motivated by reading pro-Hitler literature denying the Holocaust.11

It may yet turn out that the motive behind the horrible crime at Dartmouth had nothing to do with the ideology of hate. But the verdict is already in from Los Angeles where Buford O. Furrow, Jr., received five life sentences for his attack on the Jewish Community Center in the San Fernando Valley. On 10 August 1999, he wounded five people, including three small children, and then fatally shot Filipino postman Joseph Ileto because he "looked Asian and worked for the government." According to the government prosecutors, Furrow's original master plan was to bomb the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in order to give America "a wakeup call to kill Jews." He chose the Community Center only as a fallback target after being scared off by the security at the Museum, which, for him, was synonymous with the anti-Nazi cause. A Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist, Furrow had been indoctrinated as a denier of the Holocaust and practitioner of "leaderless resistance" to ZOG (the Zionist Organized Government) at the Hayden Lake, Idaho, compound of Christian Identity preacher Richard Butler.12

It is against this grim context that Esquire magazine decided to play Holocaust denial for laughs by running veteran war reporter John Sack's "Inside the Bunker" (February 2001) account ' not of Hitler's last days ' but of today's deniers that the Nazis ever intended to annihilate the Jews. Sack presents a sympathetic "insider's view" of a California convention of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the organized front for Holocaust revisionists.

Sack's satiric prose had a serious purpose - not to mock crackpot Holocaust Deniers, but instead to scorn their Jewish critics. Among those Sack accused of "bias, rumors, exaggerations, and other preposterous matters" is historian Deborah Lipstadt, who last year won a resounding victory when a London Court threw out a libel suit brought against her by Hitler apologist David Irving. Clearly, Sack was rooting for the other side. He pictured Irving as "a man with a statesman's bearing, a statesman's elegant pinstripe suit, and a member of Parliament's [masters of] elocution." As to whether "real" antisemites attended the IHR Convention, Sack averred, "I don't believe I met any that weekend."13

Sack's view of the IHR from "Inside the Bunker" was "the new journalism" at its worst. Abandoning any pretense of objectivity, he crossed the line between observer and participant and received roaring applause from the assembled deniers for his own speech on "the little Holocaust" supposedly suffered by Germans in postwar Poland. Though not agreeing with his newfound friends that "the big Holocaust" against the Jews did not happen, Sack reciprocated for their approbation by picturing them favorably as "the most middling of Middle Americans." They typically "talked of the weather, their homes, their children," and made fine dinner companions. Not "odious, contemptible, [or] despicable," they are harmless Germanophiles no more dangerous than devotees of flying saucer cults. Allegedly slandered by the same Jewish cabal, which purportedly orchestrated the criticism of Sack's book, An Eye for an Eye, the Holocaust deniers were presented by Sack as his fellow martyrs to the cause of free speech, supposedly under assault by organized Jews. The prurient allusions to the Talmud and hints of retribution against Jews for slandering Germans that Sack admits to hearing from the IHR Conventioneers, he dismissed as understandable excesses. He concluded with a flourish by enthusiastically accepting an invitation to be keynote speaker at a future IHR Convention in Cincinnati.14

Sack - a "bad boy" journalist who loves to shock his readers by portraying heroes as villains and villains as victims - enjoyed his 15 minutes of national fame in 1993 when "60 Minutes" featured his book, An Eye for An Eye. Its sensational thesis was that "the worst thing that happened to some Holocaust survivors is that they became like Nazis." According to Sack, Polish Jews who survived the Shoah became the willing executioners of the post-war Polish Communist regime's purge of Poland's prewar German minority.15

The resulting firestorm - with critics ranging across the political spectrum from Leon Wieseltier to Deborah Lipstadt to Daniel Goldhagen to Jon Wiener harshly condemning Sack's distortions, exaggerations, and malevolent "Jewish Survivor = Nazi" equation - left irreparable scars. Sack feigned to be horrified by the revenge fantasies of some surviving Polish Jews while flaunting his own Jewish antecedents. Yet Sack himself has apparently also harbored a consuming need to pay back his detractors.16

Now, Esquire has given him his chance in an issue that also features jokes about "butt-kicking Chasidic" Jews and a tasteless parody of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.17

Maybe the editors of Esquire are as blithely ignorant as many other Americans about distant parts of the world where murder in the name of genocidal ideologies is an everyday occurrence. But John Sack is not internationally naïve.18 Having written a book about the Gulf War, he ought to have known better than to aid those who stir the cauldron of hatred ready to boil over in such a volatile region as the Middle East. Instead, Sack in Esquire embraced the IHR's man in Teheran and Beirut, Jürgen Graf, who was featured at the same IHR Convention in Orange County where Sack spoke, as "a Swiss, a man whom I'd once roomed with (I'd met many deniers previously) and fed kangaroos with in South Australia."19

We can be sure that, despite the setback in Lebanon, the IHR will not abandon its efforts to win recruits to its international chorus of haters wherever it can - from Middle America to the Middle East. Holocaust denial is a weapon for haters everywhere who count on society's collective lapsed memory to whitewash the crimes of the past and rehabilitate Hitler's legacy. Whatever their nationality or religion, these deniers of history's most documented genocide are trying to complete the work of SS storm troopers who, according to Primo Levi, taunted death-camp inmates: "However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you."20

Long ago, Henry Ford (who tried to popularize his own bigoted version of the past) asserted, "History is bunk." Today's hate merchants and Holocaust deniers believe that - through falsehoods and violence to the truth - they can reinvent history. Our obligation is to reject their Big Lies because, as the philosopher Santayana warned, "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."?

Notes:

1. Neil Macfarquhar, "Arabs, Split on Iraq and Kuwait, Still Join to Attack Israel," The New York Times, 28 March 2001.
2. Howard Schneider, "Jews, Arabs Join To Decry Holocaust Deniers, Beirut Bans Holocaust Revision Session," Washington Post, 26 March 2001.
3. Simon Wiesenthal Center, press release, "Wiesenthal Center Hails Lebanon?s Decision to Bar Conference of Neo-Nazis and Holocaust Deniers," 22 March 2001.
4. Institute for Historical Review (IHR), "Jürgen Graf Welcomed in Iran: Swiss Revisionist Forced into Exile for ?Thought Crime?"; Simon Wiesenthal Center, "Swiss Investigating Holocaust Denier?s Role in Upcoming ?Revisionist? Gathering in Beirut," press release, 12 February 2001. See also "The Jürgen Graf Web Page" (https://www.russgranata.com/graf.html).
5. Simon Wiesenthal Center, press release, "Wiesenthal Center Hails Lebanon's Decision to Bar Conference of Neo-Nazis and Holocaust Deniers," 22 March 2001; Schneider, "Jews, Arabs Join To Decry Holocaust Deniers, Beirut Bans Holocaust Revision Session," Washington Post, 26 March 2001.
6. Michael Shermer and Alex Grossman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: The Free Press, 1993; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; "European Leaders Call for Full Access to Holocaust Files," Los Angeles Times, 29 January 2000.
7. Yossi Klein Halevi, "Palestinians See Israelis as the Crusaders," Los Angeles Times, 19 November 12000.
8. Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996; Institute for Historical Review (IHR), "Jürgen Graf Welcomed in Iran: Swiss Revisionist Forced into Exile for 'Thought Crime'" (https://www.ihr.org/conference/beirutconf/background.html).
9. Al-Risala (PA), 20 April 2000; Al-Istaqlal (PA), 20 April 2000; Al-Usbu' (Egypt), 12 February 2001.
10. Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), "The Arab Answer to 'Schindler's List?," Special Dispatch No. 190, 1 March 2001 (https://memri.org /sd/SP19001.html). The Syrian Defense Minister promised to contribute his cut of any movie profits to the Intifada.
11. Douglas Belkin, and Stephen Kurkjian, "Search of Youth?s Home is Detailed, Hate Literature Said to be Sought," Boston Globe, 23 February 2001; "Did Anti-Nazi Views Doom 2 Professors?" Los Angeles Times, 24 February 2001; "Bloody Knives Said to Link Teen to Dartmouth Victim," Los Angeles Times, 27 March
12. The two professors-Suzanne Zantop and Half Zantop-were murdered on January 27th: Germany's official Holocaust Remembrance Day. Was this a coincidence, just as it has been dismissed as coincidental that 20 April - Hitler's birthday - was chosen by another pair of teenage gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, fascinated by Nazi memorabilia, for their 1999 rampage at Colorado's Columbine High? See Kevin Simpson and Jason Blevins, "Germany Lured Harris, but Pal Klebold not as Fascinated with the Culture," Denver Post, 24 April 1999. Americans may no longer take our national holidays too seriously, but it is painfully clear that the country's extremists and fanatics are deadly serious about their special days of remembrance and revenge. 19 April - the day before Hitler was born - used to be a day of patriotic celebration. That was when, in 1775, "the shot heard round the world" at the Battle of Lexington launched the American Revolution. But then terrorist Timothy McVeigh, in 1995, chose that same day for a very different reason - as payback time for the FBI attack exactly two years before on David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas. See Brandon M. Stickney, "All-American Monster": The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996, pp. 154-55.
13. Terry McDermott, Kim Murphy, and Josh Meyer, "Suspect Is Called Racist Loner," Los Angeles Times, 12 August 1999; Henry Weinstein, "Furrow Gets 5 Life Terms for Racist Rampage," Los Angeles Times, 27 March 2001. Ironically, many of the staff and students from the Jewish Community Center attacked by Furrow were across town visiting the Museum of Tolerance at the time that of his rampage.
14. John Sack, "Inside the Bunker," Esquire, February 2001, pp. 103-104. Sack also developed a liking for another notorious denier, the "eternally jolly" Ernst Zündel.
15. Sack, "Inside the Bunker," pp. 100, 102, 138-140; Sack, "Blacklisting My Book," Institute for Historical Review (IHR), Thirteenth IHR Convention (https://www.revisionism.com/ihr/alternate_server/ihr_14sack.ram).
16. John Sack, An Eye for an Eye. New York: Basic Books, 1993, especially the tortured self-justifications in the "Preface," pp. ix-xii. Sack, "Inside the Bunker," pp. 138-139.
17. For critiques of Sack's An Eye for an Eye, see Daniel J. Goldhagen, "False Witness," New Republic, 27 December 1993, pp. 28-34; Jon Wiener, "Jews, Germans and 'Revenge'," Nation, 20 June 1994, 878-882.
18. Tom Carson, "Hasidic Jews Kick Ass. Who Knew?" Esquire, February 2001,
19. 55; A. J. Jacobs, "I Have a [Revised, Updated] Dream," Esquire, February, 2001, p. 144.
20. An old journalistic hand, John Sack made his name as a teller of nihilistic war stories about America's post-WWII "bad" or "not quite good enough" wars - from Korea, to Vietnam, to the Gulf. In books like Lieutenant Calley and Company C (about the Gulf War), he was the self-chosen biographer of the average American soldier whom he typifies as crass, crazy, or cold-blooded.
21. Sack, "Inside the Bunker," p. 138.
22. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit Books, 1988, p. 11.

Related Information

Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News Archives