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Posted Sunday, January 9, 2005

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National Post
Friday, January 07, 2005

The wrong kind of history lessons

Many seek to disprove the Holocaust or, failing that, to strip away its Jewish character

by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman
National Post

ABRAHAM COOPER IS "ASSOCIATE DEAN" OF THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER IN LOS ANGELES

ACCORDING to a new poll, 62% of Germans are tired of hearing about the six million Jews killed during the Second World War, while 52% believe that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is not fundamentally different from the Nazis' treatment of Jews. These troubling results are proof enough as to why education about the Holocaust is still needed.

Around the world, museums, monuments and educational curricula testify to the truth of the Nazi genocide. For survivors, contemporary society's embrace of their painful legacy has provided a measure of solace. But that solace is eroding in the face of twin threats: organized movements that seek to prove the Holocaust did not exist or, failing that, to strip away its Jewish character.

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David Irving comments:

RABBI COOPER IS worried about people learning "the wrong kind of history lessons." Aren't we all. Hour after hour on British BBC television for the last week we have been bombarded by advertising clips promoting their forthcoming mini-series in Auschwitz.
    I offered my assistance to Laurence Rees, the producer. No reply. Pity, they would spare themselves embarrassment. The sinister interior of the "gas chamber" they are showing in the film clips is in fact the building at "Auschwitz I," which the Poles (!) have admitted they built in 1948, i.e., a fake.What a bore the whole subject is.


HERE for the record is the letter that I wrote to Laurence Rees, editor of the forthcoming Auschwitz mini-series, on April 2, 2004:

Dear Laurence,

BBCtv reconstruction of Auschwitz.
I was most interest to read in The Guardian of the BBC project to make a film about
Auschwitz. Are you willing to hear also critical voices on this historical sensitive issue?

I am prepared to bet a large sum that one of your sources will be Prof Robert Jan van Pelt who wrote the first excellent book on the subject. You may not know that in his severe Judgment* at the end of my unsuccessful libel action against Lipstadt & Penguin Books, at which Pelt was a star witness, even Mr Justice Gray remarked that he found the evidence on Auschwitz to be of astonishingly thin quality. Here are his words (which you may not have seen reported in the press at the time):

"I have to confess that, in common I suspect with most other people, I had supposed that the evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling. I have, however, set aside this preconception when assessing the evidence adduced by the parties in these proceedings."

And: "Vulnerable though the individual categories of evidence may be to criticisms of the kind mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, it appears to me that the cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal operation of gas chambers at Auschwitz is considerable."

And: "[Irving] is right to point out that the contemporaneous documents, such as drawings, plans, correspondence with contractors and the like, yield little clear evidence of the existence of gas chambers designed to kill humans. Such isolated references to the use of gas as are to be found amongst these documents can be explained by the need to fumigate clothes so as to reduce the incidence of diseases such as typhus. The quantities of Zyklon-B delivered to the camp may arguably be explained by the need to fumigate clothes and other objects."

I.e., hardly the kind of evidence that would hang a man even in the good old days. The best evidence in my view is, in this order, 1: The Bletchley Park intercepts; 2. The (unamended) aerial photos; and 3: The evidence of Kurt Aumeier, who was commandant of Auschwitz for a while.
   I discovered this evidence in the Public Record Office in June 1992, you might like to note, and have posted it in its entirety
on my website, both the handwritten originals and transcriptions which I commissioned. In my view there were limited-scale gassings in the two "Bunkers" (converted farmhouses) outside the perimeter fence, but not at the huge underground crematory facilities of which Pelt waffles. (Look at his difficulties over whether there were holes in the roof -- to insert the cyanide -- or not).
   I am, as you may know, a great fan of your projects so far, and Producer W-- J--, who has done work for the BBC, will be able to give you comments on my work too. Your experts might like to keep my huge
dossier on the Auschwitz facilities under review.
   Do not fall for the over-simplified computer reconstruction of "Krema II" which Pelt introduced in court in the Lipstadt libel action. It is full of errors. The building, like most other such structures in Germany and Poland, was being readied for use as an emergency air raid shelter (with the usual gastight doors used in such shelters).
   It is important that the BBC produces a film on which Mr Justice Gray would not be able to pass such equivocating comments as those cited above!
   Yours sincerely,

David Irving

* PS: You can find our printed and illustrated version of Gray J's Judgment (with facsimiles and photos in pdf form at http://www.-fpp.co.uk/trial/judgment) -- far better than the printed Penguin version. You may also wish to use the corrected version of the transcripts.


To: "Timewatch" Programme, BBCtv
- attn: Editor, Laurence Rees -
BBCtv
Kensington House
Richmond Way,
London W14 0AX

As of Sunday, January 9, 2005, Rees has not replied.

Of course, the revisionist "historians" and hatemongers who deny the existence of the Holocaust, influential as they are in some marginal circles, operate outside respectable discourse. But the same is not true of those who seek to drain the Holocaust of its Jewish component. Imagine, if you will, a Holocaust commemoration that Jews were not allowed to attend. Oslo witnessed such an event on Nov. 9, the 66th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Third Reich's state-orchestrated pogrom against Germany's Jews. Norwegian authorities, not wanting any trouble from Muslims, forbade the display of Jewish symbols, including the Star of David and the Israeli flag. The evening news showed a group of Jews who wanted to take part in the commemoration being told by a policeman to "please leave the area."

The Oslo outrage echoed what occurred in 2000 when the Dutch Committee of the Jewish Resistance cancelled a public event out of fear of disturbances caused by Arab youths. While Amsterdam municipal authorities supported a memorial meeting commemorating Kristallnacht, they insisted -- over the objections of Jewish survivors -- that an Arab speaker could use the occasion to attack Israel. In Belgium and France, meanwhile, teachers are increasingly unwilling or unable to teach mandated sessions on the Holocaust because of ugly disturbances by Arab students.

In Raoul Wallenberg's homeland, Sweden, a third of young people recently polled were skeptical that the Holocaust really happened. Similar skepticism was reported in Greek newspapers -- before, during, and after last year's summer Olympics. And a recent report from the largest Dutch Jewish community organization, the Ashkenazi Orthodox NIK, noted that "there is less and less knowledge of the fact that six million Jews were murdered in the Second World War," and raised the question "whether this is the natural result of the passage of time, which leads to distance from the Holocaust, or whether this is the result of government policy."

What's going on here is worthy of George Orwell: the theft of Holocaust remembrance by revisionists and their unwitting allies. Increasingly, Europeans decry genocide by reference to Rwanda and Sudan, while passing over the even greater atrocity that took place on their own soil.

Among left-wing thinkers, the favoured recasting of Hitler's Final Solution deflects the spotlight from the wartime destruction of European Jewry to the postwar travails of the Palestinians. In this perversion, Israel -- attacked by the Arabs in five wars since its founding in 1948 and still under constant terrorist barrage -- is no longer the haven for Hitler's Survivors, but the perpetrator of "ethnic cleansing," "apartheid" and abundant other slanders. Meanwhile, the atrocities committed by Arab suicide bombers are passed over lightly as the desperate acts of "militants" driven to rage by Israeli cruelty. While it is still fashionable for European leaders to shed a tear for the victims of Auschwitz, they are dry-eyed when it comes to the mass murders of those victims' offspring.

Just days before 9/11, the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, showed how the global human rights agenda could be hijacked by bigots. The only panel on the four-day program dealing with anti-semitism was disrupted by pro-Palestinian zealots who insisted that "anti-semitism" be redefined as "anti-Arab sentiment" because Arabs -- not Jews -- are "the real Semites." It is a common theme in the Muslim world. In the United Arab Emirates, the executive director of an Arab think-tank recently explained that Israel has no right to exist because Jews "have nothing to do with Semitism or Palestine."

Where Jews are concerned, the 21st century is witnessing the emergence of an unholy alliance between Muslim extremists and left-wing fellow travellers. A recent report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, initially suppressed by the EU, documented the trend that recycles Jew hatred from Europe to the Mideast and back again -- finding its greatest echo among disaffected Muslim youth across the continent. As an antidote, the report recommended that "the governments of the EU Member States should undertake initiatives ... to mobilise the support of political and social leaders to foster Holocaust education, remembrance and research."

But if what happened on Nov. 9 in Oslo is any indication, Holocaust "remembrance" is being compromised by the very disease it seeks to cure. Left unchecked, this new pathology could pave the way for a yet another dark chapter in the relationship between Europe and the Jewish people.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Dr. Harold Brackman is a historian and consultant to the Center.
© National Post 2005

 


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Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal knighted
 
 
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