Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

Know It

The Holocaust was a genocide perpetrated by the German Nazi regime against European Jews between 1941-1945. Six million Jews were murdered in death camps, concentration camps, ghettos, killing fields and elsewhere.

In the face of extensive credible evidence volumes of governmental documents, thousands of eyewitness testimonies, firsthand admissions of guilt, photographs, film footage, meticulous written records, museums worth of artifacts, not to mention the remains of the concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoria themselves there are ongoing efforts to distort, disprove and conceal the facts of the Holocaust.

There are those who simply deny the Holocaust ever happened and those who, in a variety of ways, diminish the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers operate on a spectrum, from trivializing the genocide to alleging its falsification.

Implicitly and explicitly, Holocaust deniers argue that this entire chapter of history is an elaborate hoax by Jewish propagandists who simply wanted reparations from Germany, the creation of a Jewish state and a distraction from their own double-dealing.

In a sense, Holocaust denial is as old as the Holocaust itself. Nazi bureaucrats were careful to cover up the Final Solution in bureaucratic language. Jews were not deported but resettled. Ghettos were cordoned off for quarantine. A death march was merely an evacuation.

One notorious instance of Nazi falsification involves Theresienstadt, a transit camp in the former Czechoslovakia that the Nazis pretended was simply a resettlement community. When the International Red Cross demanded to investigate the camps living conditions in 1944, the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners to plant flowers and decorate the barracks. The Nazis even fabricated a promotional film of Theresienstadt, in which prisoners were coerced to perform cheerfulness for the cameras in exchange for food. In reality, more than 30,000 prisoners died in Theresienstadt and nearly 90,000 more were deported to death camps.

In the decades after the Holocaust, a number of pseudo-historians calling themselves revisionists set out to refute the Holocaust. Willis Carto, an American far-right political activist, career white supremacist and antisemite, founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in 1978. Still operating out of California, the so-called Institute convened conferences and published journals which disregarded the most basic standards of historiography in order to paint a picture of the past that minimized or completely denied Jewish experiences of victimhood. Scholars, courts and academic institutions have condemned IHR as a clearinghouse for ahistorical, antisemitic propaganda with links to neo-Nazi organizations.

In addition, the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been a promoter and driver of Holocaust denial as well as Holocaust mockery, and has sponsored conferences and even cartoon contests on the subject and the regime has hosted and feted leading Holocaust deniers.

In its most developed form, Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews around the world knowingly fabricated evidence of their own genocide in order to extract reparations from Germany, gain world sympathy and facilitate the alleged theft of Palestinian land for the creation of Israel. It is founded on the belief that Jews somehow are able to force major institutions governments, Hollywood, the media, academia to promote a lie at the expense of non-Jews.

There have been some important public victories against Holocaust denialism such as the successful defense in an English court by historian Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and Penguin Books against antisemitic writer David Irving and the charge of libel for exposing his willful distortion of the Holocaust. Indeed, since the 1980s, Holocaust denial has migrated from pseudo-academic journals and conferences to the post-truth world of the Internet. Today, a younger generation of Holocaust deniers is active on social media forums like Facebook and Twitter, alt right websites like the Daily Stormer and the anonymous forums 4Chan and 8kun (the successor to the notorious online forum 8chan after it was forced off the Internet). Moreover, with the passage of time, historical distance from the Holocaust contributes, for some, to disbelief that it occurred. According to a 2019 poll, one in 20 people in Britain do not believe the Holocaust ever happened.

Read the original here:

The Holocaust Didnt Happen - Antisemitism Uncovered

Category: Holocaust Denial
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