Lock & Load

The slow mainstreaming of Holocaust denial

The slow mainstreaming of Holocaust denial

It begins.

According to a report on the BBC, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry is a "myth".

*sigh*

But this is very worrying.

Binary thinking is bad news. There are many who think that US foreign policy is immoral and stupid. Think no further than Oliver North as the personification of the US’s shameful shenanigans around the globe. In many cases it is just wrong, wrong, wrong. But – and this is news to certain self-styled Leftists – that does not mean that, in the current stand-off, Iran is right.

But, already you have a group of twits who troll Indymedia and rush in and denouncing any criticism of Iran’s human rights abuses as supporting “US Imperialsim”.

And of course, such is the burgeoning antisemitism, that is it now no longer unusual to find extended tracts of Holocause denial on Indymedia either, though mercifully “hidden” by the overworked moderators.

So what will happen when these two threads become intertwined? All that’s needed is a catalyst, and Ahmadinejad has now delivered one. He says:

"They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets."

"If someone were to deny the existence of God... or prophets and religion, they would not bother him. However, if someone were to deny the myth of the Jews' massacre, all the Zionist mouthpieces and the governments subservient to the Zionists tear their larynxes and scream against the person as much as they can."

Ahmadinejad has given the green light to faux “anti Imperialists” to start mainstreaming Holocaust denial.

If criticising the Iranian regime for its persecution of gay people, women, political dissidents, trade-unionists, students and “apostates” puts one in league with US Imperialism, I can hardly bear to think what denouncing this latest outburst of antisemitic rubbish will make one.

Perhaps some of these people need to visit Auschwitz, as my boyfriend did earlier this year as a guest of the Holocaust Memorial Trust, to see the warehouses of human hair and confiscated shoes. It didn’t come from nowhere.

If we can rightly mock George “Dubya” Bush for his pig-ignorance, what form of rebuke remains for a cretin like Ahmadinejad?

posted by Brett Lock @ 12:25 pm