I have been wanting to write this post for a few weeks now but haven’t really known how to approach it. No, it is not that I am afraid of the repercussions. After all, I have no doubt that the Holocaust did in fact occur, that numerous people were killed by the Nazis. If nothing else, I know at least one person lived in a concentration camp, because I met her. I saw the number tattooed on her arm and listened to her very real and tragic stories.
Having said that, I wonder why people are shocked and surprised by the language of the Iranian president. He never denied the Holocaust as a whole but rather questioned the numbers. How many people actually died? How many of those were actually Jewish? The statistics that I’ve traditionally been taught indicated that as many as 12 million people died and only 6 million of them were Jewish. Who were the other people and why has the Holocaust become an exclusively Jewish tragedy?
These are real questions that real seekers of knowledge ask, not the the questions that “deniers” or “revisionists” ask. What Mr. Ahmadinejad has called “mythology” is the religious imposition that the Zionists have placed on the world. You must “believe” in the holocaust, not just accept that it happened. Questioning any aspect of the Holocaust is blasphemy (regardless of whether or not you are Jewish), and any blasphemy against Judaism is anti-semetism.
So, if the Holocaust is a religious belief of the Jews, then mocking it or offending it is akin to mocking or offending a religious belief of another religion. Some have wrongly assumed, however, that this situation is similar to the cartoons erroneously depicting Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and grant him peace). The difference is that the cartoons were intended to offend and were designed to ridicule him with obviously false depictions. A conference on the Holocaust (whether politically motivated or not) simply questions the accuracy of certain facts. This is done at conferences all the time.
If the question were of enslaved Africans in the Americas, we would hear no outcry. If the question were of enslaved Africans in the Americas, we would hear no outcry. (I said it twice so you couldn’t skip over it). Many white academics have questioned the oft-repeated statistics of slavery: the number of slaves kidnapped and brought to the “new world”, the number of captives on slave ships who died on the journey, the number of people killed in resistance to slave masters, and so on.
The numbers listed by many scholars reaches in the tens of millions, while some scholars cite much smaller numbers. Are the latter “revisionists” or slavery “deniers”? Very few, if any, would call them that.
The question one must ultimately ask is, what do the Zionists have to hide? Why can no serious academic inquiry be done? I doubt that they have lied about the number of deaths; that is not the issue at all.
But the “mythology”, as Ahmadinejad calls it, that has allowed them to gain not only the world’s sympathy, but also an unflinching belief that the Jews have an undeniable right to Palestine and that they can seize that land in whatever matter they please, even if it means committing some of the same atrocities that were once committed against them by the Nazis, that they can setup Palestinian concentration camps, exile hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, shoot and bomb men, women, and children, and setup an Apartheid-like regime that denies Palestinians even the most basic rights of life, dignity, and property.
Then, as if that were not enough, they prop up this vicious, militarist, terrorist state and justify it under the banner of “retribution” for the crimes committed against them by the Nazis? And who among the Palestinians were Nazis? Why not turn their guns, their bombs, and their bulldozers on Berlin? Occupy Germany and exile millions of Germans? It is the pinnacle of euro-centric racism that no Arab or African life is as sacred as that of a white person, and Israel is a symbol of that racism. Even the Arabs who have accepted Israel live as second-class citizens. And the lost tribes from Ethiopia and even India have experience similar maltreatment (and they are Jewish).
Why can such a small and miserably unpleasant state such as Israel hold sway over the entire civilized world? No wonder there are conspiracy theories! All Iran has to do is build a nuclear reactor and the conspiracy theories run wild in western media. Israel has admitted to having nuclear weapons, and yet the world remains silent. Even a child can see when something is not fair, yet we have grown folks who will deny injustice and turn a blind eye to those crying out for help.
Most of the people Ahmadinejad invited to that conference might be crazy, but they’re not stupid. Truth stands clear from falsehood. When people are honest and kind, they have nothing to fear, yet Israel is terrified of Iran and terrified of any Muslims who speak out against them. God will judge between all of us, and He is surely the best to judge.