Navonim - The Ramblings of Garnel Ironheart

Navonim - The Ramblings of Garnel Ironheart
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Sunday 15 March 2009

Holocaust Denial and Sinai Denial

It is absurd to deny the Holocaust. Where does one even begin in describing how useless and stupid it is? All the recorded evidence, all the eye witness testimony, it boggles the mind that anyone could believe that the whole horror was faked.
Yet there are people who do. Some are easy to dismiss. Red necks, ignorant Eurotrash, much of the Arab world and other such groups with no knowledge of history and a willingness to believe anything as long as it's presented the right way. The lack of belief in these people is easy to understand. They're stupid and a trip to Auschwitz would cure more of them of their misconceptions.
But then there are the others like David Irving who have made it their life's work to "prove" the Holocaust didn't happen. Unlike the hicks from the sticks, they are well dressed, educated and have an answer to every challenge. They can show you how all the evidence has been faked. They are willing to stand up to any survivor and call him a liar.
Now, as long as we have organization such as the Simon Weisenthal Centre and scholars like Deborah Lipstadt, these monsters have been kept in their place. But what has really made the difference in battling Holocaust deniers until now has been the living testimony of the survivors. It is one thing to stand in a court room and argue over the authenticity of a photo or grainy piece of video. It is quite another to argue with Bubbie Greenberg's defiant "Vot are you talking about? I vas there!"
The problem is that the number of survivors is dwindling with time. Age, the enemy of every mortal person, is taking its toll and within a few decades there will be no one left who can state "I say them do this! I was there!" And and that point the dynamic will change entirely.
No longer intimidated by eye witness testimony, deniers will be able to move the battle away from the personal and entirely into the academic/legal arena. Refutations of Holocaust deniers will require scholarship and high level of proof of evidence. Want to see the future of the Holocaust denial movement? Look at Iran's obsession with supporting these scum. In the Muslim word, the burden of proof isn't on the deniers. It's on the people who speak the truth. And they have the money they need to fund their supporters in the Western world.
(As a side point, the next time you see someone describe the president of the so-called Palestinian Authority as Dr. Mahmood Abbas, remember that his PhD thesis was a piece proving the Holocaust didn't happen and that we made up the whole thing to get the Europeans to give us Israel)
Within a few decades we will no doubt see a new trend in skepticism. It won't be consider idiocy to deny the Holocaust. It will be called skepticism. It will be presented as a search for the truth. We will be told "Yes, some Jews died, of course, no one would say not a single Jew died but really, the evidence isn't all these, etc. etc.). People who "believe" that six million Jews died in the Holocaust will be labelled as naive and not worthy of discussing the topic with.
For some, this is a pessimistic and cynical outlook. For a believing Jew, this is just history inexorably repeating itself. After all, it is quite obvious to us that God gave us His Torah at Har Sinai, that David HaMelech ruled over Israel and that his son Shlomo HaMelech built our first Temple in which the Shechina resided.
But not to the skeptics...

8 comments:

David said...

"After all, it is quite obvious to us that God gave us His Torah at Har Sinai, that David HaMelech ruled over Israel and that his son Shlomo HaMelech built our first Temple in which the Shechina resided.
But not to the skeptics..."

You can't call "obvious" something that you accept as a matter of faith. You retreat into the faith/reason distinction when it suits you, Garnel, so don't drop ugly suggestions that your beliefs are all 'obviously' true, while people who don't share them are the functional equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

This post is a cheap shot, and unworthy of serious debate.

Mighty Garnel Ironheart said...

Funny, because Alan Dershowitz deals with this very concept in The Vanishing American Jew.

Bottom line: for me, Sinai is a historical happening. Someone who denies it denies a real event. So what's the difference?

Mighty Garnel Ironheart said...

Funny, because Alan Dershowitz deals with this very concept in The Vanishing American Jew.

Bottom line: for me, Sinai is a historical happening. Someone who denies it denies a real event. So what's the difference?

Joshua said...

This is an inaccurate and frankly a bit offensive comparison (seriously, comparing Holocaust Denial to doubt over whether there was a revelation at Sinai). In any event the comparison is inaccurate for many reasons:

1) We have tremendous amounts of evidence for the Holocaust of many different sorts. We have eyewitness testimony from survivors, which has been recorded in many durable forms. We have direct physical left-overs of the various concentration camps. We have documents written by Nazis detailing the plans for the concentration camps. This is just some of it.

Let's contrast that to Sinai. We have a single document that may or may not have been written at that time and we have people with a tradition that their ancestors were there. That's hardly the same. Indeed, do you even have such direct transmission? If all your ancestors had been geirim a 1000 years ago would you know today? Probably not. So the claim that there's any strongly reliable transmission simply doesn't work.

This comparison simply doesn't work.

Anonymous said...

http://www.codoh.com/

Anonymous said...

Here's my point:
> 1) We have tremendous amounts of evidence for the Holocaust of many different sorts.

Only one type is reliable beyond doubt:

> We have eyewitness testimony from survivors,

Exactly. And the rest is all potentially suspect:

> which has been recorded in many durable forms.

Hollywood can create history that never happened. Forrest Gump met three US presidents. The crew of Deep Space Nine visited the original USS Enterprise and interacted with the crew there. Video is easily faked.

> We have direct physical left-overs of the various concentration camps.

No, they were work camps. The Nazis were clean freaks and the so-called crematoria were for disinfecting and destroyed infected garments, equipments, etc.

> We have documents written by Nazis detailing the plans for the concentration camps.

Forged by Jews later on to bolster their claims.

Except for eye witness testimony, all the physical evidence can be questioned. It seems absurd and offensive today but my point is that in 50 years it won't be. It'll become a point of skeptical scholarship. Questioning the truth of the Holocaust will be as legitimate as questioning what Julius Caeser had for breakfast the day he conquered Gaul.

And 1000 years from now how much more so.

David Kessler Author said...

If the only evidence we had for the holocaust was a single book purportedly dictated by God and transcribed in the third person by a man who died before the end of the book, there would be a lot more holocaust denial than there is.

Similarly we don't have multiple sources of evidence for "what Julius Caeser had for breakfast on the day he conquered Gaul" - as if Gaul was conquered in a day!

In 1000 years from now most intelligent people will believe in the holocaust just as they believe in the history of ancient Egypt - although they will undoubtedly argue over the details of both. Whether they will believe that a sentient supernatural being dictated not just 10 Commandments but also a convoluted story about the past and the (then) future, that was transcribed by a character in the story and contained references to talking quadraped serpents, is another matter.

FQ said...

Sorry I'm a couple years too late. I think this is an interesting comparison and a good point. The issue I have with it is when I take your argument and turn it around. Let's say I start making up proofs that aliens landed in my neighborhood and I spread it around and tell my kids and friends, and they play along. If someone is skeptical 100 years later because he's not convinced by the "proofs", is that the same as a future holocaust denyer?
And if it is different, then how does sinai denial resemble holocaust denial more than alien denial.
I hope you respond because I'd like to hear what you have to say.
Thanks