Denying the
Holocaust
Prof. Robert S.
Wistrich
As a student of modern Jewish history
and contemporary antisemitism, I have always tried to avoid using the term
"Shoah" for rhetorical purposes. But this time around "Yom
Ha-Shoah" strikes me as being very different from earlier commemorations
of the event. Since October 2005, the president of Iran,
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for wiping Israel off the map and has
simultaneously denied that the Nazi Holocaust ever took place. Meanwhile, his
country feverishly marches toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Over twenty years ago I wrote a book
called Hitler's Apocalypse which, among its main theses, warned that the
Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic and radical fundamentalist Islam were the
true heirs of the Nazis. More recently I acted as historical advisor to a new
film Obsession: Radical Islam's War against the West, which graphically
demonstrates the genocidal logic of political Islam today. Now, more than ever,
it seems to me that the prospect of a new kind of Holocaust involving the
mass annihilation of Jews and the extinction of civilization as we have known
it, is a real possibility. Ahmadinejad's threats, the jihadi war against the
West, and the fanatical antisemitism which underpins radical Islam, are obvious
examples of the threat. Then, there is the outpouring of hate and violence
across the Muslim world last month in response to a few Danish satirical
cartoons; the unbelievably sadistic and antisemitically motivated murder of
Ilan Halimi in France by a gang of so-called "barbarians" led by a
black African Muslim; and the "democratic" victory of the radical
Islamist Hamas movement in what is left of the Palestinian Authority. The ideological
foundations of Hamas are clearly based on the destruction of Israel, jihad
and virulent antisemitism.
Radical Islamists have the motivation,
the reasons, the will and (if not stopped) they will soon have the means as
well as the opportunity, to implement a "final solution" of their own
to what they call the "Jewish / Zionist cancer" in the Middle East.
It is in this context, that we need to see the denial of the Nazi
Holocaust, currently rampant not only in Iran
but throughout the Arab world including the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan,
and Saudi Arabia.
Such denial is a necessary prelude to the planned annihilation of Israel. When
President Ahmadinejad told the leaders of Hamas, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad, and
other "holy warriors", assembled together in Tehran last week, that
"the land of Palestine will be freed soon", he did not forget to mock
the "myth of the Holocaust" through which the Zionists have allegedly
blackmailed Western governments for the past 60 years. It is worth recalling
that 40 years ago the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser also denied the
Zionist "big lie" of six million murdered Jews, in an interview with
a German neo-Nazi publication. Not long afterwards Nasser embarked on his megalomaniac
effort to destroy Israel,
with its well-known disastrous results for the Arab world.
Now, once again, antisemitism and
Holocaust denial, have become linked to the government policy of a
Middle-Eastern state bent on wiping out Israel in the name of
"Palestinian rights".
In Iran's
case, the trends are towards appeasement, "constructive engagement"
or "critical dialogue", especially in Europe
for predictable reasons. Iran
is bursting with gas and oil profits; it has close business relations with
Europe (especially Germany);
it has also signed multi-billion dollar oil and gas deals with China; and in
Putin's Russia Iran has a major economic partner and important strategic
protector. Not only that, but Iran has major terrorist allies controlling as
it does Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad, financing Hamas and enjoying warm ties
with Al-Qaeda. Syria today
is little more than an Iranian vassal state while Iraq's Shi'ite majority is steadily
coming under the control of Iranian agents.
In this context, to hope that the UN,
international diplomacy or even economic sanctions will seriously deter the
Iranian leadership (which may be no more than 6 months to a year from the point
of no return in its nuclear program) stretches credulity. The unhappy American
adventure in Iraq and
vacillating, ineffective leadership in Washington
during the past three years have emboldened Iranian self-confidence. The
growing chorus of appeasement (including all too many Diaspora Jews) reveals
just how little has been learned from the history of Nazi Germany in the
1930's. In 1936 Adolf Hitler, too, could have been stopped with relative ease
at the time when his troops reoccupied the Rhineland.
His passionate speeches about the "self-determination" of the Sudeten
Germans (compare the Palestinians today) prepared the ground in an
appeasement-drunk Europe for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia and its physical
destruction by Nazi Germany. Then, as now with Iran,
Russia
was willing to strike a deal with the Devil which would later backfire with a
vengeance against it. Then, as now, radical antisemitism was essentially
treated as a side-issue by the Western democracies (including the U.S.) rather
than as the most striking herald of the looming totalitarian threat. How much
attention was paid in the west to Hitler's Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939
threatening the Jews of Europe with total annihilation? Is the West today
overly concerned by the fact that the three top Iranian leaders of recent years
Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani, the Supreme Guide, Ali Khomeini and President
Ahmadinejad, so openly speak of a real (nuclear) Holocaust against the Jewish
state?
The stark truth is that no nation (not
even the U.S.) can
ultimately be expected to defend Israel and the Jewish people from
those who seek its extinction. That is the lesson of Yom Ha-Shoah, of Judaism, Zionism,
World War II, and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Hence it is a matter of
vital existential importance that we grasp the full gravity of the Iranian and
the radical Islamist threat in the shape of Hizbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad
it already exists on our northern, southern, and eastern borders including the West Bank. The danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb or an Al-Qaeda-style
mega-terrorist assault inside Israel
is obviously the most serious security issue. But the spread of an Islamo-Nazi
culture of hatred which nourishes and motivates these designs is no less
alarming. We are confronted today with enemies that are even more brazen than
the Nazis in their annihilationist mind-set towards Israel, Zionism and the Jews.
Indeed, they have openly threatened America and the Western world as a
whole.
This is surely the time for Israel to show
some moral leadership and speak in a clear and compelling voice against such
unrestrained rhetoric of mass murder. History has shown that when political
leaders publicly threaten to wipe out their enemies, they usually mean it. Closing
the Teheran conference in mid-April 2006, the Iranian president could not have
been more frank. He contemptuously referred to Israel as "a rotten, dried
tree that will be eliminated by one storm."
It is obvious that we do not have the
luxury of repeating the terrible error of the Western democracies in the 1930's
when facing Hitler's bellicose threats, a failure which resulted in the mass
murder of European Jewry. This Yom
Ha-Shoah must become the beginning of a new and far more robust Israeli defense
of fundamental Jewish and human values, against the enemies of freedom a
mobilization which must convince the West that the future of civilization is at
stake.
This article was
published in Maariv Newspaper, 25 April, 2006