Recently a jewish lawyer, academic and sometime ‘human rights activist’ – you can guess what that means in plain English I am sure – named Menachem Rosensaft penned a typically myopic column for JTA that was syndicated widely in the jewish media with ‘The Jerusalem Post’ (1) and ‘The Baltimore Jewish Times’ (2) being two examples of its republication.
Thus, I thought it apt that as a convinced ‘Holocaust’ revisionist myself I’d reply to Rosensaft’s god-awful mound of verbal vomit pretending to be an ‘opinion piece’.
To wit Rosensaft writes:
‘When I learned that Holocaust deniers had infiltrated a New Hampshire legislative meeting and tried to insert their view into the state’s Holocaust education efforts, I was personally outraged.’ (3)
Oh no; I mean we can’t possibly include a critical and/or dissenting view into the ‘Holocaust education’ effort now, can we?
For example, it is normal to include multiple perspectives in the discussion of a historical topic and even the crimes of say Stalin get that courtesy because if a critical and/or dissenting opinion has a decent body of scholarship behind it – and the ‘Holocaust’ revisionist corpus of scholarship is heavily primary source based (unlike most ‘books on the ‘Holocaust’ which invariably rely heavy on secondary sources), original and far superior in terms of research quality as well as originality (although not in terms of quantity) to the body of orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholarship – as it allows young minds to – as the late academic historian and ‘Holocaust’ revisionist Robert Countess once put it – ‘to make their own minds up’. (4)
If orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholarship is so solid, then why is it so deathly afraid of revisionist arguments and keeps trying to simply ban/criminalise them instead?
Naturally Rosensaft claims he was ‘personally outraged’ – when is a jew not ‘personally outraged’ or ‘personally offended’? – because he sincerely believes that his relatives were ‘murdered with Zyklon B gas’ at Auschwitz Birkenau (aka Auschwitz II) in August 1943, but the problem is – aside from the curious fact that no jew ever seems to want to claim that their relatives were gassed at Auschwitz I (aka the Stammlager) in the same way that no jew seems to have met any other SS doctor at Auschwitz other than Josef Mengele even though Mengele was primarily working at the gypsy sub-camp of Auschwitz Birkenau not among the jews – (5) that there is no evidence that his relatives were ‘murdered with Zyklon B gas’ at Auschwitz Birkenau (aka Auschwitz II) in August 1943 and any orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholar worth their salt knows this (although apparently not the perennially ignorant Rosensaft).
Rosensaft’s case for his relatives being ‘gassed’ is assumptive and circular.
It runs roughly like this: the ‘Holocaust’ therefore because my relatives died in Auschwitz, they were gassed and the ‘Holocaust’ is true because my relatives were ‘gassed in Auschwitz’.
It is simply an archetypal case of what the British/American popular historian Paul Johnson once rightly called ‘logical fiddlesticks’.
Rosensaft continues by writing that:
‘My grandparents, my mother’s first husband and their 5-and-½-year-old son were murdered by Zyklon-B gas in a Birkenau gas chamber in August 1943 — dying cruelly in exactly the way that Germar Rudolf, who was invited by a state lawmaker to testify before a legislative committee, says no Jews were killed.’ (6)
However as we have seen despite Rosensaft’s claims: he has no direct primary evidence that his claim is actually true – my guess is that if Rosensaft’s relatives were registered inmates at Auschwitz (as is quite possible) then the Auschwitz death books and death certificates would indicate some other cause of death entirely (likely tuberculosis that was sweeping the Auschwitz camp complexes in deadly waves between 1942 and 1943) – (7) and as such his bleating on about his ‘gassed relatives’ is simply histrionics designed to manipulate the reader’s emotions not to actually make an intellectual sound point (probably because he can’t).
Rosensaft continues on by incoherently blathering that:
‘Rudolf is a prominent figure among Holocaust deniers. For more than 39 years, his “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust” has sought to delegitimize and undermine the historical record of the mass murder of 6 million European Jews during World War II by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and characterizing the Holocaust as a myth.
Historian Deborah Lipstadt describes Rudolf as “a hardcore denialist. He says no gas chambers, no plan to kill the Jews. It’s all a myth.” In the course of a 2007 trial in Germany, in which he was convicted of inciting racial hatred, he dismissed the Holocaust as “a gigantic fraud.”’ (8)
In the first instance Deborah Lipstadt is not an ‘expert’ on the ‘Holocaust’ as she’s published remarkably little on it – her famed ‘Holocaust’ ‘expertise’ almost solely rests on her famous 1996 law suit with David Irving and a very poorly researched 1993 book titled ‘Denying the Holocaust’ that doesn’t delve into revisionist arguments past circa 1980 for some unfathomable reason let alone cover Jurgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf’s huge output of primary source based micro-historical studies on individual camps and specific aspects of the ‘Holocaust’ theory since circa 2000 (there is almost no equivalent to these studies in orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholarship) – and functions primarily as a media talking head with a PhD (in ‘Jewish Studies’) as well as a spokeswoman for the ‘Holocaust’ industry.
Quite frankly I’d be surprised if Lipstadt (let alone the even more grossly ignorant Rosensaft) actually knows the difference between Majdanek and Maly Trostenets, but that’s just me.
Ergo her ‘expert opinion’ means very little and she certainly doesn’t have anything like the intellectual authority – even inside orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholarship – to pronounce the ‘Holocaust is a fact’ given that various ‘Holocaust’ authorities – most famously the doyen of ‘Holocaust’ historians Raul Hilberg – have grudgingly admitted the severe lack of primary evidence for the ‘Holocaust’ as a historical theory.
In the second instance Rosensaft tries to cover the lack of ‘easy to point to’ primary evidence for the ‘Holocaust’ by acting… well… like the lawyer that he is and proclaiming that the ‘Holocaust’ is equivalent to gravity and anyone who denies/doubts the ‘Holocaust’ is being as moronic as denying/doubting the existence of gravity.
However, as we have seen this simply isn’t the case since the ‘evidence’ for the ‘Holocaust’ is remarkably poor and lacking in all the normal bureaucratic documentation that we’d expect to find (such as the financial accounting documentation for example) – and no; the Germans couldn’t have realistically destroyed it all let alone as selectively as is often claimed as a ‘get out of jail free’ card when ‘Holocaust’ believers are presented with this problem – and which are present – for example – in huge bundles in the archives for even the mass deportation and execution of tens of thousands of individuals to gulags in individual operations by Stalin’s Soviet Union around the same time compared it being almost non-existent for the ‘mass extermination’ of millions of jews (and others such as the Romani people [aka gypsies]) by the Third Reich.
The truth is simply that we have reems of primary evidence for the German mass deportation of jews and their transport/use in labour camps (primarily for war work much as with Stalin’s ‘labour army’ in his Gulag system); we have almost none for a German policy of ‘mass extermination’ of these jewish deportees.
Thus, unfortunately for Rosensaft the ‘Holocaust’ is not gravity, and we have abundant evidence for the existence of gravity, but almost none for the so-called ‘best documented event in history’.
Rosensaft’s continues on by whining that:
‘Holocaust denial is not merely the manifestation of an insidious and dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theory. It constitutes a moral clear and present danger motivated by a perverse determination to radically downplay if not expunge altogether the annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II from the historical narrative.’ (9)
Rosensaft here is showcasing his sheer ignorance of how historiography works; he claims by necessary implication that the ‘Holocaust’ is a fact that ‘cannot be doubted’, but as any undergraduate class on research methods would have informed him. Historians hold any fact or event to be ‘doubtable’ (those who doubt are often called ‘revisionists’ ergo ‘Holocaust revisionists’) and there are regular debates over whether – even well-established/widely-believed – historical events, entities and/or groups even existed in the first place even though to the ill-informed layman – which apparently Rosensaft is – would assume they were ‘solid fact’ with examples being the ongoing debate over whether Holodomor actually happened, the niche debate over whether Charlemagne and his Frankish kingdom ever even existed (and were just a later literary creation), the claim that there was a previously unknown large jewish kingdom in southern France during the medieval era and the now increasing consensus that the famous medieval Christian heretics – the Cathars – against whom the Albigensian Crusade was launched in the early thirteenth century never actually existed at all and were an intellectual phantasm constructed by the newly-created Christian universities of Europe and the Dominicans.
The point is that ‘revision’ is both completely normal in historiography and also required because often new sources come to light or we reinvestigate the source material only to find that previous interpretations were dubious, somewhat inaccurate and/or simply erroneous. The only historical ‘event’ where this apparently doesn’t apply to ‘officially’ – although in practice orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholars have been steadily and quietly revising their narrative to be very close to the ‘Holocaust’ revisionist one for decades now (for example by now discarding the so-called ‘gas chambers’ of Majdanek and turning Stutthof from a ‘second Auschwitz’ to a ‘second Dachau’ [which again showcases Rosensaft’s serious ignorance of the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ literature]) – is the ‘Holocaust’, which has been elevated to the status of ‘absolute fact’ and secular religious dogma as the late traditionalist Catholic bishop Richard Williamson rightly observed a decade or two ago.
To deny this requirement for scholarly revision and to elevate an alleged ‘historical event’ to the status of ‘absolute truth’ and secular religious dogma is both hilariously ignorant, but also showcases how Rosensaft is a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect where Rosensaft has just enough knowledge to think himself an expert on the ‘Holocaust’ but not enough to know that he barely knows anything about it let alone the intricacies involved.
Indeed, Rosensaft ends up looking like the metaphorical spastic in the magnet factory rather than the august self-styled ‘crusader for historical truth’ that he wants to present himself as.
This is obvious in what Rosensaft says next when tries to provoke a moral panic among his circumcised confreres writing that:
‘The alarming reality, however, is that because Holocaust denial is generally considered to be less harmful than other variants of antisemitism, it is far too often allowed to fester and foment under a spurious guise of freedom of speech.
By failing to prevent Rudolf from testifying and not striking his testimony from the official record when he questioned whether and how my grandparents and my brother were murdered, the chairperson of this New Hampshire state House committee lent credence to Rudolf’s nefarious agenda. Sadly, this is anything but an isolated incident.’ (10)
To translate this from what we may term ‘jew speak’; Rosensaft is claiming that to doubt the ‘absolute truth’ (and the historical reality) of the ‘Holocaust’ narrative is not ‘free speech’ but rather ‘anti-Semitism’.
It is not predictably explained why ‘anti-Semitism’ is not ipso facto free speech (probably because that’d require lots of tortured and self-contradictory verbiage to ‘explain’) but we may reasonably assume the logic Rosensaft is using is a variant of the jewish political philosopher Karl Popper’s popular concept of the ‘Open Society’ where the ‘Open Society’ needs to be protected from ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘harmful’ ideas meaning in effect that Popper (and presumably Rosensaft) aren’t pro-free speech at all but rather want all anti-jewish/anti-Israel speech banned as being ‘harmful’.
In essence Rosensaft is actually repeating the following demand made by jewish organizations in the United States on 17th May 1954.
To wit:
‘Resolutions calling for the barring of anti-Semitic literature from the mails, and urging the U.S. Government to reconsider its decision to send arms to Iraq were adopted here by the American Association of English-Jewish Newspapers at its annual convention this week-end.
A delegation representing the Association was received at the White House by Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams, who accepted on behalf of President Eisenhower a Bible presented by the Association.’ (11)
Put simply: ban ‘anti-Semites’ from distributing/publishing/writing/making arguments critical of jews, Judaism and/or Israel because ‘jews say so’.
Rosensaft’s ‘argument’ is this same demand dressed up for modernity with some basic rhetoric and unevidenced assumptions.
It is thus little surprise to any observer of the jews that Rosensaft then immediately begins engaging in public self-gratification and self-promotion when he writes:
‘Confronting and refuting Holocaust deniers has come to resemble the classic Whac-a-Mole arcade game except that unlike trying to hit inoffensive plastic facsimiles of burrowing mammals with a mallet, exposing, ostracizing and utterly discrediting Holocaust deniers is both urgent and deadly serious.
Professional charlatans such as Rudolf, David Irving, Frank Leuchter, and Ernst Zündel have made Holocaust denial a career and can be dismissed as such. But I am increasingly unnerved by mainstream or quasi-mainstream figures who spout or otherwise provide a veneer of credibility to Holocaust denial claptrap.
This isn’t new. Patrick Buchanan, the Nixon and Reagan White House official and reactionary populist candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, wrote in a March 1990 syndicated column that it would have been impossible for Jews to perish in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp. Until I outed him and it in a 2009 New York Daily News op-ed, his official website, Buchanan.org, featured a Holocaust denial forum that included such comments as “there simply were not gas chambers or mass crematoriums at any of the German internment camps” and “We have known for some time that the Auschwitz myth is of an exclusively Jewish origin.”
Also in 2009, Bishop Richard Williamson, the excommunicated member of an ultra-right-wing splinter group of the Roman Catholic Church whom Pope Benedict XVI briefly brought back into the fold, declared on Swedish television in 2009 that “I believe there were no gas chambers” and that no more than 200,000 or 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, “but none of them by gas chambers.”’ (12)
What Rosensaft is doing here is claiming he has ‘confronted and exposed’ so-called ‘Holocaust Deniers’ (more accurately termed as ‘Holocaust Revisionists’) with the necessary implication that he has personally ‘proven the Holocaust to be true’ and ‘debunked them’.
This simply isn’t true as Rosensaft has never – to my knowledge nor a quick search – published any scholarly work on the ‘Holocaust’ and his ‘list of deniers’ (i.e., ‘Rudolf, David Irving, Frank Leuchter, and Ernst Zundel’) is from the early to mid-1990s with everyone but Rudolf having all but ceased activity by the mid-2000s (he is also missing off other major revisionist figures of this era like Austrian engineer Walter Luftl [who wrote the ‘Luftl Report’ on the gas chambers, the air photograph expert John Ball’s work on the air reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz and the German judge Wilhelm Staglich’s analysis of the ‘evidence for Auschwitz’ among a variety of others]) .
The problem is also that Rosensaft couldn’t quite frankly ‘debunk’ Rudolf if he tried given Rudolf is a trained chemist who has conducted chemical tests on the bunkers of Auschwitz (the ‘Rudolf Report’ that was commissioned by Zundel) with a long record of publishing scholarly material based on primary sources on the ‘Holocaust’ where-as Rosensaft is frankly well… just a jewish lawyer and a ‘Holocaust Industry’ activist with no scholarly publishing history that I can find on the subject he wants to act like an ‘expert’ in.
Similar points apply to Leuchter (an American engineer who specialised in the operation of homicidal gas chambers in US prisons who wrote what has become known as the ‘Leuchter Report’) and Irving (a British historian and probably still the single best biographer of major figures in the Third Reich given his massive reliable on primary source documentation not ‘received opinion’ or ‘court history’ as the nationalist academic William Pierce once termed it), while Zundel was the rough equivalent of Rosensaft and was a ‘Holocaust Revisionist’ activist and publisher albeit Zundel appears to forgotten far more about the ‘Holocaust’ than Rosensaft has ever known about it.
To get around the rather revealing fact that Rosensaft – like Lipstadt – doesn’t appear to have read or heard of any revisionist material beyond about 1995; he simply engages in bluff and bluster by pompously going on about how he ‘engaging in a game of classic Whac-a-Mole’ with revisionists and going around ‘personally debunking’ their ‘silly arguments’ when Rosensaft has never done any such thing.
Rosensaft doesn’t even know the first thing about modern ‘Holocaust’ research but is apparently stuck in a perpetual time loop circa 1995 like a dementia patient in a nursing home.
In reality all Rosensaft actually says is that he ‘exposed’ and ‘attacked’ senior Republican figure and popular historian Pat Buchanan for ‘daring’ to refer to revisionist positions with some kind of intellectual respect – Buchanan himself has long been ‘controversial’ for adhering to the historical revisionist interpretation (again primary source based rather than ‘received opinion’) on the lead up to (and outbreak of) the Second World War – and defamed Bishop Richard Williamson for daring to doubt the ‘absolute truth’ of the ‘Holocaust’ as well as criticising it as a secular religion.
He’s basically the intellectual equivalent of the 300-pound neckbeard who poses as an UFC level fighter on the internet and should be taken the same way: as an amusing joke of a man.
References
(1) https://www.jpost.com/international/article-895393
(2) https://www.jewishtimes.com/the-new-face-of-holocaust-denial-is-harder-to-spot-and-more-dangerous/
(3) Idem.
(4) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/a-simple-guide-to-holocaust-revisionism
(5) On the many myths about Mengele and what the primary documentation actually tells us please see John Wear‘s excellent summary article at ‘Inconvenient History’: https://web.archive.org/web/20230217010850/http://inconvenienthistory.com/13/1/7585
(6) https://www.jewishtimes.com/the-new-face-of-holocaust-denial-is-harder-to-spot-and-more-dangerous/
(7) On this see Carlo Mattogno, 2021, ‘The Making of the Auschwitz Myth: Auschwitz in British Intercepts, Polish Underground Reports and Postwar Testimonies (1941-1947)’, 2nd Edition, Castle Hill: Uckfield, pp. 46-94
(8) https://www.jewishtimes.com/the-new-face-of-holocaust-denial-is-harder-to-spot-and-more-dangerous/
(9) Idem.
(10) Idem.
(11) https://www.jta.org/archive/jewish-publishers-urge-mail-ban-on-anti-semitic-literature
(12) https://www.jewishtimes.com/the-new-face-of-holocaust-denial-is-harder-to-spot-and-more-dangerous/
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