Ever since he retired from academia; Alan Dershowitz has been getting rather more involved in his political activism on behalf of Israel. Part of this has been a radical increase in the number of articles that he has been writing and one of the outlets, which regularly publishes these is Daniel Pipes’ ‘think tank’ the Gatestone Institute.
Since Dershy decided to write an article about something that he clearly doesn’t know anything about (i.e., Holocaust revisionism) (1) and then tie it to the mass media promoted idea of ‘fake news’ via the then as now outdated ‘crime’ of ‘spreading false news’ in Canadian law that was used to unsuccessfully prosecute Ernst Zundel in the 1980s. (2) I thought I’d respond in kind to the substance of the article.
To wit Dershy writes that:
‘”Fake news” has become a subject of real news. But there’s nothing new about “fake news.” Holocaust deniers have generated fake news for decades. The deniers have funded “research” “institutes,” “journals,” books, magazines, videos, websites, newsflashes – all designed to provide a patina of academic respectability to demonstrable falsehoods.’
So how is revisionist scholarship on the ‘Holocaust’ and populist reductions of it: fake news?
It isn’t, because the scholarship is – as even ‘Holocaust historians’ have admitted on numerous occasions – both solid and often very innovative. It was revisionists – notably Carlo Mattogno – who went gone through the Auschwitz camp documents in almost excruciating levels of detail to track the history and development of the camp in both its form and function not the ‘Holocaust historians’.
Even though the latter had fifty years to do so before revisionists stepped up to the plate.
Is it the fault of revisionists that academics spent their time and energy not in documenting the events they alleged happened – as any normal historian would do – but in arguing over whether Hitler ordered the mass murders of the jews directly or not as well as collecting dubious a huge assortment of ‘testimonies’ from ‘survivors’ for years and decades after the events.
In spite of their foreknowledge that these would inevitably be polluted with the post-war narrative and atrocity stories.
But hey: it is easier to simple use the buzzwords ‘Holocaust denier’ and ‘Fake News’, while shrieking that everything a ‘denier’ says is a ‘demonstrable falsehood’ rather than doing any actual demonstrating.
Isn’t it Dershy?
Or should I dare mention that since the early 1990s mainstream ‘Holocaust historians’ haven’t dared address revisionists directly, because they got their arses handed to them in a series of public debates in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Remember what happened to Professor Michael Shermer?
The worst thing is really that the revisionists of the 1980s and early 1990s were but pale shadows of the level of expertise and detailed knowledge of the next generation of revisionists such as Jurgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf.
Scary: huh?
‘This entire enterprise is devoted to proving that the holocaust – the systematic murder of more than six million Jews in gas chambers, mass shootings, mobile killing units and other means of implementing the carefully planned genocide – simply did not occur.’
Well in the first instance; the ‘six million figure’ is utterly arbitrary, was first used by Polish propagandists before the ‘Holocaust’ allegedly began and can be traced back to the Damascus Affair in 1840 as I have pointed out elsewhere. (3)
In the second; if Dershy was aware of the ‘Holocaust’ literature then he’d know that pretty much no one now contends that the ‘Holocaust’ was a ‘carefully planned’ genocide, because – according to modern ‘Holocaust’ historians – it came about as an unintentional accident resulting from ‘initiatives from below and orders from above’.
Just ask yourself Alan: where is the Fuhrer order for the ‘Holocaust’?
We have all the orders for other controversial actions, but not that one: why?
Also it isn’t hard to ‘deny the Holocaust’, because all it takes is to simply ask questions that result from reading ‘Holocaust historians’ and you’ll quickly find that people end up sympathising with the ‘deniers’.
Have you not read any ‘Holocaust’ literature since Lucy Dawidowicz’s 1975 ‘The War against the Jews 1933-45’ Dershy?
Your ‘knowledge’ is seriously out of date little man.
‘It was made up whole cloth out of “The Jews” for financial and political gain.’
Except this is a straw man, because revisionists don’t hold that the jews deliberately made it up, but rather that they exploited extant atrocity propaganda that they themselves may or may not have truly believed – indeed I’d say many really did and do believe it regardless of the insanity of what they are suggesting – to their own advantage.
‘No reasonable person with a modicum of intelligence can actually believe that Hitler and his Nazis co-conspirators did not plan the mass extermination of Jews at the Wannsse Conference’
You mean no reasonable person with a modicum of intelligence can seriously credit the claim made by the ‘Holocaust historians’ that the Wannsee Conference – based on the one transcript we have – was a conspiracy using code words the meaning of which we magically know – yes Dershy that is literally what you are claiming is ‘indisputable fact’ – that ended in the decision to exterminate the jews.
Does anyone get the impression that Dershy knows very little about the ‘Holocaust’ history that he is supposed to be defending?
Anyway he continues:
‘That they did not carry it out at death camps, such as Treblinka, Sorbibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz, Birkenau, as well as by SS mobile killing units that gathered Jews in such places as Babi Yar and the Ponary Woods.’
Well let’s see (apart from the misspelling of Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau): Treblinka and Sobibor were allegedly pure death camps using diesel gas fumes from engines from a captured Soviet tank or submarine (depends on which ‘witness’ you use and they also disgaree whether they were diesel or petrol engines incidentally) to conduct the mass murder hundreds of thousands of jews.
Except that diesel engines are possibly the worst method of trying to gas people that you can think of (i.e., not enough lethal gas is produced quickly enough thus making it slow to kill anyone and uses valuable petrol stock) and thousands of jews are now known to have been transited through – including unloading, delousing and reloading – the super-secret ‘pure death camps’ of Treblinka and Sobibor according to both the German documentation and confirmation from ‘Holocaust survivors’.
Belzec – another ‘pure death camp’ – is in a similar situation, but didn’t have diesel gas chambers, but rather a huge floor which electrocuted its victims to death.
This is a detail that gets rather glossed over by ‘Holocaust historians’ for obvious reasons.
Then you’ve got Auschwitz – which was mainly a labour camp according to ‘Holocaust historians’ – for which no one can quite decide how the alleged gassing system operated and none of the suggestions that have been offered seem particularly efficient let alone effective.
As to Babi Yar: well it’d be useful if they could find a large filled-in ravine with a hundred thousand jewish bodies in it, but they don’t appear to be able to do so!
How strange!
At least Ponary woods was found and excavated, albeit by the not exactly factually reliable Soviet Union under Stalin – he did after all claim among other things fake statistics in the 1937 census and claim that the Katyn massacre was done by the Germans and brought in specialists to ‘prove’ it – but Dershy sort of forgets to mention that estimates are that a quarter of the victims weren’t jewish, but rather a mix of Russian communists, Polish political dissidents, Lithuanian deserters and gypsies.
So how much do you actually know Dershy?
‘Yet, thousands of people, many with academic degrees, and some with professorial positions, persist in denying the undeniable.’
To translate this into normal-speak: ‘My god educated people don’t agree with my ideologically-based beliefs. They need to be made to shut up immediately!’
‘These professional liars’
Since as we all know there is only one version of historical opinion that is allowed.
‘Are given legitimacy by some reputable scholars such as Noam Chomsky, who not only champions the right of these fake historians to perpetrate their malicious lies’
Ah so the non-jewish ‘Holocaust deniers’ with academic degrees – or who are in academia like myself – are liars, but Noam Chomsky – a jewish anarchist and to be fair an author of quite a few excellent books as well as a superb linguist by all accounts – is at fault for actually defending their right to have a dissident historical opinion?
Have you heard yourself lately Dershy?
Sound awfully like an apologist for Joseph Stalin did in the late 1930s?
Why yes: you do.
‘But who actually lend their names to the quality of the “research” that produce the lies of denial.’
How can you ‘lend your name to the quality of research’?
If you mean deductive reasoning then sure, but I don’t think any sane person with an academic degree is going to not wonder what on earth you are gabbling on about.
Need I mention the ‘quality’ of your research that was exposed for all to see by Norman Finkelstein in ‘Beyond Chutzpah’ as well as the fact that Frank Menetrez then demolished your so-called ‘counter-arguments’ about how ‘Finkelstein was misrepresenting you’ and shown you to be the lying little toad that you are? (4)
‘In a widely circulated petition signed by numerous scholars, Chomsky and the other signatories actually described the false history of the notorious denier, Robert Faurisson, as “findings” based on “extensive historical research,” thus giving them an academic imprimatur.’
What Noam Chomsky and the petition said was and is perfectly true.
Robert Faurisson – who is an acknowledged academic specialist in French literature like Dershy is an acknowledged academic specialist in law but unlike latter Faurisson actually studied and published extensively on the ‘Holocaust’ – has conducted ‘extensive historical research’ which no one really disputes… well other than you and old Debbie Lipstadt.
‘I, too, support the right of falsifiers of history to submit their lies to the open marketplace of ideas, where all reasonable people will reject them.’
Then why are you criticising Noam Chomsky?
He basically said the same thing.
Oh right… he implied that we should hear the ‘deniers’ out and not screech ‘liar’ from the top of every available edifice rather than debate them in the normal academic way a-la the Socratic method.
‘The First Amendment to the United States Constitution does not distinguish between truth and lies, at least when it comes to historical events. Just as I defended the rights of Nazis to march through Skokie, and the right of KKK racists to burn crosses on the own property, I defend the right of mendacious holocaust deniers to spin their hateful web of lies.’
Can’t you just feel the hate for the First Amendment oozing out of Dershowitz’s pen here?
Absolutely chilling.
‘But, unlike Chomsky, I would never dream of supporting the false content of these lies’
Except Noam Chomsky didn’t ‘support it’; he merely stated that Faurisson’s views were based on extensive historical research and as such at least deserved to be treated like any other point of view in academia.
‘Or the phony methodology employed by these liars.’
What ‘phony methodology’ would this be?
Deductive reasoning?
‘Chomsky should be praised for defending the right of Holocaust deniers, but he should be condemned for his complicity in lending substantive and methodological credibility to their false history.’
Oh yes, because we can’t have an accurate neutral description of historical views that you despise and want to silence now can we?
‘The marketplace is one thing, but let me be clear that I do not believe that any university should tolerate, in the name of academic freedom these falsehoods being taught in the classroom.’
Ah yes… free speech unless it comes with any kind of authority and then it ‘no longer applies’, because Dershy is scared that people might develop ideas that he doesn’t like.
‘There is not and should not be academic freedom to commit educational malpractice by presenting provable lies as acceptable facts.’
Yet they aren’t ‘provable lies’ as the signal failure of ‘Holocaust historians’ to win any debate with a ‘Holocaust denier’ should tell you. The fact that ‘Holocaust historians’ have spent decades now running away from detailed academic studies on the methodology of the ‘Holocaust’ should also tell you everything you need to know.
They know their case is very weak and – ironically – a poorly reasoned conspiracy theory based on non-evidenced assumptions, physical impossibilities and selectively citing bits of different ‘Holocaust’ testimonies to create a patchwork theory about ‘how it happened’, which is then brutally enforced as ‘the truth’ by both governments and what Finkelstein rightly termed the ‘Holocaust Industry’.
Just don’t ask inconvenient questions like where the vacuum chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau are and you’ll be just fine.
‘Universities must and do have standards: no credible university would tolerate a professor teaching that slavery did not exist, or that the Earth is flat.’
This is typical false equivalence, because we can scientifically prove that the Earth isn’t flat and that slavery existed is supported by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of different pieces of evidence from a variety of cultures and civilisations that converge on that conclusion.
Not so the ‘Holocaust’, which amounts to a few pieces of ‘Holocaust survivor’ testimony (which are actually used and also usually contradict each other), several interrogations of SS men after the war (which also heavily contradict each other), a couple of documents that allegedly include ‘coded discussions’ of an extermination policy, an autobiography of a man who had his testicles smashed before he wrote it, a pile of old shoes and an awful lot of wishful thinking about telepathy and selective pyromania on the part of the Germans.
I am sorry to say Dershy, but the ‘Holocaust’ is the quintessential example of an insane conspiracy theory that relies on magical thinking and the brutal enforcement of ideological orthodoxy to sustain it.
‘Holocaust denial does not meet any reasonable standard deserving the protection of academic freedom.’
You mean a hundred plus page studies using original source documents in several languages – many never before studied – about things like the architectural evolution of the Auschwitz camp, the felling and usage of timber at Treblinka and detailed scientific discussion of ‘gas vans’ don’t meet ‘any reasonable standard deserving the protection of academic freedom’?
I rather think they do and I am sure that any academic I know would say the same.
They reach the ‘wrong conclusions’ though: don’t they Dershy?
References
(1) https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10108/the-origin-of-fake-news-in-holocaust-denial
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Zundel
(3) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-the-6-million-jews
(4) http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/04/30/dershowitz-v-finkelstein-who-s-right-and-who-s-wrong/
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