FWD: Holocaust or holocausts?

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Ha'aretz  Wednesday, July 11, 2001 

The Holocaust, or holocausts? 
By Eliahu Salpeter

Holocaust-denial has traditionally been one of the central instruments of 
anti-Semites and neo-Nazis in the West.The verdict handed down last year by a 
court in London against historian David Irving in his libel suit against 
another historian, Deborah Lipstadt, who had accused him of denying the 
Holocaust has dealt a severe blow to all the attempts that have been made in 
recent years to extend legitimacy, if not reputability, to a "moderate" form 
of Holocaust-denial. Instead of denying the Holocaust altogether, the 
proponents of this approach spread arguments designed to erode the 
credibility of facts related to the Holocaust. Thus, 6 million Jews were not 
exterminated; "only" 1 million were. Or, there were no gas chambers; the Jews 
who perished were victims of disease or famine. Or, there was no 
"industrialization" of the mass extermination process; there were "only" 
pogroms and mass executions.

In the Arab world, the Irving trial has had less impact than it has had in 
any other segment of the international community. In Arab propaganda, the 
Holocaust continues to figure as a major tool used against Israel; however, 
its employment betrays a central paradox. On the one hand, the propagandists 
continue to stress that the Palestinians are victims of the Western world's 
feelings of guilt over the Holocaust. On the other hand, however, there has 
been an ever-increasing attempt in recent years to deny Israel's right to 
exist by denying the Holocaust.

Thus, for example, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's deputy, Abu 
Mazen, has written that Zionism wanted to inflate the number of Holocaust 
victims in order to arouse the conscience of the Arab world. One Arab 
newspaper, Al-Hayat al-Jadidah, last year defined Yad Vashem, The Holocaust 
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, as a "Jewish center 
for the preservation of the memory of both the Holocaust and the lies."

Last November 29, on the day commemorating the 1947 decision of the UN 
General Assembly to partition British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state 
and an Arab one, the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation aired a lecture 
that recounted, inter alia, the "untruthful arguments about Jews murdered in 
the Holocaust." According to the lecturer, "All these lies are completely 
groundless. There was never a Chelmno or a Dachau or an Auschwitz. These were 
delousing centers." 

Newspapers in many Arab states are not lagging behind the Palestinian media 
in denying the Holocaust.

In effect, even the "universalization" of the Holocaust, a process that has 
gained considerable ground over the past few years and which can be observed 
in circles that can certainly not be labeled anti-Semitic, is being used not 
just to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust but also, and indirectly, to 
reduce the credibility of facts concerning the Holocaust - as if the 
Holocaust were a phenomenon that is not rare by any standards in human 
history.

This process was referred to last month by Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi 
Michael Melchior in connection with the preparations being made for the 
United Nations' World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, 
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, scheduled to open in Durban, South Africa 
on August 31.

In their background papers, the conference's organizers have introduced a 
number of terminological "amendments." They have erased the definite article 
in "The Holocaust" (thus replacing the latter term with "Holocaust") and are 
writing the word "Holocaust" with a small "h" instead of a capital "H." In 
order to eliminate any doubt about their intentions, they have added to the 
word "holocaust" the letter "s" to convey the message that the Jewish 
holocaust was only one of many holocausts that have taken place in human 
history.

"Instead of condemning the greatest crime ever committed against humanity, 
they are engaged in trivialization," notes Rabbi Melchior. "They are saying 
that there have been many holocausts and that our holocaust was just one of 
them."

Lack of information on the Holocaust can serve as fertile ground for its 
denial altogether. About three months ago, the American Jewish Committee 
conducted a special survey on attitudes toward the Holocaust among Austrians. 
For comparison's sake, AJC has attached to the findings of this survey 
findings from similar surveys conducted in recent years in other European 
countries, in the United States and in Argentina.

As can be seen from the comparison, there is no clear correlation between 
lack of knowledge about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. In some countries 
there is a blatant and direct correlation between the two, while in some 
countries there is an inverse relationship.

In the AJC surveys, respondents were asked to choose, among various possible 
definitions of the term "the Holocaust," the definition they considered to be 
the most accurate. In view of the prolonged grappling of the German 
educational system with the Holocaust, it is not surprising to learn that, in 
Germany, the percentage of respondents who correctly defined the term was 
higher than in any other country: 81 percent of the German respondents said 
that the Holocaust was the extermination, murder or persecution of the Jews. 
The lowest percentage of respondents able to correctly define this term was 
in Russia - 6 percent - while the corresponding figures for Sweden were 21 
percent and 32 percent for both the Czech Republic and Switzerland. In 
contrast, 67 percent of the Austrian respondents and 59 percent of the 
American respondents gave the correct definition. In both the U.S. and 
Austria the percentage of respondents who correctly defined the term was 
significantly higher than it was in all other countries surveyed.

On the other hand, the percentage of respondents who felt that there was the 
possibility that the Holocaust never occurred was extremely low in all the 
AJC surveys. In the U.S., Switzerland, Sweden and Poland respectively, only 1 
percent of the respondents gave an affirmative answer (that is, they 
considered it possible that there never was a Holocaust). In Sweden, 
Switzerland, the U.S. and France respectively, most of the respondents knew 
that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was 6 million. In Germany, 
36 percent of the respondents cited the correct figure.

To compare personal attitudes toward anti-Semitism, the AJC survey presented 
responses to "classical" measurable questions: First of all, a willingness to 
have Jews living in a neighboring apartment or house; second, the 
respondents' opinion concerning the extent of Jewish influence in their own 
country. The greatest opposition to having a Jewish neighbor was expressed by 
respondents in Poland (30 percent). In Austria, 26 percent of the respondents 
were against having a Jewish neighbor, while in Russia and Germany the 
corresponding figures were 24 percent and 22 percent. Little opposition to 
the idea of Jewish neighbors was found among the respondents in Sweden (2 
percent), the U.S. (5 percent) and Switzerland (8 percent).

The highest percentages of respondents who believed that Jews exerted too 
much influence were recorded for Argentina (25 percent) and Germany (22 
percent). The lowest percentages were in Sweden (2 percent) and the Czech 
Republic (8 percent). The highest percentages of respondents who believed 
that Jews exerted too little influence were recorded for the Czech Republic 
(34 percent) and - surprisingly, considering that country's anti-Semitic past 
- Slovakia (25 percent).

These responses do not permit the formation of any uniform conclusions 
concerning the link between the various indices of anti-Semitism. However, it 
does appear that the percentage of Holocaust-deniers in the countries 
surveyed by AJC is low and that it is quite possible to be an anti-Semite 
without denying the Holocaust 

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