A Post for the Holocaust Deniers

From an obit in the UK:-

In April 1945 Williams was a staff captain at HQ 8 Corps, serving with the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC). He was one of a reconnaissance party — among them a number of senior Army officers, some sappers and a Jewish padre — whose task it was to ascertain the conditions in a camp that the Germans had told them was in the direct line of the Allied advance and they wished to hand over.

They travelled in jeeps with white flags hoisted along the Bergen road from Celle. Their final reference point was a small cutting in a dense plantation of fir trees leading to a side road. There were no signs or markings, but 30 yards along the road there was a sentry box manned by an armed Hungarian soldier who raised the barrier to let them pass. Behind it, there was a large fence of barbed wire. They went through the gates to find the SS guards on parade with their commandant, Josef Kramer, and Irma Grese, a warder on the women’s section. The task of Williams and his team was to check the supplies of food and water. He had to move carefully because, covering the ground throughout the camp, were inmates with emaciated faces, shaven heads and sunken eyes, some lying on the ground, some hanging on to the barbed wire for support, some trying to stand.  There were piles of dead bodies everywhere. Dazed, apathetic figures, dressed in rags, wandered aimlessly around. The stench of putrefaction hung over the camp, an acrid haze obscured the sun and the silence was oppressive. There was no food, water or fuel in the camp. All Williams could find in the five cookhouses were 50lb of rotten turnips. When two of the inmates tried to approach him, the SS guards knocked them out of their path.

Williams returned to Corps HQ and reported that food and fresh water had to be found for thousands and that thousands more lay dead and had to be buried. The next day, Williams was able to lead the first food convoy into the camp.

Solid food had to be turned into something like soup for shrunken stomachs; tea could be distributed only in small amounts. The British units had the dreadful task of trying to separate the living from the dead, for both were lying side by side.

An anti-tank regiment was put in charge of the SS, who had the task of collecting all the dead bodies, loading them on to trailers and taking them to the mass burial trenches. Some of the SS tried to escape through the barbed wire and were shot.

Their colleagues were ordered to retrieve their bodies and load them on to the trailer to be buried with the rest. It was a ghastly operation. “How our gunners managed to stay sane, I will never know,” Williams said afterwards.

On a search of the surrounding area, Williams found a deserted Army barracks a mile away with a storehouse of cereals and a bakery in full working order. He asked why it was that the SS had not made use of these to feed their prisoners and was told simply that they had not been prepared to do so.

William Richard Williams, the son of a clergyman, was born at Peterson Super Ely, Glamorgan, on August 23 1920 and educated at Wrekin College. He left school early to take up an apprenticeship with Austin Motor Company but was called up on the outbreak of war and joined the RASC. He landed in Normandy on D-Day and remained with 8 Corps as they pushed eastward...,

Now do you believe?

^

Holocaust Deniers? Who? Iran?

The NYTimes' Lede reports:

Holocaust-Denying Cartoonist Finds a Home Online

An Iranian news agency has announced the launch of Holocartoons.com, devoted to the work of Maziar Bijani, a Holocaust-denying Iranian cartoonist.

- - -

Arabs, the Holocaust and Israel - A New Twist

Gilbert Achcar, whose new boook, The Arabs and the Holocaust, will be published this month by Saqi, has an op-ed in The Guardian. If I understand him, he claims Arabs are misunderstood for their complex relationship with the issue of Holocaust denial and those Arabs calling themselves "Palestinian" somehow have begun expressing sympathy.

Weird.

And how?

Excerpts:-

There is no dispute that Holocaust denial has been on the rise in Arab countries during the last two decades...Yet western-style Holocaust denial – that is, the endeavour to produce pseudo-scientific proofs that the Jewish genocide did not happen at all or was only a massacre of far lesser scope than that commonly acknowledged – is actually very marginal in the Arab world...Holocaust denial is not primarily an expression of antisemitism, as western Holocaust denial certainly is, but an expression of what I call the "anti-Zionism of fools".

...Much less reported, however, are public acknowledgements by Palestinians of the Holocaust and of the universal lessons it bears for all persecuted peoples and groups. When researching my book, The Arabs and the Holocaust, I found innumerable reports about the enunciation by Palestinians or other Arabs of insanities about the Holocaust, while I noticed that expressions of Palestinian compassion with the victims of the Holocaust were barely reported, if not blatantly ignored.

...on 9 January 2009, at the peak of the brutal Israeli onslaught on Gaza, inhabitants of Bi'lin, another West Bank village known for standing at the forefront of the struggle against the Israeli occupation, organised a demonstration in protest, wearing striped pyjamas similar to those of Nazi concentration camp inmates. An account by the Bil'in Popular Committee states: "Protesters also wore small yellow cutouts in the shape of Gaza with the word 'Gazan' written on them to symbolise the yellow 'Jude' stars of David worn by European Jews during World War II." The BBC briefly broadcast a glance at this astounding event: a video is still available. That the message the Palestinian demonstrators conveyed was "exaggerated" is obvious (and natural); but the point is that they were identifying with the Jewish victims of Nazism and regarding the Holocaust as the highest standard of horror, rather than denying it. [rather backward, no? they asserted the Jews are Nazis]

...most media – often unconsciously – play a negative role in putting much more emphasis on the dark side of the Arab world or the Muslim world than on the bright side. This increases public prejudices against Arabs and Muslims, and sends back to the latter a detestable image of themselves with damaging consequences.

One would wish that the media instead promoted expressions such as...reported above. Unlike counterproductive pronouncements by apostates of Islam busy outdoing the neocons in pro-western or pro-Israeli statements, these are expressions by credible and respected fighters against the national oppression that their people endure. Such are the most truthful Arab or Muslim upholders of the universal lessons of the Holocaust – like the Palestinian demonstrators in striped pyjamas.

This is a new form of pro-Pal. apologetics.

The media is blamed while actually, without going to the root of the Pal. denial of the Holocaust, or rather their adoption of its paradigm which then transfers to them the role of victim while demonizing the state of Israel, they assure the increasing depth of antisemtism.

Good old Guardian.

Gets it wrong always.

A new twist, like twisting the knife in Israel's back.

The Iranian Two-Timer

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday:

To attack humanity and to achieve their goal, western countries raised the issue of the Holocaust and created the Zionist regime without considering God Almighty and the holy prophets,

The issue of Holocaust denial for this guy is not a question solely of racism or antisemitism. It is more evil.

Israel has no right to exist from an Islamic theological interpretation according to Ahmadinejad (and, of course, I would claim that the Quran can been read as very pro-Zionist). It is anti-Allah for him. So, where is its basis as a geo-political entity?

Is it in its 3000 years and more of religious, cultural, historical, linguistic identity? Is it in the archeological discoveries confirming the Biblical narrative? Is it the international legal decisions?

No, these cannot be because they are objective. So he creates an inverse thinking.

The nations of the world persecuted the Jews for all the wrong and the right reasons. With no where to go, the Jews claimed they needed to go to "Palestine" due to some fictional past. Now, in order to eject the native population who are not guilty of anything towards the Jews (not really but I never said the Iranian was logical or factual), the Jews created a fictional Holocaust and this dovetailed with the need to provide a 'cover' feeling of responsibility for those nations who yielded to the Jews to aid them in establishing their 'Zionist entity' and this enabled the usurping of the Arabs of "Palestine".

Besides being all wrong, the Iranian doesn't only deny the Holocaust. He denies Jewish nationalism.

He's a two-timer.



(Kippah tip: SoccerDad via Judeopundit)

Important for Supporters of Arabs Who Identify as "Palestinians"

This notion of total extermination is important for yet another very precise and concrete reason: namely, Israel. The Shoah did not cause Israel to come into being. And we must do everything, truly everything, to break the insidious chain that, in linking the two, ends up imputing a providential cause to, and, whether we want it to or not, justifying the Shoah. All the same, there is another inanity heard all over, which consists of the following: "Yes, alright, it was a crime; yes, if absolutely necessary to admit, a singular crime; but as for the survivors of the tragedy, why weren't they moved to Germany? Why a national Jewish homeland in the Arab world--the only part of the world that did not take part in the crime?" And the answer remains that the world itself was a trap for Jews; there wasn't a single part of the world where the evil wind of this death didn't blow; and the Arab world did not recuse itself, any more than the rest of the world, from this plan of total extermination...

Today we have very detailed information on the matter. We have the memoirs of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem describing, relentlessly, during the entire duration of the war, his admiration for Hitler. We have the work of historians citing the existence of an Arab SS legion waiting, at the rear guard of Rommel's army, for the order to descend on the Yishuv in order to exterminate the 500,000 Jews who had already settled there. We know, in other words, that Nazism was a global ideology that manifested itself in national versions and, in particular, in an Arab version no less criminal than the European version. This changes nothing--quite the contrary--when it comes to the necessary fight for democracy in the Arab world and, in particular, in the Palestinian State to come. This is simply an argument for honesty, an argument to oppose relentlessly those who, sustained by an ignorance related to an absence of memory, try to delegitimize Israel--and who sometimes, unfortunately, succeed. Commemorating the Shoah is also a matter of honesty. It is also a fight against ignorance.

Bernard-Henri Lévy,
April 20, 2009, at Place des Nations in Geneva.

Bye-bye, Pope

Mario Kaiser is a journalist based in Berlin.

He is the grandson of two very different men.

One came from a family that raised the swastika flag on the tallest building in my hometown. The other was a tailor who secretly sewed suits for Jews. They both disappeared in the trenches of World War II. Maybe that is why I'm sensitive when it comes to discussing the Holocaust. Part of my family has blood on its hands, and the part that doesn't was killed anyway.

And since he is sensitive, he wrote an op-ed and informed us that he

walked into a courthouse and divorced myself from the Catholic Church. That is what you have to do as a German if you want to leave the church. I was waiting for the pope to hold me back. I was waiting for him to tell me that it never should have happened. I was waiting for him to correct his mistake. But he kept me waiting.

Why?

When I first heard that the pope had welcomed a once-excommunicated bishop who denies the Holocaust back into the church, I didn't believe it. I thought that the truth was probably more complicated...And then he lost me. The man he had virtually absolved, Bishop Richard Williamson, was known to be a notorious denier of the Holocaust.

Only weeks before, Williamson...dressed in a black robe, a large cross hanging from his neck, he nodded his head and said, in a soft, grandfatherly voice, what he believes. "I believe there were no gas chambers," he said.

...This is the man who, after being excommunicated by a pope more than 20 years ago, was reinstated as a bishop of the Catholic Church - by a German pope who has been to Auschwitz.

After days of unbearable silence and outrage around the world, Benedict finally spoke, and that is when he lost me. He didn't actually speak: The Vatican issued a statement demanding that Williamson "distance himself from his positions on the Shoah."

I looked at these words and wondered why, in the eyes of the Vatican, denying the Holocaust was a "position." I wondered why all it required for a Holocaust-denying bishop to remain a bishop was to "distance himself" from his words.

I couldn't understand why Benedict didn't distance himself and the Catholic Church from Williamson in the same way he had associated himself with him, with the stroke of a pen. So I distanced myself from the pope.

...The pope is not an anti-Semite and has never condoned anti-Semitism. But he chooses to retreat at a time when he should lead, and that, to me, is not an option for a German pope in the face of anti-Semitism.

Maybe I judge him too harshly. I hope so. That's the beauty of being born in a country with a Nazi past. I can hold him to a higher standard.

That is a man of faith (see here for my reference)

Williamson Is Going To Read One Book

In an e-mail and fax exchange with SPIEGEL, the ultra-conservative Bishop Richard Williamson saןג that he is willing to "review the historical evidence."

SPIEGEL: The Vatican is demanding that you retract your denial of the Holocaust, and it is threatening to not allow you to resume your activities as a bishop. How will you react?

Williamson: Throughout my life, I have always sought the truth. That is why I converted to Catholicism and became a priest. And now I can only say something, the truth of which I am convinced. Because I realize that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must now [now? wow] review the historical evidence once again. I said the same thing in my interview with Swedish television: Historical evidence is at issue, not emotions. And if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

SPIEGEL: How can an educated Catholic deny the Holocaust?

Williamson: I addressed the subject in the 1980s. I had read various writings at the time. I cited the Leuchter report (eds. note: a debunked theory produced in the 1980s claiming erroneously that the Nazi gas chambers were technically impractical) in the interview, and it seemed plausible to me. Now I am told that it has been scientifically refuted. I plan now to look into it.

SPIEGEL: You could travel to Auschwitz yourself.

Williamson: No, I will not travel to Auschwitz. [but there's a museum there, he doesn't have to go further than that] I've ordered the book by Jean-Claude Pressac. It's called "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers." A printout is now being sent to me, and I will read it and study it. [I can suggest more books]

"For He Knew Not..." - Forgive Him?

The head of an ultraconservative society is asking for forgiveness from Pope Benedict XVI for the claims by one of his bishops that no Jews were gassed in World War II.

Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, said his group doesn't share the views of Bishop Richard Williamson about what Fellay called the ''genocide'' of Jews by the Nazis.

He said he had forbidden Williamson from speaking out publicly about any historical or political questions from now on.

To forgive is divine but why must we all be so stupid?

There Really Was An Auschwitz

If you read German, you can go here and see the plans.

What plans?

These:

Original plans for the construction of the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz, including a gas chamber and crematorium, have been found in a Berlin apartment, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The daily Bild published copies of some of the 28 plans, which the head of Germany's federal archives, Hans-Dieter Krekamp, called "authentic proof of the systematically planned genocide of the Jews of Europe."

Bearing Witness

From a new book, THE ROAD TO RESCUE The Untold Story of Schindler’s List by Mietek Pemper on the importance of bearing witness:-

Pemper won the post of Göth’s personal secretary and interpreter [at Plaszow]. He was so terrified of working in close quarters with the volatile commandant that despite his workload he refused to ask for an assistant, unwilling to risk another prisoner’s death. Anyway, no one volunteered — the inmates were too afraid of Göth. The following anecdote, coolly related by Pemper, shows why:

“I would sit in the commandant’s office and take dictation from him. While he ­talked, Göth would watch the mirror outside his window, which he used to oversee the area in front of the barracks. Suddenly he would stand up, take one of the rifles from the rack on the wall and open the window. I would hear a few shots and then nothing but screams. As if he had interrupted the dictation only to take a telephone call, Göth would come back to his desk and say, ‘Where were we?’ ”

From reading the SS correspondence, Pemper realized that the Plaszow camp could be kept open (and its workers not sent to Auschwitz) only if it could be proved that its weapons production was siegent­scheidend, or “crucial for victory.” A megalomaniac who desired authority (and access to luxuries) at all costs, Göth agreed to the inflated production tables that Pemper drew up for him. Pemper would also persuade Schindler that producing arms in his factory would keep his workers safe. “If Schindler hadn’t begun production of grenade parts in 1943,” Pemper writes, “there would have been no Schindler’s list and no rescue effort.”

Pemper’s prodigious memory and ­powers of observation allowed him to give vital testimony in the commandant’s trial in Poland after the war, which resulted in Göth’s execution. The memoir draws a devastating portrait of a brute who stood out even among the SS for his recklessness and arrogance, so gung-ho about his macabre work that he visited other camps for inspiration...Göth was careless, of course, because he believed assur­ances that no witnesses would remain. When he saw the list of witnesses at his trial, he reportedly exclaimed: “So many Jews? And they always told us not a single one . . . would be left.”

The deniers continue to deny. The haters continue to hate. The violent continue to hurt and injure and damage.

But we will remember all those who have proven to be unjust and unfair and evil.

And we will give testimony and witness and we will repay.

Never again will Jews be defenseless, unable to respond to our enemies.

Amd those who seek to weaken and undermine Israel - economically, militarily, psychologically and spiritually - those, too, will be remembered.

There Goes Another Holocaust Denial Story

Kristallnacht was the foreshadowing of the Holocaust.

It seems that the physical evidence of that pogrom is coming to light:-

Refuse Heap Is Archive for Night of Hatred

KLANDORF, Germany — Seventy years ago next month, rioters wreaked havoc on their Jewish neighbors, destroying and burning thousands of synagogues, businesses and homes across the nation...

...Curiously, though, physical evidence of the state-sponsored pogrom has always been extremely scarce. The Jewish Museum, for example, holds many letters describing the night. But the only other related object in its collection is a 38-second black-and-white film of a synagogue burning in Bielefeld, a university town in western Germany.

Last week, however, an Israeli researcher reported finding a trove of such evidence — piles of looted Jewish possessions — in this town 30 miles north of Berlin...The day after Kristallnacht, trains loaded with personal and religious items arrived in the woods outside Klandorf. Political prisoners from a nearby camp unloaded the material and threw it all in a dump here.

...“We have confirmed that the relics are from that period,” said Tanja Ronen-Löhnberg, a historian at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, a well-known Holocaust museum and research center in Israel.

...The Ghetto Fighters’ House hopes to set up a living history center that would bring young Germans and Israelis together to sift through the contents of the dump. Such a project could help the area, one of the many economically depressed parts of the former East Germany.

There promises to be plenty of chaff to sort out from the valuable kernels of history remaining in the dump. According to old maps, the area was used as a dump from the early 20th century until 1945. Distinct sections hold Berlin refuse from different eras. But many of the castoffs are mixed together, and even with forensic studies it can be difficult to pinpoint exact dates.

And the conclusion for historians?

“In the end it doesn’t matter terribly if these articles were taken on Nov. 9 or the following March or the previous August,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “The fact is that it is a relic and testament to these two terrible days and the actions of criminals.”

Mr. Svoray said he was surprised that the dump’s contents were not made public earlier.

“As far as detective work, with 10 being the most difficult and zero being nothing, this was a 2,” he said. “What always amazes me in Germany and Austria is that people assume these stories are over and done with.”

Matory No Scholar

An anthropology pofessor at Harvard published an op-ed in the Daily Crimson entitled: Israel and Censorship at Harvard.

Most of it is ranting and irrational and I chose to respond to just one claim:-

Professor J.L. Matory asks (rhetorically?) "But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans?" ("Israel and Censorship at Harvard", Sept. 14) and the answer must be a qualified 'no'.

The Arabs of the Palestine Mandate (1922-1948), who referred to themselves as "Southern Syrians" in the early years of that period, were early supporters of Hitler and his Nazi regime. In their anti-Zionist propaganda, they exploited and copied crude Nazi racist literature, slogans and symbols. They adapted to the Aryan ideology, claiming racial kinship. When the Grand Mufti El-Husseini was forced to flee the region during World War II, due to his Islamic terrorism policy, he traveled to Berlin, met the Fuhrer and offered his services to the Nazi cause on behalf of the extermination purposes of German actions. He broadcast pro-Nazi messages over German radio and raised military units composed of Muslims, mainly in Bosnia, to fight in the Waffen SS. Two of his aides were parachuted back into the Mandate for purposes of spying, sabotage and murder by poisoning water supplies.

More importantly, the Arab terror campaign of 1936-1939 which killed hundreds of Jewish civilians as well as British Army and Police forces and, incidentally, some 2000 Arab rivals from the more moderate camp as well, led to the infamous British White Paper policy of 1939. The British closed the gates of immigration to the Jews of Europe. This stranded millions of Jews to the fate that eventually overtook them: shootings in pits, starvation in concentration camps and incineration in the crematoria. The Nazi crimes could not have been so enormous or so horrific without this development in the Palestine Mandate.

In perspective, it may be that the Arabs of the Palestine Mandate, in their support for the Mufti and their participation in the terror of the 1930s, did indeed contribute indirectly to the German crimes of the Holocaust. This aspect of the Israel-Arab conflict also deserves protection from censorship or, at the very least, the too common ignorance the conflict

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh,
ISRAEL

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Information about the content of my letter can be researched here as well as in this film clip

A Bit of 'Dusty' History

In 1937, Chaim Weizmann gave testimony before a British Commission of Inquiry regarding British policy and reported on it to that year's Zionist Congress.

One of the things he had to say was very disturbing, especially in the light of what eventually happened to the Jews of Europe. He was asked "But can you bring 6,000,000 to Palestine?" and he replied: "No" as he was well acquainted with the laws of physics and chemistry.

Weizmann spoke of 6,000,000 Jews of whom he was determined to save the 2,000,000 youngsters who were fit for Eretz-Yisrael. The others, the old people, were as "dust", who would disappear. "Two millions, and perhaps, less - Scheerith Hapleta - only a branch shall survive. They had to accept it.

Here's the text as it appeared in the official monthly of the World Zionist Organization (see the underlined section in the right-hand column):-



The clipping is from The New Judea, August-September 1937, page 215.

Another Take on Iran and Holocaust Denial

From the Weekly Standard's Matthias Küntzel:-

Up until now, Holocaust deniers have wanted to revise the past. Today, they want to shape the future: to prepare the way for the next Holocaust.

In his opening speech to the conference, the Iranian foreign minister, Manucher Mottaki, left no doubt on this point: If "the official version of the Holocaust is called into question," Mottaki said, then "the nature and identity of Israel" must also be called into question. The purpose of denying, among all the Nazis' war measures, specifically the persecution of the Jews is to undermine a central motive for the establishment of the state of Israel. Auschwitz is delegitimized in order to legitimize the elimination of Israel--that is, a second genocide. If it should turn out, however, that the Holocaust did happen after all, Ahmadinejad explains that it would have been a result of European policies, and any homeland for the Jews would belong not in Palestine but in Europe. Either way, the result is the same: Israel must vanish.

This focus explains why the conference's sponsors attached so much importance to the participation of a delegation from the Jewish sect Neturei Karta. Although it does not deny the Holocaust, the sect welcomes the destruction of Israel. That objective was the common denominator uniting all the participants in the conference. In his closing speech, Ahmadinejad formulated it with perfect clarity: "The life-curve of the Zionist regime has begun its descent, and it is now on a downward slope towards its fall. . . . The Zionist regime will be wiped out, and humanity will be liberated."

and it continues:-

Yet it's all confusing. Why, if Iran wishes Israel ill, does it deny the Holocaust rather than applaud it? Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial has been especially well received in the Arab world, where it has won praise from Hezbollah, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas. Yet in the Arab world, Hitler is admired not for building highways or conquering Paris, but for murdering Jews. How can Holocaust denial be most prevalent in a region where admiration for Hitler remains widespread? To unlock this paradox it is necessary to examine the anti-Semitic mind.

Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism at its most extreme. Whoever declares Auschwitz a myth implicitly portrays the Jews as the enemy of humanity: The assumption is that the all-powerful Jews, for filthy lucre, have been duping the rest of humanity for the past 60 years. Whoever talks of the "so-called Holocaust" implies that over 90 percent of the world's media and university professorships are controlled by Jews and are thereby cut off from the "real" truth. No one who accuses Jews of such perfidy can sincerely regret Hitler's Final Solution. For this reason alone, every denial of the Holocaust contains an appeal to repeat it...

...Obviously, from a logical point of view, enthusiasm for the Holocaust is incompatible with its denial. Logic, however, is beside the point. Anti-Semitism is built upon an emotional infrastructure that substitutes for reason an ephemeral combination of mutually exclusive attributions, all arising from hatred of everything Jewish. As a result, many contradictory anti-Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust can be deployed simultaneously: (1) the extermination of millions was a good thing; (2) the extermination of millions was a Zionist fabrication; (3) the Holocaust resulted from a Jewish conspiracy against Germany that Hitler thwarted and punished; (4) the Holocaust was a joint enterprise of the Zionists and Nazis; (5) the Zionists' "Holocaust industry" exaggerates the murder of the Jews for self-interested reasons; (6) Israeli actions against the Palestinians are the "true" Holocaust--and so on.

We are dealing here with a parallel universe in which the reality principle is ignored, and blatantly contradictory fantasies about Jews all have their place so long as they serve to reinforce anti-Semitic paranoia and hatred: a universe in which the laws of reason have been abolished and all mental energy is harnessed to the cause of anti-Semitism. ..

...Irrespective of the leeway that Ahmadinejad has, for the time being, left the Iranian Jews, his rhetoric is steeped in an anti-Semitism that is unprecedented for a state leader since World War II. Ahmadinejad does not say "Jews" are conspiring to rule the world. He says, "Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world." He says, "The Zionists" have for 60 years now blackmailed "all Western governments." "The Zionists have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural, and media sectors." "The Zionists" fabricated the Danish Muhammad cartoons. "The Zionists" are responsible for the destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque in Iraq.

The pattern is familiar. Ahmadinejad is not a racist social Darwinist who, Hitler-like, wants to eliminate every last trace of "Jewish blood." The term "half-Jew" is not used in Islamist discourse. But he invests the word "Zionist" with exactly the same meaning Hitler poured into "Jew": the incarnation of evil. ..

...Shiite Islamism confronts us with an adversary who reviles the achievements of modernity as Satan's work, who denounces the international system created after 1945 as a "Jewish-Christian conspiracy," and who therefore wishes to overturn the accepted historiography of the postwar period. At the start of the Holocaust deniers' conference, Foreign Minister Mottaki explained that the problem is the "wording of historical occurrences and their analysis [are written from] the perspective of the West." As against this "Western" historiography, Islamism wants to create a new historical "truth," in which the Holocaust is declared a myth, while the Twelfth Imam is deemed real. Whereas the delusional worldview of Holocaust denial is elevated to the norm, any deviation from it is denounced as a symptom of "Jewish domination." ...

...Even as he is conducting his religious war, Ahmadinejad is also playing the role of a global populist. The alarm cannot be sounded loudly enough. If Iran is not put under pressure without delay and forced to choose between changing course and suffering devastating economic sanctions, the only remaining alternatives will be a bad one--the military option--and a dreadful one--the Iranian bomb.