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When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran described the Holocaust as a "myth" and hosted a Holocaust revisionist conference in Tehran in December 2006, he was warmly cheered in the Third World and severely castigated in the United States and Europe. Yet most Western pundits largely failed to grasp the significance of the assault. They limited themselves to outrage and righteous indignation. Ahmadinejad's fulminations were, on the one hand, jeered as "paranoid" and, on the other, described as on par with his other threats to destroy Israel -- pardon, "the Zionist entity." In other words, Western commentators dismissed the Iranian President as a vile, if dangerous troglodyte.
But Iran's leader is much more sophisticated than that. Ahmadinejad apparently applied Western logic to score a major propaganda victory. First, he argued that the failure to hold the Holocaust to legitimate "scholarly" scrutiny is an intellectual and moral flaw. Next, the Iranian President depicted himself as a defender of the freedom of inquiry. He trumpeted that only the irrational and the corrupt would refuse to allow academic freedom. Therefore, last but not least, he roundly condemned anyone who took offense at Holocaust revisionism as a lackey of "the Jews." After all the Shoah is just a "Jewish myth." And Western opponents of Holocaust revisionism are simply mercenary hypocrites, according to him.
Ahmadinejad selected the Holocaust not so much because of its special significance to the Jewish people, but because it appears to be the only unassailable truth in Western intellectual discourse. His is a dangerous assault on the West itself.
In the United States and among our allies, Holocaust revisionism is practically the only revisionism beyond the pale of academic inquiry. Whereas Western universities are full of Communist apologists, there are scarcely any Nazi sympathizers. American and European fans of Adolf Hitler rear their ugly heads mostly on the Internet. The mainstream public hears about them only occasionally.
The Revisionists
The average news consumer could probably name but one Holocaust revisionist: David Irving.The British researcher is arguably the most notorious because he is also the most sophisticated of the revisionists. In essence, Irving denies that there was a phenomenon of planned mass murder at all that could be conceptualized as the Holocaust. Instead, borrowing a cue straight from Sovietological revisionism, he argues that the local Nazis overzealously interpreted their orders to transfer the Jewish population "to the East." There was some killing.But Hitler did not know any of this, of course. True, he argues, there were also disassociated massacres of Jews, mostly not as Jews but as Communist sympathizers, by Stalin's erstwhile Eastern European victims. Irving also questions whether gas chambers existed at all. Most Jews died of hunger and diseases, he claims. There was never any systematic murder campaign against them and certainly no general order from Der Führer, according to Irving.
Other revisionists argue along similar lines, as "Hitler's Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust Revisionism" (New York: ADL, 1993) shows. Many are associated with the Institute for Historical Review, and its flagship quarterly Journal of Historical Review (JHR). Frenchman Robert Faurisson, for example, specializes in exposing the "fraud" of the gas chamber and so does American Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. JHR's long time editor, Canadian Mark Weber, even claims that "the Holocaust hoax is a religion. Its underpinnings in the realm of historical fact are non-existent -- no Hitler order, no plan, no budget, no gas chambers, no autopsies of gassed victims, no bones, no ashes, no skulls, no nothing."
A separate school of revisionism treats the Holocaust as a non-event. For instanc
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