Holocaust denial
oracknows | December 21, 2006With the impending release of David Irving, my mind turned to wondering about what he'll do when he gets out. His finances are a ruin. He's ticked off his fellow Holocaust deniers by saying that there were indeed homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. This discussion led to a question, which led to some prognosticating by me and others on a discussion board:
When will Irving show up in the U.S. to give speeches before far right wing groups to try to replenish his depleted bank account? Current favorites range from around two weeks after his release to around a month after his release. What do…
oracknows | December 20, 2006It's about time:
An Austrian appeals court has ruled that UK historian David Irving - jailed for denying the Holocaust - should be released on probation.
Irving is now being held in police detention and will be deported to the UK on Thursday, officials said.
Irving was convicted in February in a case that sparked international debate about the limits of freedom of speech.
In 1989 he spoke in Austria denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, though he later said he was "mistaken".
The appeals court in Vienna had heard calls for both a reduction and increase in his sentence.
Irving on…
oracknows | December 17, 2006First, check out The Daily Show's take on the Holocaust denial conference, with goodies like Revision Quest and Just Say No. It's the show that characterizes the "question" being discussed at the conference as: Was the entire Holocaust an elaborate episode of Punk'd? Best line: David Duke, he's like the Flock of Seagulls of hate. Or maybe the one about the neo-Nazis who are publishing a book about the Holocaust entitled If We Did It...
But, believe it or not, I've found a take on the Holocaust denial convention, parts of which may be even funnier than The Daily Show, and it comes from a…
oracknows | December 16, 2006We often hear atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and P. Z. Myers castigating the excesses and irrationality of religion. (Heck, I'm often game for joining in when it comes to fundamentalist religion.) While discussing the recent Holocaust denial conference in Iran, Massimo Pigliucci makes a good point when he argues that focusing on just religion is missing the broader context:
The answer, I think, is similar to that of the other unnerving question raised by this week's events: how can some people deny one of the best documented (and recent) historical events of all times? I mean,…
oracknows | December 12, 2006
Regular readers of this blog know that I couldn't leave this one alone.
Yesterday, the Holocaust-denying President of Iran Mahmoud realized his promised dream of holding an "academic" conference to "debate" the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it's a lovefest for Holocaust deniers. Indeed, many of the most "prominent" Holocaust deniers in the world are now gathered in Iran to spew their lies:
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran opened a conference on Monday to examine the Holocaust and question whether Nazi Germany used gas chambers to kill Jews, drawing condemnation in the West and criticism from Iran's…
oracknows | November 29, 2006Andrew Mathis over at Flavor Country does it well. Indeed, his demolition of Holocaust deniers on Usenet on the newsgroup alt,revisionism undoubtedly had an influence on what later became my special brand of Respectful Insolenceâ¢.
So, sit back and enjoy as he thoroughly fisks an article by Mark Glenn, the webmaster of the Crescent and Cross (WARNING: Glenn likes to post extremely gory pictures), a website that is, as Andrew puts it, dedicated to "uniting Christians and Muslims against Jews."
Here's a little taste of Andrew's response to one of Glenn's claims that Jews are "exploiting in a…
oracknows | November 27, 2006I've mentioned one particularly odious (well, more odious) subset of Holocaust deniers, a type that I call the "Holocaust never happened but the Jews deserve it" type of Holocaust denier. These Holocaust deniers claim that either the Holocaust never happened or that it was greatly exaggerated, while at the same time spewing anti-Semitism along the lines of, "The Jews deserved everything they got" from the Nazis. (Never mind that the denier just said in the previous breathe that the Jews never got much of anything as far as persecution from the Nazis). If you don't believe that this type of…
oracknows | November 19, 2006Via Holocaust Controversies, I've become aware of a new anti-denier blog, Holocaust Denial Absurdities. Its first couple of posts look promising, such as this description of the censorship of opposing viewpoints that goes on at a denier forum.
oracknows | November 4, 2006A while back, I commented on the infamous Iranian "Holocaust Cartoon Contest," which Iran sponsored in response to the Danish cartoon imbroglio in which cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed triggered violent protests among Muslims last winter. Their stated goal, was to try to draw some sort of equivalency between their offense at having Mohammed mocked and what they expected would be the West's offense at having the Holocaust or attitudes towards the Holocaust mocked. The result, as I mentioned, was underwhelming; with a few exceptions, the contest didn't cause much reaction. Even Rabbis…
oracknows | October 4, 2006The other day, in the midst of a discussion about one of my posts about Holocaust denial, an anti-Semite posting as "bernarda" demanded:
Then I read books like Norman Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry and understood that it [the Holocaust] has just become a propaganda tool to create a permanent guilt complex, even on Americans who had nothing to do with it. Why are there several holocaust museums in the U.S. but no slavery museum?
The answer is pretty simple: Because the U.S. did not perpetrate the Holocaust. It helped to end the Holocaust. In contrast, the U.S. did perpetrate slavery. That's…
oracknows | October 2, 2006While I happen to be on the topic of free speech and neo-Nazis today, here's something that came to me via Holocaust Controversies, a Holocaust denier comments about Sergey's post about the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre:
So is this the so-called "massacre" where kikes were supposedly massacred? God, but were it only so. Thus the volk who seek freedom fm Judaic oppression need merely review the proper historical dialectic.
He then goes off on a standard anti-Jew rant, citing arch anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Michael Hoffman III.
As you can see, this "Apollonian" is the variety…
oracknows | September 19, 2006Heh.
I love it when the guys over at Holocaust Controversies get involved in a tussle with someone who clearly doesn't know what he is talking about, and I figure that perhaps my readers will too. So, enjoy this amusing little rebuttal to a guy who calls himself the "Birdman" and seems to think it's so cool to be "politically incorrect," even going so far as to bill himself the "world's most controversial author." (Get a load of his blatant anti-Semitism, for example.) Apparently he's also a UFO maven, as well.
In any case, enjoy as Sergey takes the Birdman apart.
While you're at it, enjoy…
oracknows | September 10, 2006Yesterday, I posted about a story indicating that a Danish newspaper had published some of the cartoons from the Iranian Holocaust Cartoon contest, pointing out how, when the original Danish cartoons poking fun at Islam were published, we saw riots, death threats, and demands for punishment. When Iran, supposedly to make fun of the Holocaust and the West's supposed "double standard" with respect to the Holocaust, holds a contest and publishes a bunch of anti-Semitic cartoons, the reaction is largely a worldwide shrug of the shoulders and some fairly minor protests. Some of the collective yawn…
oracknows | September 9, 2006Here's something very telling:
A Danish newspaper has printed cartoons about the Holocaust commissioned by Iran after cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad triggered violent protests.
The newspaper - Information - published six of the cartoons, which are on display in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Several of the cartoons contrast the plight of the Palestinians with that of the victims of the Holocaust.
Editor-in-chief Palle Weis said he had thought carefully about publishing the cartoons and said it was not a stunt.
He told the BBC the cartoons accompanied a news story about the exhibition. He said…
oracknows | September 5, 2006Sigh.
You know, the President of Iran, Ahmoud Ahmadinejad, is, sadly, not unlike the Energizer Bunny. He keeps going and going and going and going. This time around, he just can't resist putting his foot in it again. Hot on the heels of hosting a Holocaust Cartoon Exhibit as his response to the Danish cartoon incident designed to "test the tolerance" of the West for offensive "humor" directed at Jews and the Holocaust. Never mind that, unlike Denmark, this "Holocaust cartoon exhibit" is being held in a nation with in essence no freedom of speech, where the government controls the media and…
oracknows | August 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 20, 2006...I love it when Nick Terry makes dim Holocaust deniers run away just by asking them to back up their claims.
oracknows | August 8, 2006The other day, I posted about the reaction in the white power ranger blogosphere to Mel Gibson's little anti-Semitic tirade. Apparently a blogger by the name of Occidentalist took umbrage in the comments at my having pointed out that the rantings about "the synagogue of Satan" contained on an anti-Semitic blog were, in fact, anti-Semitic and downright un-Christian:
Ya know the Talmud says Jesus Christ is boiling in hot excrement for all eternity, right?
Besides being irrelevant, that statement has nothing to do with the contents of my post. (I don't recall mentioning the Talmud, Jesus, or the…
oracknows | August 3, 2006Now that Mel Gibson has apologized for his anti-Semitic tirade during his arrest for DUI last week and the ADL has accepted Gibson's apology, everyone is discussing what the fallout will be among the Hollywood elite, many of whom happen to be Jewish. Ever the contrarian, using my knowledge of the darker places of the Internet, where white power rangers spin ever more self-pitying tales of depradations at the hands of "the Jews," I thought I'd see what Gibson's other fan base thinks of the whole affair, in an unflinching effort to bring you a perspective that no other blogger would, mainly…