The issue is complex and cannot be fully debated or
decided here but the following points may stimulate thought and discussion.
- During even the most terrible times of Jewish
suffering such as the Crusades or the Chmielnitzky massacres of seventeenth century Ukraine, and
even more so at other times in history, it has been said that the average
peasant would have given his eye-teeth to be a Jew. The meaning is clear:
generally speaking, and throughout most of their history, the condition of Jews
was often far superior to the mass of the population.
- The above-mentioned Ukrainian massacres took place
in the context of a peasant uprising against the oppression of the Ukrainian
peasantry by their Polish overlords. As has often been the case, Jews were seen
as occupying a traditional position of being in alliance with the ruling class
in their oppression of the peasantry. Chmielnitzky, the leader of
this popular uprising, is today a Ukrainian national hero, not for his assaults
on Jews (there are even references to his having offered poor Jews to join the
uprising against their exploitative co-religionists – the Jews declined) but
for his championing of the rights of the oppressed Ukrainians. Again, the inference is plain: outbreaks of
anti-Semitic violence, though never justified, have often been responses to
Jewish behaviour both real and imaginary.
- In the Holocaust three million Polish Jews died, but
so did three million non-Jewish Poles. Jews were targeted but so were Gypsies,
homosexuals, Slavs and Poles. Similarly, the Church burned Jews for their
dissenting beliefs but then the church burned everyone for their dissenting
beliefs. So again, the question must be asked: what’s so special about Jewish
suffering?
The Holocaust, the paradigm for all anti-Semitism and
all Jewish suffering, is treated as being beyond examination and scrutiny.
Questioning the Holocaust narrative is, at best, socially unacceptable, leading
often to social exclusion and discrimination, and, at worst, in some places is
illegal and subject to severe penalty.
Holocaust revisionist scholars, named Holocaust deniers by their
opponents, have challenged this. They do not deny a brutal and extensive
assault on Jews by the Nazi regime but they do deny the Holocaust narrative as
framed by present day establishments and elites. Specifically, their denial is
limited to three main areas. First, they deny that there ever was an official
plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime systematically
and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe; second, they deny that there
ever existed homicidal gas-chambers; third, they claim that the numbers of
Jewish victims of the Nazi assault have been greatly exaggerated.
But none of this is the point. Whether those who
question the Holocaust narrative are revisionist scholars striving to find the
truth and shamelessly persecuted for opposing a powerful faction, or whether
they are crazy Jew-haters denying a tragedy and defaming its victims, the fact
is that one may question the Armenian genocide, one may freely discuss the
Slave Trade, one can say that the murder of millions of Ibos, Kampucheans and
Rwandans never took place and that the moon is but a piece of green cheese
floating in space, but one may not question the Jewish Holocaust. Why? Because,
like the rest of the Jewish history of suffering, the Holocaust underpins the
narrative of Jewish innocence which is used to bewilder and befuddle any
attempt to see and to comprehend Jewish power and responsibility in
Israel/Palestine and elsewhere in the world.
