Holocaust Denial No Joke

Last night I watched Jon Stewart do his inimitable [actually slightly imitable by other professional cynics on-line] schtick with Fareed Zakaria, having a gay old time frisking the prez who is always misunderestimated. I actually thought about how this prancing youngish comic was ignoring the huge threat to his co-religionists, or co-genepoolers, in Israel and elsewhere posed by Iran's Holocaust Denial Meeting.

Anne'>http://www.slate.com/id/2155328/?nav=ais">Anne Applebaum at Slate throws cold water on the blissful Panglossian pundits who discount such moronic nonsense as just harmless flimflammery foisted on the Iranian people for the glorification of Ahmedinnejad.

the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Thiel, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Töben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers. The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited. One Palestinian scholar, Khaled Ksab Mahamid, was asked to come but was then barred because he holds an Israeli passport—and also perhaps because he, unlike other guests, believes that the Holocaust really did happen.

The Holocaust really did happen, but because of some very nasty backstories like the David Irving saga [Irving still languishes in an Austrian jail] and other hypertrophic overreactions, there is always going to be a libertarian strain of historiography that questions the who, what, where, why, and how. Plus the numbers game. But it is not like the Armenians, who were also murdered in mass numbers during World War I for reasons having as much to do with living in a war zone [between and among the Russian and Ottoman Turkish armies] and having large populations both in Turkey and Russia. This was Hitler's deliberate Nacht und Nebel policy for eliminating the Jews [the name came from Wagner's Ring referring to the helm which made one invisible or disappear]. Applebaum wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag which portrays Stalin's archipelago of slave labor camps and Anne speaks and reads every major European language, so I always take her seriously as when she says:

the near-destruction of the European Jews in a very brief span of time by a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available was, it seems, an event that requires constant re-explanation, not least because it really did shape subsequent European and world history in untold ways. For that reason alone, the archives, the photographs, and the endless rebuttals will go on being necessary, long beyond the lifetime of the last survivor.

Read the Slate article linked above to get the acidic flavor and weird pro-Nazi background of Ahmedinejad, who like Yasser Arafat had with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, himself had a mentor heavily influenced by Nazi wartime propaganda, and the previous Shah's contention that Iran was the homeland of the Aryan race, which Hitler himself encouraged.

But I would very much like to see Anne Applebaum write the definitive book on Hitler's involvement in the Jewish Holocaust with the same incredible detail and passion that she did with exposing Stalin's decades-long extermination of millions through forced labor.