Holocaust Hoax

Auschwitz was liberated 61 years ago, but anyone passing through Teheran this week could well have been benign to the fact. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president is doing his level best to erase the memory of that small Polish town.

101 offensive remarks and a seminar for Holocaust denial later, and don’t be too surprised to learn that the word on the Arab street is that the Shoah, as Elie Wiesel coined it, never happened at all.

To learn more about the Holocaust hoax and the myth of the six million, Infolive.tv took to the streets of Ramallah where we asked for the Palestinian response to Yom HaShoah. The responses ranged from indifference to disbelief.

Over half of those asked were categorical in their denial; the diatribe of radical Islamic education having done the job well. One middle-aged spectacle wearing gent, told our Arab affairs reporter, "there were only 500,000 Jews in Europe at the time," and so he reasoned, quite understandably, "how could six million have been killed?"


After some careful research, you may be surprised to learn, that I for one agree with Mahmoud: the Holocaust is an episode full of lies and deceit; here are just a few choice examples.
To this day, Warsaw cemetery remains a remarkable cradle of life; the only place in the city with even a semblance of Jewish life - untouched by Nazi hands.

During the round up and deportation of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, a myth was spread among the Nazi soldiers who patrolled the city, that the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw was haunted.

A small number of children were discreetly hidden among piles of dead bodies stacked ready to be thrown over the ghetto walls into the cemetery. The plan paid proved a success; not one German soldier dared step foot inside the cemetery. A tiny number of Warsaw's 400.000 Jews survived living in and among the gravestones, creeping out of their hiding places at night to reclaim the food parcels hidden each day among the day's new corpses.


The myth of Warsaw cemetery is joined by others like it - each with one or two survivors able to tell the tale. To hear more of these myths, I refer you back to some choice Islamic propaganda - however a close reading tells not only of myths, but of forthright lies as well:

In the first of a sea of wild lies, writer, educator Dr. Janus Korczak bravely shielded the Jewish children in his Polish orphanage from the reality of Nazi oppression.

On August 6, 1942, the date given for the children's deportation to Treblinka, Korczak spun another yarn: he instructed the children to pack a small bag and prepare for a picnic outing; the children did so and their spirits were lifted. Shortly after the group arrived at Treblinka, Korczak allayed the group's rising fears as they lined up to have their hair and clothes removed.

Later that day in one final bid to spare them from fear, he led the children in a song as they marched to their death. Janus Korzcak was not the only liar of the Holocaust, he is joined by thousands of others who lived and died through those terrible years.


I'm doubtful whether the Iranian President was referring to these or similar incidents in his Yom HaShoah offensive last week, but either way I thank him for jogging my mind.

The true damage and horror of Holocaust denial is not in its injustice to the past, but rather in its injustice to the future; put simply – it is the rape of civilization.

A brief glance towards the radical Islamic regimes across the Mid East and beyond, and at the state of the societies therein, reveals a world of intolerance, repression and wicked cruelty. What irony that the societies who deny the Holocaust most, are those with the most to learn from its unceasing call to human morality.

As we mark 61 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, with our own Persian Hitler not so far away, the importance of perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust only grows stronger.

AR