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Debating the Holocaust: There can be no denying the “Holocaust” of the mid-twentieth century: it was called World War II. Roughly 50 to 60 million people died worldwide - about 70 percent of whom were civilians.1 They died from a variety of causes including guns, bombs, fire, disease, exposure, starvation, and chemical toxins. Within this greater Holocaust existed many lesser holocausts: the Allied fire-bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne; the killing of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians, by the victorious Allies, after the formal end of the war; the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which incinerated 170,000 women, children, and elderly; and the Jewish Holocaust of Nazi Germany. ...

... Some researchers make challenging and troubling claims, which threaten to overturn major aspects of the Holocaust story:

* Key witnesses to the Holocaust have either falsified or greatly exaggerated important aspects of their stories.

* The figure of “six million” has little basis in fact. This number, which theoretically could only have been known after the war, actually traces back decades before.

* Major death camps, like Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Treblinka, have vanished “without a trace”—as have most of their alleged victims. Such a thing is not possible.

* Both of the alleged means of gassing victims—Zyklon-B (cyanide) and carbon monoxide from diesel exhaust—are impractical, unworkable, and simply ridiculous.

* No “Holocaust order” from Hitler exists; nor was there any budget or any plan. How, then, could the Nazis have pulled off their perfect crime?

* Wartime air photos do not substantiate the traditional account of events.

* Why are there, even today, so many “survivors”?

Four Myths
An inquiry into the Great Debate of Holocaust revisionism cannot even begin unless a few prominent myths are dismissed at the outset. Four are of particular importance:

Myth #1: Revisionists believe that the Holocaust “never happened.” . . .

Myth #2: Photographs of corpses prove the Holocaust happened . . .

Myth #3: The Holocaust was a “hoax.” . . .

Myth #4: Revisionists are right-wing neo-Nazi anti-Semites. . . .
 

Bishop Williamson and `Holocaust Denial’: Why the Uproar? Bishop Williamson holds unconventional views on a range of issues. He has repeatedly said that Nine-Eleven was an “inside job,” and believes that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks were organized by the US government. But no one is demanding that Williamson apologize for charging that high-level US officials carried out mass murder of their own fellow citizens. Indeed, if the US government were to insist on such an apology, it would rightly be regarded as an act of arrogant effrontery.

Tony Judt, a Jewish scholar who serves as director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, has written:

“The Shoah [Hebrew term for Holocaust] is frequently exploited in America and Israel to deflect and forbid any criticism of Israel. Indeed, the Holocaust of Europe's Jews is nowadays exploited thrice over: It gives American Jews in particular a unique, retrospective ‘victim identity’; it allows Israel to trump any other nation's sufferings (and justify its own excesses) with the claim that the Jewish catastrophe was unique and incompa­rable; and (in contradiction to the first two) it is adduced as an all-purpose metaphor for evil -- anywhere, everywhere and always -- and taught to schoolchildren all over America and Europe without any reference to context or cause. This modern instrumentalization of the Holocaust for political advantage is ethically disreputable and politically imprudent.”

Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who teaches at DePaul University in Chicago, writes in his bestselling book, The Holocaust Industry, that “invoking The Holocaust” is “a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews.” He adds: “By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure... Organized American Jewry has ex­ploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own morally indefensible policies.”

In Israel, says Tom Segev, a prominent Israeli journalist and author, the Holocaust has become “an object of worship.” Moreover, he writes, “the 'heritage of the Holocaust,’ as it is taught in [Israel’s] schools and fostered in national memorial ceremonies, often encourages insular chauvinism and a sense that the Nazi extermination of the Jews justifies any act that seems to contribute to Israel’s security, including the oppression of the population in the territories occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War.”