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History and ideology stir up the melting pot
A judgment against a Holocaust revisionist encourages racial distinctions
Angela Shanahan, The Australian, 24 September 2002
Jeremy Jones, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, has a sticker on his car showing a dog using a computer. The caption reads: "On the internet nobody knows I'm a dog."
The successful prosecution of revisionist Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben by Jones under the 1995 Racial Hatred Act in the Federal Court has caused some disquiet about the limits to free speech on the internet.
There are sound arguments for not pressing ahead against Toben and the Holocaust deniers. It is argued that Toben's bogus claims, similar to David Irving's, should be publicly exposed. And although Toben obviously doesn't like Jews, unless he incites action against Jews he shouldn't be prosecuted. Holocaust denial, despite the distress it causes survivors and their families, is not a specific crime in this country.
Still, by appealing to the Federal Court after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission order was ignored, Jones has succeeded where a lot of others have tried and failed.
The reason for this goes beyond the problem of ignorance and historical revisionism. It has to do with the special significance
attached to that particular event, which is summed up by the very name Holocaust, a burnt offering, and what this has come to represent.
As a particular event it echoes down two generations of grandparentless children but, beyond the immediate tragedy, the Holocaust has a broader significance. Theologically, it is somewhat akin to the Christian idea of martyrdom. But on a more temporal level it has a special ideological niche. It has become the ultimate symbol of racism. Jews were killed in Germany as a race, not just as a religion. By accepting this idea, under the Racial Hatred Act, the judge accepted the idea that Judaism has a racial historical past and Holocaust denial, because it denies the defining experience of the race, is a specific form of racism.
In Australia this is sometimes of a new idea. We tend to think of Jews as just another religion. Unless you were brought up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, and meet a lot of Orthodox Jews who dress in a distinct way and sometimes speak Yiddish, Jews are ethnically indistinct from the rest of the population.
Ironically, the judgment against Toben has encouraged distinctions on racial grounds where none existed before. Hence even among Jews, particularly secular Jews, there is some ambivalence about prosecuting Holocaust deniers.
But despite other massacres and persecution of other races, the Jewish Holocaust seems to be regarded as somehow different. Christopher Hitchens, writing in September's Vanity Fair, asks: "What other ethnicity has ever had to witness the destruction of perhaps one-third of its entire membership?"
Well, the Armenians for a start, and the numerous indigenous groups who were massacred, including the aborigines of Argentina and Tasmania.
In fact, the ideology of the Holocaust has been extended so that if historians question massacres like some of the more dubious events in Australia, they can be virtually accused of Holocaust denial.
And this brings me to something about which most commentators don't want to talk: the problem of gentile guilt. Nowhere is this better displayed than in Germany, where Holocaust denial is a crime. It allows the overblown Hitchens's view, which calls anti-Semitism "not like any other prejudices ... and a kind of venomous distillation of all this conspiracy mania" which sounds in itself pretty conspiratorial.
Unfortunately, it allows a rather banal modern dichotomy: on the one hand racist conspiracists and on the other the guilt industry. Any connotations of racism prompt irrational apologias (which have nothing to do with contrition) and the Holocaust ideology is extended to any critical treatment of other ethnic groups, from rightly aggrieved indigenes to black Americans (a dubious case), right through to our own illegal immigrants and exonerated child chuckers who apologists such as Marcus Einfeld insist as being kept in "concentration camps by SS guards".
This sort of thing was indulged in without any thought of the overtones by correspondents during the the post-Tampa debate. It cheapens and vulgarises a terrible event in Jewish lives and history.
To return to Jones's internet-savy dog, it is a cliche to say that not just children but many journalists and commentators are affected by the dumbing down caused by using the internet a problem of blogs, not dogs. Rational intellectual movements that are unfashionable and unpopular, are intertwined with ideology, prejudice, emotionalism and downright wackiness. Jones convincingly pointed this out in an article in the Australia/Israel Review in 1996 when he traced Holocaust denial through several quite respectable link sites.
Serious intellectual endeavour is often lumped in with plain old conspiracy. But is that dangerous? Some would say yes, particularly for the impressionable, ignorant young. Perhaps we should remember that during the controversy over Toben's Holocaust denial website, the S11 website a virtual blueprint for violent protest and a breeding ground for the most bizarre conspiracists flourished. And despite the violent protests at the World Economic Forum, the police were unable to shut it down.
Dr Tφben Judgment: Talmudic Justice enforced
Letter to the Editor
The Australian: email: letters@theaustralian.com.au
From: David Brockschmidt
Angela Shanahan informs readers of her column, 'History and ideology stir up the melting pot', 24 September 2002:
"Jews were killed in Germany as race, not as a religion. By accepting this idea, under the Racial Hatred Act, the judge accepted the idea that Judaism has a racial historical past and Holocaust denial, because it denies the defining experience of the race, is a specific form of racism."
Wow! What a word construction, with legal consequences, of course, just to shut up the world and to stop it from questioning the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust.
This concept of seeing the Jews as a race is a nonsense. The Nazis said that, and Justice Branson has just revitalised the Nazi racist ideology in her judgment!
If Hitler had killed Jews for being members of the Jewish race, then Shanahan and Justice Branson may explain to us why Hitler let approximately 150 000 'Jews' and 'half-Jews' serve in his army that included field marshals, generals, high ranking, and highly decorated officers, and why Hitler declared approximately 500 000 Jews in his empire not only in Germany honourable Arian and or of German blood.
Not even the State of Israel has a proper definition of what a Jew is. If Justice Branson wants to follow the Nazi definition of what and who a Jew is, so as to justify her judgment based on the vile Racial Discrimination Act, where truth is no defence then that is her cup of tea. Adelaide Institute does not follow the racist Nazi line.
We are not discussing races here, but we are looking for and finding truth in history, and nobody can stop us doing that.
References
Allan Abrams: Special Treatment. The untold story of the survival of thousands of Jews in Hitler's Third Reich, 1984. ISBN: 0 - 8184 - 0364 - 0
Bryan Rigg: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: ISBN:0 - 7006 - 1178 - 9
