AnswerMan! is in the business of answering historical queries,
not engaging in polemics. However, you have asked a common question
so AnswerMan! will straighten you out.
There is a tendency to characterize anyone who is opposed
to a Jewish interest, or who doesn't particularly like Jews, as
"antisemitic". However, we are inclined to accept the thinking of
Daniel Pipes (in his book, "Conspiracy") who considers 'antisemitism'
as being specifically a conspiratorial ideology about Jewish people.
Now to this extent it certainly is true that some revisionists
are 'antisemitic'. That is, they believe that the Holocaust is a
fraud perpetrated by a Jewish intriguers. Of course, this is not
true, but it is true that several agencies, as well as several which
claim to speak for Jewish and Zionist interests, have used the Holocaust
for all kinds of political purposes especially in the past three
decades. Norman G. Finkelstein's essay in "A Nation on Trial" demonstrates
this very clearly.
This manipulation of what the Holocaust supposedly was
is the main motive for many more revisionists than those described
above. Yet this majority of revisionists have no particular anti-Jewish
animus and indeed several are Jewish themselves. They are motivated,
not by hatred, but by the desire to end the demonization of the
German people, and the debasing of our political culture with puerile
horror stories. Their hope is to help us face the history of the
Twentieth Century fairly and squarely.
Nevertheless, there remains the small handful of revisionists
who maintain a conspiratorial perspective on the Holocaust, and
we leave aside those few among them who discuss "conspiracy" and
"hoax" for frankly rhetorical purposes. We can safely disregard
such arguments since conspiracy theories are almost always false.
Just as it is absurd to believe that a handful of influential Jews
conspired to "create" a Holocaust, it is likewise absurd to believe
that a handful of committed Nazis conspired to "perpetrate" one,
leaving scarcely a trace of documentary, material, or physical evidence.
The inescapable conclusion is that, while there was a
mass destruction of the Jewish people of some kind, it did not involve
a planned attempt at extermination, homicidal gas chambers, or six
million victims. Combining that fact with the self-evident fact
that most people continue to believe that millions were killed in
gas chambers according to a plan leads neither to a Jewish nor a
Nazi conspiracy theory, but rather to a conclusion that is much
simpler and even more obvious: mass hysteria on the grand scale.
That more and more people are coming to realize the deficiencies
in the standard Holocaust story is not an indication of growing
antisemitism. That would be equivalent to equating a position on
one issue with a general judgment about those who hold it. For example,
it is well known that most pornographers support a woman's right
to choose abortion, but that does not mean that Patricia Ireland
of NOW is a pornographer, or that women's groups endorse pornography.
People are questioning the Holocaust story because it
is being suppressed with prison sentences and book burnings in Europe,
because of attempts at censorship in the United Kingdom and the
United States, and because of the obvious, and oft seen as cynical,
manipulation of this great Jewish tragedy for political purposes.
Therefore AnswerMan! predicts that the standard story will continue
to give ground, but it will not be possible to excuse these further
revisions with a facile conspiracy theories about 'antisemitic revisionists'.