SMITH'S REPORT

Contents

• The Beirut Conference: Catalyst of Controversy
• Notebook
• and more!

and now... our lead story!

The announcement last December of a major revisionist conference to be held at the end of March, 2001 in Beirut, Lebanon, brought forth the typical howls of rage from the usual anti-revisionist sources. To that extent, the conference, even in its planning stages, had performed an important service in publicizing revisionism. At the same time, the conference created a linkage between revisionist historiography on the one hand and anti-Zionism on the other. In turn, this linkage deserves careful examination, because of a number of pitfalls that seem inherent in the approach. In the event, just a week before it was scheduled to begin, the conference was cancelled by what passes for the government in Lebanon. Still, in our view, the conference was successful in exposing the dynamics of the Holocaust and the current Middle East situation.

Background

The actual purpose of the conference first became clear in January, through an article by the Swiss revisionist Juergen Graf, now in exile in Iran, who appeared to be the prime mover behind the conference. The article, a brief but cogent review of the Holocaust in modern politics, essentially argued that the Holocaust was used to justify the Zionist presence in Palestine (i.e., Israel and the Occupied Territories), and that if the Holocaust were overthrown the Jewish state would collapse. We will touch on some of arguments Graf made a bit further on in this article.

Predictable Responses

The first squawk came from the Anti-Defamation League, its director, Abe Foxman, flush with victory after having helped secure a pardon for the Jewish American felon and fugitive from justice, Marc Rich. On February 11, Foxman announced that the "Holocaust deniers" were moving their "drumbeat of antisemitism" to the Middle East, and that there was a "change in strategy" among "deniers" who were now trying to find an audience for their views in the morass of Middle East turmoil. As if to make the charges more serious, the press release went on to say that "Anti-semitism and racial theories" had long held sway among radical Arabs.

Foxman's remarks were devious in more than one respect. In the first place, the conference did not stem from a "change of strategy", it was clearly planned as a result of the fact that one of the most prominent of revisionists -- Graf himself -- had sought refuge in the Arab world from persecution in Switzerland. Second, to argue that Arabs were concerned with "Anti-semitism and racial theories" is a transparent falsehood designed to associate the Arab world with western anti-Jewish attitudes and racial problems. Moreover, the association cannot withstand the barest scrutiny, since the Islamic world has never been concerned with race, and fosters anti-Jewish feeling not on the basis of any "racial theory" but simply because most Arabs feel that Israel occupies land that is rightfully theirs.

The ADL press release was followed the next day by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, announced that a request had been filed with the Swiss government to see if anything could be done to stop the activities of "Truth and Justice." Here, for the first time, was an indication that strong arm tactics were being employed.

The low point in the first wave of negative reactions was achieved by the Canadian Jewish News, which ran an article on February 22. Heavily quoting Stephen Emerson, the article claimed that the scheduled conference was just "the tip of the iceberg" of the "ongoing collaboration" between "Neo-Nazi fundamentalists" and "Middle Eastern terror groups." Of course there is not a shred of truth to any of these charges, but it conjured up a useful image of all powerful revisionists conniving with terrorists in order to tear down, or perhaps, blow up, Israel and whatever else remains of western civilization. The same day the Canadian Jewish News article appeared, the World Jewish Congress made a public plea to the Lebanese government to stop the conference.

A few weeks later, on March 8, Rabbi Cooper again was in the news, this time in an Op-Ed piece in USA Today. Once again, we had the typical assertion that anyone raising questions about the Holocaust "defames the memory of the dead" and that such questioning inevitably will lead to a "resurgence of Nazism." The novelty of the Op-Ed piece was that Rabbi Cooper introduced his article with a spiteful attack on Jewish author John Sack, whose Esquire article of the previous month generally portraying revisionists as "harmless Germanophiles" was apparently too fair for Rabbi Cooper's liking. The day after Rabbi Cooper's article was published, the South African Board of Jewish Deputies announced that they too were calling on the Lebanese government to cancel the "hate crimes" the conference would represent.

Changing Sides

Israel Shamir is a Russian born Jew who writes left-wing commentary on the political scene in Israel. In March, he wrote a series of columns which outlined what he considered to be the main problems in the area, particularly emphasizing what he considered the quasi-genocidal policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians. In one column, entitled Vampire Killers, he discussed the hypocrisy of the Jewish establishment in attempting to halt the Beirut conference. At the same time, he came as close as an Israeli journalist can to accepting the validity of some revisionist claims. However, for all that, he concluded, "The arguments on gas chambers and soap production could be very interesting, but they are quite irrelevant." Shamir considers them irrelevant because he concluded that even without them the sate of Israel would simply find some other pretext to continue its anti-Palestinian acts. We will discuss this in more detail below, but the important thing about Shamir's writings is that revisionism was defended by a free-thinking Israeli Jew -- much to the delight of revisionists worldwide.

Two days later another dramatic shift took place in which 14 leading Arab intellectuals signed a letter in the Paris newspaper "Le Monde" condemning the conference. The signatories were illustrious, including Edward Said, longtime Israeli nemesis, who apparently took time off from perfecting his throw to sign the letter. Another of the signatories, Joseph Samaha, was quoted as saying that he opposed the conference because it might suggest that "the defensive Arab struggle against Israel and its allies is somehow the extension of the Nazi extermination plan."

What were these people thinking? Samaha's remark suggests that he was frightened of the Nazi-Arab conspiracy theory that is frequently peddled, as it was described in the Canadian Jewish News article above. Apparently, these Arab intellectuals decided that it was better for their purposes if there was no association between them and Holocaust revisionism. Yet such a gesture, which implicitly endorses the standard Holocaust story, does not come free. There is little doubt that these Arabs expected, and still expect, something in return, and something more substantial than the guarded praise of a handful of Jewish mouthpieces. Our guess is that the public relations gesture by these 14 Arab intellectuals, which in the meantime betrayed the basis of their intellectual lives, was made in the expectation that the Israelis would translate that concession into meaningful rollbacks in their treatment of the Palestinian population. However, if that was their expectation, our prediction is that they will be disappointed in the outcome.

Dilemmas

For example, it has been said that the Holocaust is a religion, and its function is to support the state of Israel and denigrate and blackmail Germany. There's a lot of truth to this, but revisionists should keep in mind that there's a difference between what the Holocaust has come to represent in political discourse and the actual factual errors that comprise it. To put it another way, the basic idea of the Holocaust is that the Jewish people were persecuted and killed by Germany while the rest of the world stood by and did nothing. This basic idea may be wrong in many of its particulars, including gas chambers, six million, and an extermination plan. It may even be wrong in terms of the claim that "the rest of the world did nothing" to help. But everyone accepts that the Jews were persecuted by the Nazi government of Germany and that at least hundreds of thousands died.

The real issue, from the point of view of contemporary politics, is not what are the facts of the Holocaust. The issue is rather that, regardless of the facts, the Holocaust is used to procure wealth, reparations, and foreign aid, and is also used to bolster Israeli identity and the occupation of areas heavily populated by non-Jews.

One can say that Germany and other countries should stop feeling guilty about whatever happened in World War Two, and should stop paying. Fine. But one could just as easily say that even if six million Jews had been killed in gas chambers. The proof of this last fact is that over the past two years a number of voices have been raised which are critical of the exploitation of the Holocaust for economic or political purposes, including Peter Novick, Norman Finkelstein, and, as noted above, Israel Shamir. All Jews, none of these authors has attempted to couple their criticism of the Holocaust as an idea with any questioning of the usual Holocaust "facts." To put it another way, the political leverage of the Holocaust -- pro-Israel, anti-German and anti-Arab -- may be colored by falsehoods, but it doesn't depend on those falsehoods.

It seems to us that Israel Shamir is largely right: the use of the Holocaust to support Israeli policies is a reflection of existing power relations, not the other way around. The Holocaust as an idea never would have succeeded if it had contradicted powerful material interests. In 1945, and for decades thereafter, the Holocaust was a useful tool to many: to the United States in justifying international intervention, to the Soviet Union in justifying the occupation of Eastern Europe, to most Europeans to justify the limits placed on postwar Germany, and to all of the allies in absolving them of any guilt feelings for the wartime and postwar treatment of the German people. To be sure, Jews also exploited the story: but they were neither the first nor the most powerful. The paradox is that over the past twenty years, as communism weakened in Eastern Europe only to collapse in the early 1990's, the idea of fantastic Nazi exterminations has weakened, because it serves no purpose. Meanwhile, the idea has flourished in the United States, which uses it to justify race-based social policies as well as foreign intervention, and of course it continues to flourish in Israel for obvious reasons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, "Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind." To the extent that revisionists are driven by a desire to change the existing power relations in the Middle East, then they should focus on those matters, along with their Jewish and Israeli colleagues. In such a context, the existence or non-existence of gas chambers sixty years ago is not crucial. On the other hand, for those revisionists who are most concerned with the abuse and fabrication of the historical record, they should continue to expose the falsehoods on which the current World War Two narrative is based. But they should have no illusions about the upshot of their endeavors. The desire to write the history of the past as it occurred is an important undertaking, one in which revisionists have made many notable contributions. But the end result of that undertaking will only be historical truth, and not a revolution in the world's power relationships. Still, for many of us, historical truth is enough.

The idea that exposing the falsehoods of the Holocaust will lead to the destruction of Israel is not only, in our view, apocalyptic. We might further ask to what extent we, as westerners, would approve of that destruction, and what would ensue. The Israel Shamir solution -- "one man, one vote" -- strikes us as naïve. By this path of absolute democracy, two longstanding South African western cultures, in the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia, have been largely crippled, and the situation appears to be getting worse. To be sure, in the abstract, people should never be discriminated against on the basis of race and everyone should have a say in how their country is governed. But the historical record shows that when previously disenfranchised groups are empowered, the first thing that such democracy brings is the attempt to democratize wealth, with all that that entails in terms of wealth and land seizures, social and political chaos, charismatic dictators, police states and ultimately mass killings. We may say that these are necessary steps that nations have to go through to rectify injustices or to further their development, and that they are in any case better than the previous oppression. Perhaps: yet to invite such chaos is to our minds questionable.

We also have to bear in mind, as revisionists, that our devotion to historical truth is coupled to a strong belief in individualism as well as in free intellectual inquiry. Do we really see these things in the Arab world? We can avoid discussing the semi-feudal infrastructure of most Arab states, the suppression of dissent, the forms of punishment by mutilation that are routinely carried out. None but the most Diversity-besotted persons would regard these things are merely "relative." But we cannot at the same time avoid the fact that in several Arab states there is a commitment to a single view of reality that is at times enforced to unreal extremes. Just in the past month, the Islamic fundamentalist government of Afghanistan, in an effort to enforce a unified vision of reality, ordered the destruction of hundreds of Buddha statues simply because their existence violated the Koran. To be sure, this lunatic endeavor to destroy potentially dangerous symbols could be compared to the over zealous campaigns of some Jewish groups who apparently will not be satisfied until every swastika on the face of the earth is destroyed. But we would not want to affiliate ourselves with one totalitarian vision of the world just to break the hold of another. In our view, revisionists, by their nature, should remain free agents.

Conclusions

Still, the very idea of the conference yielded several important points. First, it has led the Palestinians and other Arabs to make an ideological concession in advance, essentially, the Holocaust for the promise of self-government in Palestine, and we predict that they will soon be disappointed at the response of the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon. Second, having discovered the potency of the Holocaust as an ideological weapon, they will no doubt return to it after their future disappointment. Third, the cancellation has allowed revisionists to make the point that the Holocaust is a fundamental prop for Zionism, even if the Jewish state is not likely to collapse without it. At the same time the cancellation has also allowed revisionists to stay above the political fray in the Middle East, and avoid an ideological commitment themselves, in this case, to possible Islamic militants or fundamentalists.

There is one further positive aspect to this cancellation. It is to demonstrate once and for all the enormous power of the mostly Jewish groups -- the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the World Jewish Congress, and others -- who opposed the conference. By their press releases and articles, the cancellation also shows the willingness of these same groups to engage in the most demagogic rhetoric in order to achieve their goals. Once again it has been demonstrated how these groups will betray the basic ideas of intellectual freedom on which our western civilization was built, if only for the sake of a short-term political gain.

While revisionists would form an uneasy alliance with fundamentalists of any kind, Islamic or otherwise, it appears these same Jewish groups would be right at home with them. While Islamic fundamentalists blow up priceless archaeological relics in order to police the people's thought, the ADL and its other clones in the Jewish community are so far content to spare the relics, and concentrate on controlling how the rest of us think. If successful, such tactics will make intellectual freedom itslef a relic. Revisionists are playing a central role in an international effot to see to it that this will never come about.