I never cease to be amazed how much there can be said - and has been said, and will be said - about the Holocaust. Here's yet another reader's point of view, well worth pondering:
The problem is that a small Jewish minority has been using a deep reservoir of pro-Jewish feeling stemming from WW2 in order to push a censorship agenda. And a censorship agenda would be a disaster to the Jewish people - apparently trying to censor nothing else (if any), but the revisionist views.
How can that be a disaster to the Jewish people?
It would be a disaster because it would establish the precedent for censoring unpopular views as defined by other groups. Unpopular views are by necessity minority views, thus, by pushing for the censorship of minority views, Jews are establishing a precedent for the censorship of all other minorities.
It hardly needs to be said that Jews, because Judaism does not proselytize, is, and always will be, a minority point of view. That means that by advocating censorship these same Jews are setting the stage where they themselves can be censored in the future.
It was not so unusual, a 100 years or so ago, for Jews to be persecuted, or more accurately, subjected to pogroms. But the apologists for these pogroms would always say that the Jewish rejection of Christ was "insensitive" to Christians - so that, in effect, they got what they deserved.
That Serge Klarsfeld could engage in mirror-image justification of the near- death beating of revisionist Robert Faurisson makes it clear just how much some Jews have turned their backs on their own history of persecution.
Indeed, the fight for Jewish civil liberties from the 1780's throughout the 19th Century was precisely this: that they be allowed to hold, and express, their minority viewpoints without molestation. But censorship of revisionism recapitulates the very same thing.
It is a fantasy to think that censorship, once applied to a single case, will not change, or be applied elsewhere. Of course it will change, just as, in 50 years, you can be sure that people will regard the Holocaust differently than we regard it today.
But ALL attempts at censoring revisionists rest on the premise that such views SHOULD be censored because they offend the sensibilities of some other group - here, Jews! - and once that concept is established as law, it will be easy to apply it to any other minority in the future.
I do not believe that the current Jewish influence is so great, although it is considerable because of the memory of World War Two. But that influence -- however great -- will not last.
And in that future time the Jewish people will need to fall back on a bedrock of legal principle that protects all minority viewpoints, something which, I regret to say, the advocates of censorship are undoing by their efforts.
Thought for the Day:
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
(Lewis Carroll)