NOVANEWS
Lipstadt’s ignorance knows no limits…
By Gilad Atzmon
In a recent article, Shoa-logist Deborah Lipstadt attempts to reinstate her argument against historical revisionism.
Lipstadt is clearly opposing holocaust deniers whom she also identifies as anti Semites, yet, she fails to define what denial means. She also comes short of suggesting what anti Semitism stands for. I guess that for Lipstadt, ‘deniers’ are those who insist that our past must be revisited, scrutinised and be told from different perspectives.
People who hold such views are usually called historical revisionists or simply historians. Yet, historical revisionists are clearly perceived by Lipstadt as anti Semites — I guess that for Lipstadt , those who dare touch or fiddle with the Jewish past are nothing less than enemies.
What Really happened – and How?
The ‘deniers’, according to Lipstdat, are a lively movement that is working vigorously to “distort history and inculcate anti-Semitism”. Yet, it is far from being clear how anyone can ‘distort history’, for history is not a singular set of facts laid down and dictated by one group of people alone.
Rather it is an attempt to transform the past into a story aspire to as full a narrative as is possible, drawn from as many points of view and from as wide a body of research as is available. History is an attempt then, to build a narrative. Different people should be entitled to hold different perspectives of their past.
Seemingly, Lipstdat is not happy with it all. She wants the chapter known as the holocaust to become a meta-historical impenetrable narrative. It is not clear to me and to a growing number of academics, artists and ordinary people, why Jewish academics and institutions are so afraid of this particular chapter in history being looked-at and discussed freely.
For some peculiar reason Lipstadt regards herself as a ‘scholar’, yet her engagement with the subject matter is far from being scholarly oriented.
Her reading of the Nazi era is utterly embarrassing– for instance, she says:
“had the world taken Nazi anti-Semitism more seriously from the outset of the rise of the Third Reich the subsequent tragedy might have been quite different.”
But seems as if the world did actually react very seriously to Nazi anti Semitism — It basically followed the Nazi agenda. America and Britain closed their gates to Jews, leaving European Jewish refugees to face their fate. Even the Zionists failed to do much to save their European brothers and sisters.
Author David Irving
It is also clear that the Nazis would not have succeeded in their ethnic cleansing project unless they had been assisted by European communities, governments, and even by Jewish institutions. It seems as if the Nazis were not the ‘only anti Semites;’ they were just more open about it.
Lipstadt’s ignorance knows no limits. She continues, “in the 1930s and 1940s, of course, observers—and the potential victims—could not fathom where Hitler and his cohort’s anti-Semitism might lead.”
I guess that the Jewish ‘historian’ doesn’t really know that in the 1930’s and the early 1940’s ‘Hitler and his cohort’ also didn’t know themselves where they were aiming’. We do know that they wanted a Germany free of Jews — and this is, indeed, pretty outrageous. Yet, it is not that different from the vast majority of Israelis, who want a Palestine that is free of Palestinians.
Lipstadt is convinced that the ‘deniers’ are motivated by “hatred of Jews and their desire to do them harm”. But the truth of the matter is slightly embarrassing — Historical revisionism is a growing body of knowledge. It doesn’t claim to address ‘the Jewish question’, nor does it offer any political agenda, and neither does it call to harm Jews.