For the Anti-Semites the idea of a uni-directional diatribe without allowing for rebuttal is in most cases too tempting to pass up.

I am by no means categorizing all blogs or bloggers into the revisionist category but there are definitely signs that deniers are “hip” to the blog scene. They want nothing more than to discredit and destroy anything they can.

One must simply absorb any and all information with a watchful eye.

-Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org

http://jewhatred.blogspot.com
http://pages.nyu.edu/~air1

Where the Iranians might have a point, or valid point of inquiry at least, is when they argue that compensating and forming a homeland for Jews seemed to come at the expense of a group of people who had nothing to do with the holocaust, the Palestinians. Now I know that even saying this may garner accusations of anti-seminism, and maybe I deserve this, though I sincerely hope not.

I wouldn’t say you’re guilty of anti-semitism, but I think you may be guilty of naivite. It might be worth asking whether there was a better way to safeguard the Jewish population after the Holocaust, but that’s not what the Iranian government is doing. They’re just trying to shore up their popularity by baiting Jews. They don’t have any valid points. They’re just trying to start a big, noisy fight which will focus the country on a common enemy and distract ordinary Iranians from the stuff that’s making them miserable, such as Iran’s sky-high unemployment rate and very high incidence of drug addiction.

forming a homeland for Jews seemed to come at the expense of a group of people who had nothing to do with the holocaust, the Palestinians. Now I know that even saying this may garner accusations of anti-seminism, and maybe I deserve this, though I sincerely hope not. But. Could Israel have been formed in a way that generated less ill will in the Middle East?

I agree with you that there were things that were not done right and that it’s a valid thing to argue. I also agree that one people’s self-determination should not come at the expense of another’s. The problem is that there are many, many points of disagreement about Palestinian and Israeli history, pre- and post-’48. For example, w/r/t Palestinian refugees from within the pre-’67 borders of Israel: 1) Did the Israeli forces make them leave? 2) Did they leave because they were afraid and/or thought it was a bad idea to be in the country? 3) Did leaders of surrounding Arab countries encourage them to vacate the area? The answer, probably, is all three to a greater or lesser extent.

The history involved has an important role to play and is instrumental in reconciliation. The problem is that resolving the narratives is only part of the solution. Allowing people in the region to come to know the situation from each others’ perspectives is crucial–as opposed to the heaps of blame that will be handed out at this conference.

…The Holocaust was the most extreme atrocity in human history, and we lose our humanity if we are even willing to enter the arena of debate with those who seek to deny or underplay Nazi crimes.

Yes. This rhetoric of “we need to study this to find out if it really happened” garbage that is being proposed as the point of the conference is just the old racist shit. Trying to spin it into a discourse of serious intellectual study is entirely misdirection: “scientific” or “rational” racism has been around for a long time, from phrenology to the attempts by the Nazis to “prove” that Jews, Romani, people of African descent, etc. were subhuman.

My dear pal Ampersand writes a post defending Noam Chomsky and the architects of the Israel Academic boycott from my half-joking claims that they’d hop a plane to Tehran and provide Western legitimacy to the “Holocaust Conference” they plan on havin…