The Collegian

Issue date: 3/5/09 Section: Opinion

Raymond's inference that Holocaust deniers rely on "historical evidence" deserves more attention - not because it is a serious claim, but because such nonsense should not go unchallenged in our college's paper. Williamson bases his Holocaust denial on the so-called "Leuchter Report," in which a self-proclaimed execution expert named Fred Leuchter "proved" that Auschwitz had no gas chambers. Leuchter, however, was a fraud with no professional training or degrees except a bachelor's in history. His report was quickly and thoroughly discredited, and his utter lack of training or relevant education was exposed at the Canadian trial of another Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel. Leuchter's credibility as an execution engineer was soon destroyed; he eventually pled guilty to practicing engineering without a license in Massachusetts.

This all happened two decades ago. That Williamson and others continue to parrot this drivel shows how desperate they are for a whiff of evidence. Being Judeophobic conspiracy theorists, they must then infer a world-controlling Zionist conspiracy to suppress the truth. This is not, as Spiotta tries to argue, a historical debate. It is Judeophobia masquerading as evidence.

Though he purports merely to defend free speech, Spiotta reveals his own conspiratorial Judeophobia. In his cosmology, Zionists are the new "high priests" of Europe, pulling legal levers and manipulating history to defend the state of Israel. I can find no other purpose for his quote from "Mein Kampf" than to compare the "received Holocaust tradition" to the kind of big lie Hitler advocated. He and Williamson point to the emotional reactions elicited by Holocaust denial as evidence of "blind faith" rather than "historical evidence." And indeed the excessive emotionalism that followed Pope Benedict's rehabilitation of the four SSPX bishops is regrettable. It gives Spiotta room to cloud the simple condition that Holocaust deniers have not a leg to stand on. As George Will once said about a different brand of conspiracy theorists, the utter lack of evidence proves "not that there was no conspiracy but that the conspiracy was diabolically clever."

< prev Page 2 of 2

Article Tools