The United Nations’ Conference on Racism, held in Durban in September 2001, was a sad reminder of the virulent antisemitism more readily associated with Europe in the 1930s. Speeches of free flowing hate, pictures borrowed from Nazi propaganda, and public insults were common. There was, of course, a modern touch: T-shirts with antisemitic slogans allowed people to wear their hatred on their chests. In the midst of bitter discussions, especially among the non-gov-ernmental organizations (NGOs), the subject of the Holocaust became central.
Several attempts were made to trivialize, if not to deny the Holocaust. There were also proposals to use the word “Holocaust”as a generic term applicable to many other events—specifically, the equation of six hundred Palestinian deaths during first year of the second Intifada with the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis.
This decontextualization of the Holocaust is not new; it is, rather, the latest effort in a trend that began in the early 1950s, immediatelyafter the initial shock wore off fromthe discovery of the death camps and the massacres perpetrated by the Nazis. In the recent past, the word “Holocaust” has been used by different groups to describe the mass deaths that have resulted from nuclear weapons or from the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. If these uses of the word blur the ideology behind the Nazi atrocities, they at least preserve the horrific magnitude. However, the present efforts to equate Israel’s actions to the Holocaust grossly distort and trivialize history.
The Holocaust is a unique event that has marked not only Jewish conscious-ness, but also world history; it is the symbol for cruelty toward Jews. To equate other acts of genocide to it and to reduce it to the scope of a “normal” massacre is to denigrate its particularities and atrocities. If we wish to properly memorial-ize human suffering, then each act of genocide must be placed in its historical, social, and human context. Amalgamating all massacres into one category only denies the particular lessons in each of these events and, in the end, prevents humanity from learning the lessons of history.
Assaults against the memory of the Holocaust are no longer taboo. The reduc-tion of the Holocaust to just another “detail” of history (to quote Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National and a former presidential candidate in France)
1 The author would like to thank Prof. Robert Wistrich for his editing work which greatly en-hanced the text; Alan Shefman, former director of the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith;
and Adina Goldberg for helping me with many legal points.
or—as was the case with the Syrian delegation to Durban—its total denial, must be seen on the world’s political stage as an attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel. The open denial of the Holocaust by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Arab governments reveals their perception that attacking this symbol critically injures the Jewish people and thwarts Israel’s national interests. These groups believe that Holocaust denial can effectively change the course of the future, perhaps even rejuvenate Nazi ideology, undermine the moral values of the West, and reduce Western support for Israel and Jewish causes. Therefore, Holocaust denial must be seen as hate propaganda against Jewish people wherever they live and against the State of Israel.²
In Canada, these issues gained public attention through two well-publicized trials of the neo-Nazi “revisionist” Ernst Zündel. These lawsuits were among the first major public confrontations with the historical, ethical, and social ques-tions embodied in Canada’s new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The delicate balance between the freedom of speech (including the expression of overt lies), the respect and dignity of a minority, and the preservation of public peace was at the center of these proceedings.
The trials raised a number of acute questions concerning Holocaust denial. For example, does it constitute an active form of hate propaganda against an identifi-able group? While the answer may appear clear today, this was not automatically the case at the time of the trials; no European legislation had been established to treat and define Holocaust denial as a criminal offense per se. Furthermore, Holo-caust denial had not yet become a prime weapon for neo-Nazi groups in Europe and North America, though it was increasingly present in their literature. Simi-larly, no Arab or Muslim government in the mid-1980s had employed denial as a weapon against the State of Israel, even though they printed and distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as “proof” of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
The Zündel trials also challenged the effectiveness of the legal system in fighting hate propaganda and the limitations on legitimate, but antagonistic, speech. Indeed, this issue goes to the heart of many important democratic values.
Namely, it questions the balance between public peace, and the right of groups and individuals to freely express potentially hurtful ideas. In practical terms, when does the freedom of one infringe on the freedom and safety of another?
This discussion was especially interesting because in Canada there is a tendency
2 Deborah Lipstadt wrote in 1993: “I knew that I was dealing with extremist antisemites who have increasingly managed, under the guise of scholarship, to camouflage their hateful ideology.... It is intimately connected to a political agenda.” See Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, 1993), 3.
to keep an equal distance both from the absolute concept of free speech (often advocated by American scholars and the American justice system) and the more controlled application of the idea prevalent in Western Europe.
A third question that became crucial to the deniers and their opponents was the manipulationof the justice system and the media for propaganda purposes.
Ernst Zündel, like Robert Faurissonbefore him, found the press very eager to open their pages and broadcasts to what were seemingly scandalous trials, high on emotions and theatrics.³ By trying to remain unbiased and balanced,much of the media appeared to confer equal legitimacy to the opposing views. More-over, the thundering declarations of Zündel and other deniers made eye-catching headlines; the press could not resist the temptation to print them. The mere con-sideration of the deniers’ cases by the entire legal system, including the Supreme Court of Canada, also seemed to legitimize these extreme positions.
The scholarly questions that historians, linguists, political scientists, and philosophers debate regarding the transfer of historical knowledge found no place in the courtroom. Clearly, scientific methodology and accuracy were not on the agenda of Holocaust deniers, even if they claim that their goal is to “restore”
history. As we shall see, the aim of this alleged scientific discussion is not a better understanding of historical facts but the promotion of a political and social agenda. Hence the need for a more levelheaded debate that should take place among politicians, journalists, and philosophers. Of course, this discussion must also consider the social impact that these trials had on the Jewish community and Canadian society. The study by Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn of the Canadian media during the Zündel trials provided the beginning of an answer, but more attention should be devoted to this phenomenon.⁴
3 A suspended Professor of French Literature at the University of Lyon, Faurisson published Memoire en defense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’Histoire (Paris, 1980); Reponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Paris, 1982); and, Is the Diary of Anne Frank Genuine? (Torrance, Calif., 1985). His article in Le Monde (1979) marked the emergence of Holocaust revisionism from a small circle of devotees into the public conscience and made Faurisson emblematic for the movement.
4 Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn, Hate on Trial: The Zündel Affair, the Media, and Public Opinion (Oakville, 1987).