Conspiracy Theories

I read a status update today on FB.  It mentioned something about denying the Holocaust and believing in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional work attributed to Jews that I’ve never seen but which purportedly talks about the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and orgies of feasting on the blood of goyim children.  

Can we just stop right here?  I mean, right here, right now.  The Holocaust happened, okay?   Those amazingly efficient genocidal Nazis murdered millions and millions of people.  I’m not a scholar on the topic but off the top of my head I think the numbers are around six million Jews and about six million or so other “undesirables”, such as those with mental retardation, certain Slavic groups, Gypsies, and others.  I say the Nazis were very efficient because they left a wealth of documentation behind.  There are the bodies themselves, buried in mass graves, the crematoria, the fillings and glasses and bits and baubles and other things left behind.  There are the secret Swiss bank accounts – gotta love those neutral Swiss! – and family treasures such as paintings and sculptures that mysteriously or not so mysteriously disappeared from Jewish homes and turned up, well, in places less Semitic.  And there are the records… ah, the records.  Names, family associations, possessions, cities of origin.  A mass murder documented in painstakingly typed triplicate forms.  

Trust me on this.  I’m of German heritage.  My great aunt’s late husband was a child in Hitler’s Germany.  He made a few schillings or pfennigs or whatever the currency was at that time by hunkering down on a hillside and running to tell someone if he heard airplane engines.  I’ve visited a cemetery in my mother’s hometown, seen the well-kept Christian side and the neglected Jewish side; there were no relatives left to tend the graves.  (This has since changed when someone, locals or the government, I don’t know which, took on the somber duty of maintaining the graves on the Jewish side.)

I have found that some Muslims have decided that it is a necessity to deny the Holocaust in a misguided attempt to bolster the argument that Palestine belongs to the people who were there before Partition, that the fact of the Holocaust somehow lends credence to the Zionist land grab and therefore must be denied.  This is a facile and counter-intellectual argument.  The two issues are completely separate.  Denying the Holocaust does not make people more sympathetic towards the plight of Palestinian Muslims, Christians, Druze, and others (including some Jews!).  It makes you lose credibility, except among your misguided peers.  

The murder of millions of Jews and others was a horrendous crime that no human being should ever celebrate.  A Muslim should never say that it was justified or that it was a good thing or that Hitler was your hero.  Any Muslim who admires a murderer like Hitler is ignorant or stupid, racist and believing something that is contrary to Islam.  If you think Hitler was someone to be admired, let me know so I can make sure to unfriend you and block your e-mail address, because I just don’t want to be associated with you.  What’s that sound?  The clicks of some of my Muslim brothers and sisters unfriending me?   I’m okay with that.  Go away and pat each other on the back and tell each other “We showed her“.  

Now, for the other issue, Palestine, you will find me to be firmly on the side of those who say that Palestine belongs to the Palestinians who were there before the Zionists deported Jews from other countries and imposed them upon the native inhabitants – Muslims, Christians, Druze, Jews, and others.  Under the “two wrongs don’t make a right” category, the reality of the genocide in Christian Europe does not justify stealing the land of other people.  The saying “A land without a people for a people without a land” is a lie.  Just ask all the displaced Palestinians for whom the “right of return” does not exist. 

Palestine is a huge issue, and perhaps I’ll take little bites out of that pie from time to time, but for now that’s where I’ll stop.  You don’t need to deny the Holocaust in order to justify being anti-Zionist.  Pretty simple, huh?