Holocaust a myth? Time to unify!

This is not some guy on the street corner saying it. This is the freaking President of Iran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday that the Holocaust was a myth, ramping up his rhetoric and triggering a fresh wave of international condemnation.

“They have fabricated a legend under the name ‘Massacre of the Jews’, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves,” he told a crowd in the southeastern city of Zahedan on Wednesday.

I have worried for a while that as the last survivors of and witnesses to the terrible truth of the Holocaust died off, the revisionists would become more bold in their declarations that those dark days never happened. And now, here we are.

We can play ideological dart ball with each other all day long, and half of it is compelling and the other part is amusing, or self-validating. Lots of us who opine on things, left and right, simply love to hear ourselves talk.

But I think, when you have a situation like this, where a man in a powerful office says such a thing, then it is time to stop playing “us against them” and come together to profoundly reject this man’s assertion. If ever there was a time to stand up and be counted, this is it. Those who cannot bear the idea that Afghanis and Iraqis have been liberated and who swear it is “not done in my name,” can perhaps get on board this time and stop pretending that all things are equal. They are not.

Siggy has important commentary on this. He recognises the wake-up call for what it is, a last chance for humanity to find a means of coming together to proclaim and pronounce something as “evil,” without rationalizing, without equivalence, without ideological carping and snarkery, without bowing to the dictatorship of relativism – the world needs to find one unified voice of condemnation against this man’s idea…or it will say something truly terrible about the state of humanity, and our future.

But Siggy says it better than I:

Irrational hatred is, in the end, predicated on stupidity. The Arab world wants to find conspiracies and plots against them, perpetrated by an unrelenting and hated Jewish cabal, so as to avoid facing their own failures. Reality of course, plays no part in the equation. Jews do not wake up each morning, asking themselves, ‘How can I keep an Arab down today?’ They wake up and wonder about their families, their education of their kids, their jobs and the thousand and one other mundane things that we all worry about. It is for these truths the Arab world reiterates their hatred of Jews- precisely because they are just like us, with the same values, hopes and dreams. What the Arab world resents is the success the Jews have had, not as the result of the ‘home court advantage’, but rather, because they worked for what they achieved, as individuals and as a community. Their story is a carbon of other immigrants. The Jews, Italians, Greeks and Asian immigrants, all ‘strangers in a strange land’, made a go of it, because freedom empowered them and made possible their success.

Siggy calls for all of humanity to focus, finally, on an outrage and call it what it is, but he takes especial issue with believers:

If the religious community does not demand action, then God must find us guilty. All our good works will not balance out our abrogation of being our ‘Brothers Keeper”. If the Holocaust and subsequent horrors were not enough to prod those ‘created in His image’ into action, then we deserve no redemption and our claim to Christ is fraudulentd fraudlent, no matter our protestations.

When Christ was killed the first time, by the Romans, who he was and what he would come to mean was unknown. Indeed, other than by a few hundred people, he was unrecognized.

After two thousand years, Christ is universally recognized, his message universally understood. Now, in no uncertain terms, they want to kill his legacy, his people and all those values he believed in.

Christ was a Jew. He was born of Jewish mother, he lived, worshipped and preached as a Jew, to other Jews.

For Christians, the only question is whether or not we will stand by and watch history repeat itself- again.

Strong words, and he’s right.

I linked above to the last sermon that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave before entering the papal conclave from which he emerged as Benedict XVI. I linked to it because after reading
Ahmadinejad’s words, I wondered how some on the left, who make equivalence for example, between Palestinian terrorists at the Olympic games and and the Zionists who answered them, would be reacting to them. Maybe I missed it, but I couldn’t find anything about it at the two largest lefty sites. That’s when I thought of Benedict’s words:

The mercy of Christ is not a cheap grace; it does not presume a trivialization of evil. Christ carries in His body and on His soul all the weight of evil, and all its destructive force. He burns and transforms evil through suffering, in the fire of His suffering love…The more we are touched by the mercy of the Lord, the more we draw closer in solidarity with His suffering ­ and become willing to bear in our flesh “what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Col 1, 24).

Being an “Adult” means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties.
…
We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!

… Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
…
There are no secrets among friends: Christ tells us all everything He hears from the Father; He gives us His full trust, and with that, also knowledge. He reveals His face and His heart to us. He shows us His tenderness for us, His passionate love that goes to the madness of the cross. He entrusts us, Hhe gives us power to speak in His name: “this is my body,” “I forgive you.” He entrusts us with His body, the Church. He entrusts our weak minds and our weak hands with His truth ­ the mystery of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the mystery of God who “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (Jn 3, 16). He made us His friends ­ and how do we respond?
…

All people want to leave a mark which lasts. But what remains? Money does not. Buildings do not, nor books. After a certain amount of time, whether long or short, all these things disappear. The only thing which remains forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity. The fruit which remains then is that which we have sowed in human souls ­ love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching the heart, words which open the soul to joy in the Lord. Let us then go to the Lord and pray to Him, so that He may help us bear fruit which remains. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.

I have no doubt that many, many liberals, many Democrats and many on the left deplore the words coming from Iran. I hope they will speak up, ready to unite – suggesting that while there is much about which right and left disagree, on this there can be only unity – The holocaust was no myth. Think about it. This cannot be a left/right issue.

Alexandra has another compelling graphic and text at All things Beautiful. Michelle Malkin has several excellent links and she urges action! Let your voice be heard here.

Fausta has more a whole troubling catalogue of Middle Eastern situations, including what’s happening in Iran. Note, the Muslims say the wailing wall belongs to them; Mohammed kept his horse there, and Jews come from pigs and monkeys.