TORONTO — There’s standard Holocaust-denial and then there’s the new version. Call it Holocaust denial 2.0.
Anthony Julius
In the “standard” variety, the argument is that Hitler did not want to kill the Jews or that Hitler did not, in fact, kill the Jews. For proponents of that view, think Ernst Zundel or David Irving.
The “new” strain of Holocaust denial “denies the specificity of the Holocaust” or attempts to use it as a weapon against the State of Israel, insisting that what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is pretty much what the Germans did to the Jews.
Think far left and radical Islamists for advocates of that view.
Anthony Julius is a British lawyer who witnessed first hand the excesses of Nazi apologists, having successfully defended historian Deborah Lipstadt in a notorious libel case brought by history writer David Irving. Julius will be in Toronto to deliver two lectures on Feb. 13 and 14 as part of a 10-day seminar of the Mark and Gail Appel Program for Holocaust and anti-Racism Education at York University.
The first lecture is titled “Holocaust Denial: What’s the Point.” The second is “How Can Good Literature Be Bad for the Jews?”
In a telephone interview from London, Julius said the two strains of new and old anti-Semitism can be seen converging in rhetoric that’s common to both. In 1925, a notorious British Nazi referred to Jews as “scum” who were intent on driving Palestinians out of their land.
“That’s close to the language of current anti-Israel activists,” minus the reference to “scum,” he said.
Back then, the extremists were “romanticizing the Arabs, the rural Bedouin, and deprecating the urban Jew.”
Today, “they romanticize the radical Palestinian resister and disparage the Israeli army…” The one continuing theme is anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel, he said.
The Holocaust “put paid to the fantasy of Jewish power and conspiracy.” But Israel’s success in the Six Day War in 1967 “liberated anti-Semites from their caution about Jews,” he said.
Today, “a red-green alliance” of leftists and Islamic radicals poses a threat to Jews in the West, he said.
As to his second topic, good literature being bad for Jews, Julius said it is based on his work on T.S. Eliot. (His first book was titled T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form.) It poses the question of whether great literature can be compatible with ugly racist sentiments.
You can take “the view that a literary work has merit regardless of the views of the writer,” Julius said.
York’s Holocaust and anti-racism program was launched in 2001 and is directed by professors Michael Brown and Mark Webber. It consists of a month-long field study in Poland and Germany, which was held last summer, followed by the seminar at York.
The program is aimed at future educators from Canada, Poland and Germany who go on to teach and research issues connected to the Holocaust and racism, Brown said.