Here are a few paragraphs from Counterknowledge on Iran, Holocaust denial and a postmodern university professor:
History as well as science is under assault from Muslim counterknowledge. In December 2006, the Islamic Republic of Iran organised a conference entitled “A Review of the Holocaust” in Tehran whose participants included the notorious French Holocaust revisionist Robert Faurisson and the far-Right American demagogue David Duke.
One of the attendees was Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia. In the June 2007 issue of the Literary Review of Canada, Dossa attacked the “illiterate Islamophobes” who had criticised him for going to the conference. Their arguments were based on two fallacies, he said. The first was that President Ahmadinejad had ever called the Holocaust a myth: instead, he had merely questioned its “mythologising and sacralising” by supporters of Israel. Presumably, Dossa had missed Ahmadinejad’s speech in the city of Zahedan in December, 2005, in which he denounced “the myth that Jews were massacred”.
Dossa continued: “The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/sceptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. Out of the 33 conference paper givers, 27 were not Holocaust deniers, but were university professors and social science researchers from Iran, Jordan, Algeria, India, Morocco, Bahrain, Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Syria.”
Dossa did not say whether he had time to examine one of the exhibits at the conference, brought along by the “historian” Frederick Toeben, who has served a prison sentence in his native Germany for denying the Holocaust. According to the official Iranian news agency, this was “a huge model of the Treblinka extermination camp, complete with model trains and human figures, which he said he would use to argue that the gas chambers did not exist”.
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The Literary Review of Canada published my letter in response to Professor Dossa’s defense of his attendance of the conference in Tehran
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I know nobody that denies that the Jews suffered in the second world war. I note that those that ‘question’ ANY aspect of the official tale are classed as deniers and are subject to massive ad homonym attacks. (Examples above are words like ‘notorious’ and ‘demagogue’ in just one sentence when naming such people.) I note that those who question are told to ‘prove’ that six million jews were not deliberately murdered – yet are carefully denied a hearing. It would seem to me that the burden of proof is upon those who claim they were, yet despite that, the questioners seem to have the greater evidence to justify their skepticism. Above all, I note that questioning the official story brings a jail sentence in so-called free countries. That indicates there is something Holocausters have to hide. Like almost everything in Counterknowledge the reasoned and well documented arguments/theories are avoided. Counterknowledge seeks to try to discredit these by ignoring them and by concentrating on the clearly whacky non-state conspiracy theories. Won’t work! For real analysis and a lesson in good journalism read the works of the Time’s Chief Foreign Correspondent for that period, Douglas Reed, especially Controversy of Zion. There were still some genuine newspaper reporters in those days! Counterknowledge is an amusing but unimpressive work. Try better next time.
P Brooks:
It would seem to me that the burden of proof [that the Holocaust occurred] is upon those who claim they were, yet despite that, the questioners seem to have the greater evidence to justify their skepticism.
This is precisely why diplomats, intelligence officers, criminal investigators, prosecutors, historians, and social scientists, both during the Holocaust and in subsequent decades amassed an unprecedented amount of evidence that speaks to the fact that the event happened, how it happened, its causes, its scale, and its consequences. There is the physical evidence of mass graves, corpses, gas chambers, and crematoriums; eye-witness accounts from not just survivors, but the killers and their commanding officers; designs for the extermination camps; invoices for the poison gas; pay-stubs for everyone who played a part; a bureaucratic paper trail regarding the planning behind the killings; photographs, film; as well as indirect evidence such as stolen property and census records. The point is that the proof is so robust that even if one piece of evidence is called into question, the basically agreed upon facts remain. The burden has been bared and the case has been proven well beyond a reasonable doubt.
The fact is that the deniers whom “P Brooks” erroneously calls “skeptics” do not have a better explanation for the sheer weight of evidence beyond taking anything they can out of context, ignoring anything they can’t, and fabricating the rest.
There is no “massive amount of evidence” for the so-called holocaust.. However, there is a massive amount of of hearsay, fabrication and irrationality; not to mention all the frantic ad hominem invective by the holocausters.
The “holocaust” dam is cracking – and that’s why they must throw skeptics into prison: they have no better answer.
Check out CODOH : http://www.codoh.com/
Citizenfitz: yes, you explain that to all those millions of families in Continental Europe, from France to Russia and from Norway to Sicily, who have personal memories of members murdered by the scum you defend. You see the trouble is that you cannot try and pretend that murder is not murder when people have seen and heard it done. Your heroes murdered, at a conservative estimate, eleven million civilians in cold blood in little more than six years. End of story. Go try and shock someone else.
Most of it’s lies. Anyway, there were scarcely six million Jews, if that, in all of nazi occupied Europe – and it’s know that millions of them survived.
The holocausters refuse to debate with revisionists, not out of any desire to deny them a platform for their “despicable” views, but because their fraud gets stripped naked. Same reason those who doubt it must be imprisoned, for pointing out the lies. But you can continue closing your eyes and plugging your ears, and spinning around in circles while you stamp your little foot…
sucker.
Here are a few paragraphs from Counterknowledge on Iran, Holocaust denial and a postmodern university professor:
History as well as science is under assault from Muslim counterknowledge. In December 2006, the Islamic Republic of Iran organised a conference entitled “A Review of the Holocaust” in Tehran whose participants included the notorious French Holocaust revisionist Robert Faurisson and the far-Right American demagogue David Duke.
One of the attendees was Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia. In the June 2007 issue of the Literary Review of Canada, Dossa attacked the “illiterate Islamophobes” who had criticised him for going to the conference. Their arguments were based on two fallacies, he said. The first was that President Ahmadinejad had ever called the Holocaust a myth: instead, he had merely questioned its “mythologising and sacralising” by supporters of Israel. Presumably, Dossa had missed Ahmadinejad’s speech in the city of Zahedan in December, 2005, in which he denounced “the myth that Jews were massacred”.
Dossa continued: “The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/sceptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. Out of the 33 conference paper givers, 27 were not Holocaust deniers, but were university professors and social science researchers from Iran, Jordan, Algeria, India, Morocco, Bahrain, Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Syria.”
Dossa did not say whether he had time to examine one of the exhibits at the conference, brought along by the “historian” Frederick Toeben, who has served a prison sentence in his native Germany for denying the Holocaust. According to the official Iranian news agency, this was “a huge model of the Treblinka extermination camp, complete with model trains and human figures, which he said he would use to argue that the gas chambers did not exist”.
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