Holocaust Denial

As Iran's conference of Holocaust revisionists and denialists gets under way, I'm left, like Spencer confused as to why people who don't like the Jews are so enthusiastic about this sort of enterprise. Shouldn't Adolf Hitler be a hero to these people, and his mass-murders be celebrated as the best anyone's ever done at wiping the Jews off the planet? I suppose you can't really expect deranged people to make a ton of sense, but I'm still left baffled.

On a policy front, note that even while wallowing in repugnance at this conference Ahmadenijad's anti-Israel bluster does not extent to threats of nuclear first strikes with ISNA reporting he told the gathered scumbags that "The Zionist regime will disappear soon, the same way the Soviet Union disappeared."

Comments

I think it's more of an attempt to explain
a) why Israel is an illegitimate state, and
b) why Israel/Jews are powerful.

It's all some big conspiracy: a big Protocols of the Elders of Zion-esque conspiracy.

Posted by TP | December 13, 2006 9:18 AM

Best guess is that, if your worldview revolves around the belief that the Jews run the world, a Zionist-conspiracy theory is a lot more palatable than the idea that someone actually succeeded in killing vast numbers of them.

Posted by Adrian | December 13, 2006 9:37 AM

I think the explanation is one of two things:

1. they believe that the Holocaust really happened, but deny it just to provoke and infuriate others, as well as to convince the gullible that stories about it are all just a Jewish conspiracy. I guess, crudely put, you could call this "Jew baiting".

2. they ARE the gullible ones, and actually believe it didn't happen.

Posted by Jim W | December 13, 2006 9:37 AM

It's hard to rally people to a cause generally associated with ethnic cleansing and genocide. It's a lot easier to convince people that the jews are exagerating than it is to convince people that killing millions of people was a really good idea.

You really think right wing republicans weren't happy to see a bunch of leftists die in the 70's and 80's? Of course they were, they just knew if they were seen as celebrating murder and tyranny they'd be viewed unkindly by other Americans. So they made excuses and pretended Pinochet didn't kill thousands of people. Same

Posted by soullite | December 13, 2006 9:50 AM

"Shouldn't Adolf Hitler be a hero to these people, and his mass-murders be celebrated as the best anyone's ever done at wiping the Jews off the planet?"

I think at some level they recognize they can't go this far. There's plenty of support in the rest of the world, including the West, for their questioning-the-moral-rightness-of-Israel project, and I think that TP is right and this conference should be understood in that light.

What there isn't such enormous support for is a mass-genocidal Jew-killing project. Many or most of those who question the moral rightness of Israel's existence - especially in the West, and Europe most of all - are not going to get on board for another Shoah. Which is good.

Now - is this a case like the pro-life movement, where the end goal of its proponents (the eternal subservience of women; the extermination of all Jews) is obvious but musn't be said out loud? I'm not so sure. I'm sure there are many folks at this conference who would be pretty stoked to live in a Jew-free world, but were the Jews to just kind of leave Israel, non-dead, that might satisfy even those most rabid anti-Zionists.

Or maybe I'm being naive. I dunno.

Posted by jkd | December 13, 2006 9:51 AM

Plausible, jkd, but why go to such enthusiastic lengths to rehabilitate Hitler? Why not just say "Hitler was a monster; his project isn't *my* project".

Posted by Adrian | December 13, 2006 9:54 AM

I think the Holocaust deniers are proof that some people are really, really stupid.

And worse: being really stupid is no bar to gaining power.

Posted by Jeffrery Davis | December 13, 2006 9:54 AM

As one who has read some of the literature of holocaust denial, there is another irony. The insistence that the holocaust is a fraud is almost always accompanied by the conclusion that Hitler SHOULD have tried to kill all the Jews. Presumably the holocaust deniers think Hitler was just too nice a guy to do what was necessary.

Posted by gregpstone | December 13, 2006 9:56 AM

I'm left, like Spencer confused as to why people who don't like the Jews are so enthusiastic about this sort of enterprise.

The chicks, Matt.

Posted by SoCalJustice | December 13, 2006 10:05 AM

"We never massacred them, and anyway they deserved it." Is this:

a. Lenin on the Romanovs? (Stalin on the kulaks?)
b. Mugabe on the Matabele?
c. The Serbs on Srebrenice?
d. The Turks on the Armenians?
e. US neo-cons on the "faked" airstrike victims in Lebanon?
f. South African security forces on Sharptown?
g. Yeltsin on Grozny?
h. Tony Soprano on his hit of the week?
i. All of the above?

I mean, Mel Gibson obviously thinks the Mayans were hideous beasts who deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth, but do you think he'd boast of how many Indians the Spanish succeeded in massacring? Hm...actually, come to think of it, he might. But most people aren't quite that honest.

Posted by brooksfoe | December 13, 2006 10:09 AM

Seriously though, as to Spencer's questions:

Let's say you're an antisemite. Why would you deny the Holocaust? Wouldn't you consider it the most awesome thing that ever happened?

You would deny it because if, it didn't actually happen in the first place, there's more of a chance of another one happening (a desired outcome for these types) - if you can successfully argue and convince people that the Jews are so evil that they faked the organized murder of 6,000,000 of their own just to score awesome victimhood points and make any "criticism" of "their" "activities" verboeten so that "they" can "continue" with "their" "evil" "grand" "strategy" to "take over the world" by "weakening" the "resolve" of the "one true dominant white European race."

I mean, obviously, that must be stopped. Again. Or not again, but for the first time, depending on which stripe of Nazi you're talking about here.

Or something like that.

Posted by SoCalJustice | December 13, 2006 10:11 AM

I think the Holocaust deniers are aiming too low. They should promote the theory that 6,000,000 Jews died during WWII by their own hand in order to make the Germans look bad and rack up the guilt on the rest of the world.

Go for the really big lie.

Posted by daveNYC | December 13, 2006 10:17 AM

Just to note, I don't think it's the official policy of the Iranian government that the Holocaust "didn't happen." Still, this utterly and totally sucks: Ahmadinejad is using anti-semitism in the Middle-East to score popularity points, and doing it by dishonoring lots of dead. Not a proud moment for Iran.

Posted by ogged | December 13, 2006 10:19 AM

The thinking goes like this:

1. Israel was created after WW II by the Europeans and Americans to compensate for the killing of 6 million Jews in Europe.

2. But the killing never took place.

3. Therefore, Israel's reason for being is a fraud.

A fair number of people in the West accept no. 1, but it's not true. The Jews in Palestine were working towards their own country before WW II. Zionism and Israel would have been stronger if there had been no Holocaust. And Western governments did very little to help Israel win its War of Independence.

Posted by Hal Grossman | December 13, 2006 10:20 AM

Yeah, I don't understand the confusion here. Many tie Israel's legitimacy to the atrocities of the Nazi's, and erasing the latter would undermine the former.

Not the _sole_ source of Israel's legitimacy, but indeed a prominent one.

Posted by Bob | December 13, 2006 10:23 AM

Matt, I think it's easier if you remember that the non-Western folks are not particularly individualistic in their thinking. They might not want you, for example, dead because you're Jewish, but rather want to destroy access to the part of your identity that makes you Jewish. Without Jewish communities, no Judaism. Without Israel, it's much harder to have Jewish communities, certainly ones that have impact on the world.

For individualists, destroying Israel translates into destroying every individual Jew in Israel. But it needn't mean that (although for many it does). If it doesn't, the Holocaust had quite different aims than what they're after.

Western holocaust minimizers (I'm not a fan of lumping them all in as deniers, as many, even Gibson, do not claim that none of it happened) are different -- they're generally just whacked.

Posted by nolaboyd | December 13, 2006 10:23 AM

As Gregpstone comments, a lot of Holocaust deniers do, sooner or later, come around to letting on to their Hitler admiration. If you listen for a while, you'll hear "Of course it would have been great if he did..." and "Not that the Jews wouldn't have had it coming..." and the like.

Posted by Bruce Baugh | December 13, 2006 10:25 AM

You have to distinguish between holocaust denial and holocaust doubters. I don't think that Irving and co have the slightest doubt that the holocaust is a historical fact. Claiming the opposite is a tactic, not a belief.

The conference in Iran is not a sincere attempt to discover the truth, it is a political event staged for the purpose of demonstrating that Ahmadinejad is possibly nuts enough to attack Israel if provoked.

Ahmadinejad has good reason to expect that the US might try to invade. The Axis of evil speech was tantamount to a declaration of war. Iran would be much harder to defeat but Bush might make the attempt anyway (more on my blog).

Posted by PHB | December 13, 2006 10:36 AM

Isn't this attitude remarkably common, on a less disgusting and extreme level, all the time? The same people who seem to have negative attitudes about black people and want to provide less uplift or help to the black community are the people who downplay the racism and injustice of the Jim Crow era. You know them because they often are people who say things like - "wasn't slavery over 150 years ago" - as though slavery was the end of institutionalized racism in this Country.

Similarly, the people who seem to be most sexist are often argue that women face little discrimination on the basis of their sex. People who want to make homosexual conduct illegal insist that Gay people are whining and are not oppressed (even favored!). People who want to do away with the Welfare State and argue that poverty is not the government's problem insist that private charity would meet all the poor's needs, and that poverty isn't that bad. These aren't all the same as the current situation, but most people KNOW that things are bad and then spend their time arguing why (1) they aren't that bad and (2) they aren't really that way at all.

Finally - it seems that even in this context there is massive support for Anti-Zionism, but the support for out-and-out genocide of the Jews is more mixed and confused. Don't get me wrong - I understand that a lot of people in the Middle East would like to kill all the Israelis, but they sometimes seem to have trouble facing that and would prefer they all just left (which is a completely different attitude, though still abhorent).

Shifting positions allows one to please everyone, and allows one to avoid the truly hideous implications of many of your thoughts.

Posted by MDtoMN | December 13, 2006 10:36 AM

it didn't actually happen in the first place, there's more of a chance of another one happening (a desired outcome for these types) - SoCalJustice

I guess righty-tighty whack-jobs are the same the whole world over: they read "those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and say "I want to repeat the past, therefore I must forget it".

Posted by DAS | December 13, 2006 10:43 AM

They should promote the theory that 6,000,000 Jews died during WWII by their own hand in order to make the Germans look bad and rack up the guilt on the rest of the world. - daveNYC

Actually some of them do: i.e. they say that the killing of all those Jews was done (or the more "moderate" ones who do not deny the Holocaust per se talk of Jews letting it happen, which is reasonable from their already unreasonable POV as they believe in an all powerful Zionist conspiracy that could have stopped the Holocaust if it wanted to) in order to provide justification for Israel.

And indeed, Israel's existance is justified by the Holocaust: just raise a quesion of

how does Zionism square with Judaism? Zionism says "we Jews deserve a state just like any other ethnic group" and Judaism says "we Jews are called from all peoples speaking all languages to be a chosen people to God, and hence not like any other ethnic group"

And you'll get a response of "what if there's -- Hashem forbid -- another Holocaust? Wouldn't be better to have a State of Israel to accept the refugees?"

Of course this reasoning is silly considering that, Baruch Hashem, there should be enough Jews that it would take a miracle possible only in Messianic times for all Jews to be able to live in Israel, no matter how much the expansionists want to have Israel's borders be, well the borders those Brits promised us when they first started talking about carving up the Middle East ... but it still exists ...

As to the degree to which Jewish identity revolves around the modern state of Israel, IMHO, this is a mistake. Pace nolaboyd, the Jewish communities have existed for over a thousand years without a state of Israel, so why is it necessary now? Certainly things weren't so good in the past, but, pace the Zionists, Israel's existances ain't what's making things better.

Posted by DAS | December 13, 2006 10:51 AM

Matt, Juan Cole answered this very question in his blog just a couple hours before you asked it:

Iran's farce of a "conference" on the Holocaust is a way of underlining its government's complete rejection of a two state solution and of a Zionist state in the Middle East. Iran's leaders support a maximalist Hamas vision of a fundamentalist Muslim Palestinian state in all of historical Palestine, which requires the dissolution of the Israeli state. Since Israelis tend to justify their state project with reference to the Holocaust, the Ahmadinejad faction in Iran is replying with Holocaust denial as a counter to this argument.

(Cole goes on to add, "Note that other prominent Iranians, such as former President Mohammad Khatami, accept the Holocaust and have lambasted Ahmadinejad for questioning it.")

Posted by RT | December 13, 2006 11:00 AM

The Jews in Palestine were working towards their own country before WW II. Zionism and Israel would have been stronger if there had been no Holocaust. And Western governments did very little to help Israel win its War of Independence.

I used to think this, but reading the post-Zionist Israeli historians, it seems there's a pretty clear consensus that none of this is quite true. The Jewish population in Palestine skyrocketed in the '30s due to Nazi oppression, and went up even faster from '45 to '48 as post-WWII displaced European Jews ran the British blockade. (Don't have the figures handy, but it's really striking - the Russian-dominated Yishuv of the first and second aliyahs through the 1920s was tiny.) Without the Holocaust Israel would probably never have had the demographic impetus it needed to become a state - the Arab majority in Palestine would have remained overwhelming.

It's true that Western states didn't give Israel much military help in 1947-8, but a sober appraisal is that the Jews in Palestine had clear military superiority over the Arabs and didn't need much military help. The Arab states were weak and newly independent, and lacked armed forces which could project force into Palestine. The Palmach was the strongest military force in the region. Obviously the notion that Israel was a colonialist creation of the West is absurd. But it was a convenient way for them to wash their hands of the problem of millions of Jews in European DP camps.

Posted by brooksfoe | December 13, 2006 11:14 AM

Ahmedinejad, like the rest of the world outside the U.S. and Israel and maybe Europe, doesn't give a shit about the Holocaust, which happened over 60 years ago in Europe, but he probably knows in some intuitive way its centrality in justifying our relationship with Israel to the public and in rhetorically blotting out any scrutiny of that relationship. Put more plainly, he knows it presses Americans' buttons. I don't know why, but he's goading the Bush administration, and our press is only too happy to amplify the issue.

Please, don't tell me the Israeli perspective -- no, the most aggressive Israeli perspective -- does monopolize our the media's coverage of the Middle East. I can't tell you if those kinds of executive decisions are made by Jews or not; it's certainly not cut-and-dried -- those decisions are political ones made by political coalitions. This summer, when Israel was flattening Lebanon, the very week, if not the very day they killed all those people in that shelter (Qana?), the biggest story in the U.S. was Mel Gibson's "drunken tirade". Give me a fucking break already.

All I read on this thread is handwringing about some parade of freaks in Teheran. I think it's a riot. Give it a rest, already. It's 2006: Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites aren't the ones going around invading other people and trying to steal the world's oil.

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 11:54 AM

"doesn't monopolize"

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 11:55 AM

It's 2006: Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites aren't the ones going around invading other people and trying to steal the world's oil.

I would bet that most of the anti-Semites in the US supported the invasion of Iraq. That said, there are rather few anti-Semites in the US these days.

Posted by brooksfoe | December 13, 2006 12:02 PM

Without Israel, it's much harder to have Jewish communities, certainly ones that have impact on the world.

Fortunately, DAS has already largely dealt with this one. Indeed, the ~25,000 Jews living in Iran have certainly had a harder time existing as a Jewish community because of the existence and policies of modern Israel. (For what it's worth, the Jewish member of the Iranian parliament, Maurice Motamed, has sent a letter to Ahmedinejad protesting his Holocaust denial.)

it is a political event staged for the purpose of demonstrating that Ahmadinejad is possibly nuts enough to attack Israel if provoked.

Okay, every time Ahmedinejad spouts off, we get this sort of thing. Again, the President of Iran does not control the armed forces. Ahmedinejad has no authority to nuke Israel with insufficiently-enriched uranium. Ahmedinejad has no authority to send Iranian infantry marching into Tel Aviv. This is primarily for regional consumption, not to defy the West to use bunker-busting nukes on every Iranian population center, or whatever it is we must do in order to save Israel from this lunatic elected despot.

That said, there are rather few anti-Semites in the US these days.

[Snort.] Actually, I take it sort-of personally that the Religious Right want to stuff the Holy Land with Jews so that two-thirds of them can be exterminated in the End Times(TM).

Posted by mds | December 13, 2006 12:57 PM

brooksfoe:

Why would you make that bet? A genuine anti-Semite like Duke opposed the war, as did other people tarred, fairly or not, as anti-Semites, like Patrick Buchanan.

I'm grateful to this thread and other discussions like it that the word "anti-Semitism" is losing all meaning and becoming a blunter and blunter weapon in the hands of the Israel lobby.

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 1:11 PM

brooksfoe:

...In fact, Lieberman and his press allies insinuated that Ned Lamont was an anti-Semite this summer.

Neoconservatives want to create a direct association between "Anti-semitism" and anti-war.

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 1:14 PM

...In fact, Lieberman and his press allies insinuated that Ned Lamont was an anti-Semite this summer.

Well, yeah, but he's not. Are we agreeing with each other here?

Posted by brooksfoe | December 13, 2006 1:21 PM

This summer, when Israel was flattening Lebanon, the very week, if not the very day they killed all those people in that shelter (Qana?), the biggest story in the U.S. was Mel Gibson's "drunken tirade".

Isn't that just par for the course with any random celebrity doing any random thing? What does that have to do with Jews or Israel?

I think those of us who cared to stay informed about the war had plenty of news converage at our disposal.

Posted by benny | December 13, 2006 1:32 PM

I think Hal Grossman up above makes a very good point.

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 1:52 PM

brooksfoe:

I mention Lamont to continue my point that anti-Semites and "anti-Semites" are not the ones supporting the war, which you "bet". Not only that, but the neoconservatives, with the most stake in the war, suggest there's something outright anti-Semitic about the anti-war movement.

benny:

Maybe you're right. Maybe Natalie Holloway's kidnapping could have been used to suppress the story the same way. I just found the coincidence, if that's what it was, disgusting, as if Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic prejudices were a crime worse than Israel's bombing of Lebanon. Also, the whole "Passion of the Christ" thing was still sticking in my craw: the feigned fear of home-grown pogroms in all those op-eds and essays I read, op-eds generally written by Jews who supported invading Iraq. I don't think you saw Seymour Hersh or Eric Alterman (correct me if I'm wrong about that one) or Robert Dreyfuss or Matthew Yglesias (again, correct me) waste time on the movie. I do, however, remember Krauthammer, Anne Applebaum and Leon Wieseltier, among others, excoriating it.

In any case, tabloid tv is not just a case of giving the people what they want (a circular argument, when that's all they're given); it's just as often a technique of information suppression. "Those of us who stay informed" about the Middle East are a tiny minority. What the rest know about the Middle East right now is that a crazy Arab (never mind that he's Persian) name Ahmed-something wants a new Holocaust. I have seen jokes on the Tonight Show about how Iranians, literally, like to fuck goats.

So I think that caring, or pretending to care about Ahmedinejad's Holocaust-denial soirees are far more dangerous than the soirees themselves.

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 2:15 PM

but he probably knows in some intuitive way its centrality in justifying our relationship with Israel to the public and in rhetorically blotting out any scrutiny of that relationship.

Hosting a conference with such notables as David Duke and Robert Faurisson is perhaps the worst way possible to enhance any scrutiny of that relationship, if that is in fact the ultimate goal here.

Posted by SoCalJustice | December 13, 2006 2:24 PM

Ahmadinejad is nuts. There's no need for any nuanced explanation here. He's a kook and a Jew-hater. Jew-hater kooks tend toward holocaust denial. It's an incredibly dull story.

Posted by henry evans | December 13, 2006 2:29 PM

Allow me to chime in again unasked, because this subject really raises my hackles.

"Anti-semitism" as its used in this country's political discourse, is a subjective, and, therefore, worthless term. The charge can be wielded for whatever aim one has, so, one day Putin is an anti-Semite because he is a threat to American-dominated oil markets, or Jimmy Carter is because he has enough stature to credibly expose Israel's ongoing land grab.

Anti-semitism is using political or social power against Jews for defined ends. University quotas. Restriction of trade on Sundays. Restricting Jews' rights to own land. Until we see anyone advocate any of those things in this country let's have a moratorium on the phrase.

Meanwhile, let's hold Ahmedinejad to a lower standard. At the moment Israel and the United States are threatening to bomb his country, after invading Iraq without provocation and bombing Lebanon "back 20 years". The onus is on us to rectify our own Nazi-like behavior before we bellyache about his country.

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 2:33 PM

Brendan:

The fact is that Hezbollah can never beat Israel in a war of weapons (knock on wood), so they have to fight a war of public perceptions. They draw Israeli fire towards their own civilians, and then call on the international community to be outraged.

It's hard to begrudge them this strategy since it's the only way they can win. However, you can't blame the American media for not wanting to be part of their game (the European media is a different matter).

The thing is, the purpose of the media is to spread information, not indignation. Israel kills Lebanese civilians. If this gets some people pissed off at Israel, well fine. Personally, it gets me pissed off at Hezbollah's militants who intentionally put those civilians in harm's way. Whatever. The news is there to report the facts, and we're all free to come to our own conclusions. And the media came through. There was no suppression.

I remember Britney's divorce getting a lot of press as well, and probably pushing aside a lot of news about the midterm outcomes. But was there underreporting? No. Do people sift through the news and judge for themselves what they consider personally relevant? Yes.

Posted by benny | December 13, 2006 2:36 PM

Antisemitism is hatred of Jews, not using power against them. That would be oppression of Jews, which could be motivated by antisemitism.

Posted by henry evans | December 13, 2006 2:38 PM

SoCalJustice:

I take back that "scrutiny" part of my argument. I think it's a combination of goading/taunting and what Hal Grossman said.

harryevans:

Is he a Jew hater? How do you know? Maybe he is, but does it matter? It's subjective, personalized bullshit. Israel and the United States consider Iran their primary adversary in the region and are both threatening to bomb it. Can you be so naive to believe it's because Ahmedinejad doesn't like Jews?

This is what I mean by the subject "blotting out" analysis. There are real, substantial reasons why we may attack Iran. This Holocaust stuff is total bullshit.

Posted by brendan | December 13, 2006 2:39 PM

I judge him by his words. If a someone calls a black person a nigger, I figure he's a racist. If someone says the Holocaust didn't happen, I figure he's an antisemite.

Of course this wouldn't justify attacking Iran. Being an antisemite is hardly a casus belli.

Posted by henry evans | December 13, 2006 2:44 PM

I think Hal Grossman nails it above: Holocaust deniers believe that the general population wrongly feels sorry for the Jews because of what happened to them during WWII, and the Jews use this to leverage public opinion and get their way. So by "proving" that the Holocaust didn't happen, they hope to make the public see that their sympathy for the Jews is misplaced.

For some Holocaust deniers -- those who think that Nazism is kind of cool, or at least had some good ideas -- there is probably also an element of not wanting to believe that the Nazis were all that bad, but in fact had their reputation ruined by their enemies (i.e., the Jews).

Posted by moonbiter | December 13, 2006 6:09 PM

Hal Grossman nails it. And Ahmedinejad is a troll.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | December 14, 2006 6:06 AM

President Ahmadenijad doesn't have to use nuclear weapons, he just has to possess them to bring the Zionist edifice down. Quite a few Israelis understand this already.

Ephraim Sneh, one of Israel's most distinguished generals and now Olmert's deputy defence minister, revealed that the government's primary concern was not the threat posed by Ahmadinejad firing nuclear missiles at Israel but the effect of Iran's possession of such weapons on Jews who expect Israel to have a monopoly on the nuclear threat.

If Iran got such weapons, "Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will ... I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That's why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs."

Posted by blowback | December 14, 2006 3:08 PM

Blowback:

Nope, that's just the usual political bluster. The emotional attachment that Jews have to Israel is pretty deep. It will take more than just nuclear threats to make us give up the Holy Land. If you don't know that, then you don't know Jews.

Posted by benny | December 14, 2006 3:44 PM

How many Jews hung around in northern Israel when the Katyshas started falling? Only those who had nowhere else to go. How many will hang around in Israel if Iran acquires atomic weapons? Only those who have nowhere else to go. How many Israeli Jews have somewhere else to go? An awful lot! They will not all depart immediately but it will start as a trickle and will flow for a long time.

In a demographic war, of the type that is being fought in Palestine, you need to grow your population and if Iran has the atomic bomb, Israel probably won't be able to do that. Israel could always go down the genocide or ethnic cleansing route to winning such a war but then they will be no better than the Nazis and the Holocaust will count for little.

Posted by blowback | December 14, 2006 5:22 PM

Blowback:

See, this is exactly the kind of logical conclusion that will stem from a mentality that believes the Israelis must act like complete saints, otherwise they're the villains.

You know the one. "Why are those Israelis overreacting? It's just a few kidnapped soldiers and missiles landing in their streets and schoolyards."

What's the difference between an Iran with nukes, and actual, physical rockets being fired into your cities? A whole freakin' lot!

Posted by benny | December 14, 2006 6:47 PM