We are entitled to search for the truth. The real crime committed by the National Socialists—the exclusion, disempowerment, deportation, enslavement, death by omission and by commission and expulsion of a people simply because they were that people—was a terrible one. One does not need gas chambers to make the targeting of Jews, just because they are Jews, extraordinary and unacceptable. Nonetheless, if this targeting did not extend to extermination, if there were no gas chambers and if six million Jews did not die, then we should know it and, if necessary, address the implications. If there is some reason why we should not investigate this matter, then the onus is on those who would deny us that right, to say why. Those who would deny us that right have tried to say why, but in my view they have failed miserably.

But what does it matter how many Jews were murdered and in what way and with what intention? A murder is a murder and one murder is one murder too many. What difference will it make whether the Holocaust is proven or not? Will it have any affect whatsoever on the status and attitudes of Israel or on its behavior towards the Palestinians—issues on which we pressingly need to focus?

But the Holocaust is not just murder. Nor is it just mass murder. Nor is it even just genocide. There have been plenty of murders, mass murders and even genocides, but none have been memorialized like the Holocaust. The Holocaust is held to be the worst crime in human history, and this is not because more people were killed or because they were killed more brutally or more senselessly. Three million Polish Jews are held to have died in the Holocaust. Three million Polish non-Jews also died in the same period of history—yet the Jews, as evidenced by the memorialisation accorded them, are seen as more important. Fifty million people died in the Second World War, including twenty million Russians, ten million Germans and Austrians and six million Jews. Yet only the Jews warrant a "Holocaust".

Is this because it was only Jews who were targeted for obliteration simply because they were Jews, and because it was only Jews who were exterminated in such a cool, premeditated and modern fashion by such an advanced, liberal and enlightened nation in the heart of Christian Europe? If the revisionists should prove their case that Jews were not targeted for extermination, that there were no gas-chambers and there was no six million, would there then be no Holocaust? Would Jews become just more tragic victims of a tragic period of history, on a par with the millions of other victims, including the thousands upon of thousands of German civilians slaughtered in the terror bombing of German cities by the western allies?

The revisionist community has probably said just about all it can say and proved all it can prove and have probably made the case sufficiently to at least cast doubt on the veracity of the Holocaust narrative. Future historians may well reject the Holocaust as history, but the Holocaust may yet go on, no longer as history but as ideology and even theology. Even though the evidence may lead us to accept that there never was intent to eliminate every single Jew from Europe, or any gas chambers at Auschwitz, or anything near six million victims, this may not make one iota of difference any more than archeological evidence might prove that there was no Exodus from Egypt and medical science might throw doubt on the virgin birth.

Because there is another possibility—that the suffering of the Jews is held to be the worst crime in human history not because of the nature of the crime but because of the nature of the victims. Maybe Abe Foxman had it just about right when he wrote: "[The Holocaust is] not simply one example of genocide, but a near successful attempt on the life of God's chosen children and, thus, on God himself."

Because it may be that the Holocaust is not just special, it may be that the Holocaust is sacred. It may be that speaking of the Holocaust alongside other atrocities is like speaking of the Passion as being the crucifixion of one troublemaker and two thieves. It may be that the Holocaust is a narrative of suffering greater than just of one person on a cross.

If Auschwitz is something other than a horror of history, if it goes beyond the 'banality of evil', then Christianity totters on its foundations. Christ is the Son of God, who went to the end of the humanly endurable, where he endured the cruelest suffering ... If Auschwitz is true, then there is a human suffering which simply cannot be compared with that of Christ ... In this case, Christ is false, and salvation will not come from Him ... Auschwitz is the refutation of Christ. –Claude Lanzmann

So the Holocaust and Jewish suffering, no longer history, now theology, have become a religious imperative for Jews, and more critically for all Jews, even for those Jews who regard themselves as secular, who haven't been near a synagogue since they were children, even for those Jews who don't much consider themselves Jews. Take ten Jews today, maybe three will worship God, perhaps nine will worship the state of Israel, nine-point-five may worship "The Jewish People" but nine-point nine-nine-nine recurring will worship Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. The Holocaust resolves the great dilemma of modern Jewish life—how to be a Jew when you no longer believe in the Jewish God. Secular Jews have found many gods to replace the one they reject—Marx and Trotsky, atheism, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, human rights, money and success, and of course, Zionism—there's lots to choose from but only one that serves as a catch-all for everyone. And if you don't believe it, try this—go find the most educated, secular, progressive, enlightened, perceptive, sensitive Jew you know—deny the Holocaust and then stand back.

But the Holocaust is not confined to Jews. The Holocaust is not only the central martyrdom and therefore a religious focus in modern Jewish history but also, if not in world history, then certainly in American and European history. All over North America and Western Europe: Holocaust museums—cathedrals to the new religion with their own priests and priestesses; Abe Foxman, Deborah Lipstadt, Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, abound—the biggest and best in Washington DC with all the other symbols of American nationhood and power. Holocaust Chairs at major universities, memorials, foundations, conferences and symposia, books, magazines, films, TV documentaries. The further we travel in time from the actual events the greater the sacralisation. But these are only the outward manifestations. The Holocaust, the ultimate in suffering is a paradigm for all Jewish suffering and for all intolerance, discrimination and hatred against Jews and this is in itself is a paradigm for all suffering and all intolerance, discrimination and hatred against all people. That's why a major Holocaust Museum in the U.S. is able to style itself as simply "The Museum of Tolerance", and that's why those who dare to challenge the Jewish claim to a particularity of suffering are nearly always accused of "intolerance" or of "promoting hate". The Holocaust may be the ultimate symbol of Jewish power, the most visible means by which the Jewish will in this world is enforced and displayed to a cowering non-Jewish world. It proclaims that Jews are suffering and Jews are innocent so Jews can do what they like and, by association the state of the Jews is also suffering, is also innocent and can also do what it likes.

The Emperor's new clothes

But the world doesn't jump because it feels sorry for Jews. As Israel Shamir says, compassion and guilt may get you a free bowl of soup but not a lot else, and certainly not the ninety billion deutschmarks paid in reparations by the Federal Republic of Germany to the infant state of Israel, the billions of dollars paid by successive US governments to maintain that state, nor the free pass given to Israel by just about everyone to do pretty much what it likes to the Palestinians. The power of the Holocaust is not the power to arouse pity and compassion in the rest of the world. Anyone can see that Israel has no need of our pity or compassion and neither have Jews. Israel is not weak and Israel is not innocent and neither are Jews. What is harder to see is how anyone could ever have thought otherwise. Could it even be the same with the Holocaust? Is it not by now plain that there is very little evidence to support the Holocaust narrative, that the extermination narrative just doesn't add up, and that the issue of the gas-chambers could, as Ingrid Rimland reminded us, be settled easily by forensic investigation.

I suggest that forensic science ought to settle that disagreement about what Germans did or did not do in World War II in an open public forum.

Why has this not been done? Everyone must know that if the establishment could disprove revisionist claims they would, so why haven't they? And anyone can visit any number of websites and find mountains of evidence against the veracity of the Holocaust, so why don't we?

The reason is the same reason why courtiers have, since time began, acted as if a stark naked emperor was beautifully attired—because they have to. The power of the Holocaust is the same power as enabled a few thousand Englishman to rule hundreds of millions of Indians; a few hundred French aristocrats to rule a few million French peasants and a Czar and a few hundred Russian nobles to rule millions of Russian serfs. It is the same power that all over the world and throughout human history has enabled the prosperous few to rule over the impoverished many. It is the very essence of power in this world; the power of bluff. As an unclothed Emperor can force people to believe that he is clothed, so the Jewish and Holocaust establishments can make us believe that black is white in the Holocaust narrative and that Jews and Israel are suffering and innocent. And if they can't make us believe it, they can still make us say that we believe it. To the wannabee dissenter, the power behind the Holocaust says this, "Watch it! If we can enforce this we can enforce anything!"

But why should we care if Jews choose to create for themselves such a mythology, even if that mythology has been accepted by so many others? The answer is: we must care because if the Holocaust is false, then there are those who suffer under that falsehood. First, if the special status of Jews is removed, then the equal status of every single non-Jew who died in that same time, till now demeaned and denigrated, is immediately restored to its rightful and equal place. And there are other victims too. The German people stand accused and found guilty of having committed the worst crime in human history. The Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians etc. etc. stand accused and found guilty of aiding, abetting and even applauding the commission of the worst crime in human history. Add to them the Catholic Church and the Pope, the Americans and British who stand accused and found guilty of not having done enough to prevent the commission of the worst crime in human history. Add to them Christianity and Christians who throughout the ages stand accused and found guilty of laying the foundations for the commission of the worst crime in human history. And finally you may as well throw in pretty much the entire non-Jewish world accused and guilty of what amounts to simply not being one of the chosen victims of the worst crime in human history, and therefore condemned forever to hush their voices whenever the word 'Jew' is mentioned and to stand silently as the myth of Jewish chosenness in the Holocaust is propagated.

The weapons of the poor ...

There is one other victim: a present, pressing, ultimate victim. The Palestinian people—denied, denigrated and abused by a power which uses the Holocaust as a shield behind which any and every atrocity may take place—are surely the primary sufferers under the Holocaust.

On March 22, 2001, Robert Faurisson wrote a paper for the proposed Beirut Conference on Revisionism and Zionism, which he knew would never be presented. He was right. The conference was cancelled due to external pressure, largely by Jewish groups. In his paper for the first time, Faurisson addressed the Arab world. First he put it to them that an intelligent adversary may say that they fear something when they don't, and that they don't fear something when they do. Thus their enemy's firepower is deflected from those places where it may do real damage to those areas where it can do little damage.

Then he listed those things that Zionists do not fear: They do not fear military power—they've more than enough of their own and anyway, they know that anyone who has military power is far more likely to support them rather than oppose them. They do not fear anti-Semitism—on the contrary they feed on it to create sympathy for their cause. They do not really fear denouncers of Holocaust exploitation—the Norman Finkelsteins and the Peter Novicks—so long as they do not challenge the Holocaust itself. After all, the fiercest critic of something can (albeit often unwittingly) become its staunchest guardian—(If Norman Finkelstein says it, it must be true.) They do not even fear anti-Zionism since Zionism, like Jewish power itself, has the wondrous ability to transform itself into anything it wants—left/right, religious/secular, one-state/two-state—all provide fertile ground for Zionism and Jewish particularity. Nor do they much fear attacks on the founding myths of Israel—that is, all of them except one. Finally, they do not even fear being called Judeo-Nazis. On the contrary, being labeled by one's adversaries as a Nazi merely affirms that 'Nazi' is the very worst thing imaginable.

He then told his audience what Zionists do fear: They fear the weapons of those who have nothing left to lose—the poor and the weak. They fear the stones and suicide bombers of the Palestinian Intifada—and they fear the weapons of that other Intifada—the words of the revisionists.

Zionists truly fear the weapons of the poor (children's stones, their slingshots like that of David against the giant Goliath, the suicide attacks) and all that may endanger persons and business; they fear a demeaning of their brand image. But they are above all apprehensive of "the poor man's atomic bomb", that is, the disintegration, by historical revisionism, of the lie of the gas chambers, the genocide and the six million; they dread this weapon that kills no-one but that would not fail, if properly used to explode their big lie like a bag of hot air ... to lose the "Holocaust" is to lose the sword and the shield of Israel as well as a formidable instrument of political and financial blackmail

Despite their honourable intentions and dedicated efforts, the solidarity movement, which includes many Jews of conscience, has had little success in stopping the Zionist juggernaut. The truth is that the only thing that has stalled it has been Palestinian steadfastness and Palestinian stones. Although they will never say so, Palestinians must know that they are not just facing the might of the Israeli state but also the power of organized world Jewry and its primary arm, the Holocaust. Perhaps Palestinians should consider lobbing a few stones in that direction. Perhaps we all should.