Bret Stephens On The Plague Of Polite Society

Yesterday, Bret Stephens penned a superb piece about Iran's despicable Holocaust conference. It is a must-read:

"Not acceptable," says Ban Ki Moon, new Secretary-General of the United Nations. "Repulsive," say the editors of Britain's Guardian newspaper. "An insult . . . to the memory of millions of Jews," says Hillary Rodham Clinton. Global polite society is in an uproar over the Holocaust conference organized this week in Tehran under the auspices of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do--what they must do--when a regime that avows the future extermination of six million Jews in Israel denies the past extermination of six million Jews in Europe. But let's be frank: Global polite society has been blazing its own merry trail toward this occasion for decades.

The Australian Financial Review is not the Journal of Historical Review, the Holocaust-denying "scholarly" vehicle of some of the Tehran conferees. But in 2002 the AFR thought it fit to print the following by Joseph Wakim, at one point the country's multicultural affairs commissioner: "Sharon's war is not a war," he wrote. "Genocide would be a more accurate description." In Ireland Tom McGurk, a columnist in the very mainstream Sunday Business Post, noted that "the scenes at Jenin last week looked uncannily like the attack on the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1944." Jose Saramago, Portugal's Nobel Laureate in Literature, observed after a visit to Ramallah that the Israeli incursion into the city "is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz."

Never mind that the total number of Jews "dealt with" in the Warsaw ghetto, according to Nazi commandant Jürgen Stroop, was 56,065, whereas the number of Palestinians killed in Jenin was no more than 60. Never mind that at the time Mr. Saramago visited Ramallah a total of about 1,500 Palestinians had been killed in the Intifada, whereas Jews were murdered at Auschwitz at a rate of about 2,000 a day. Let's concede that, for the sake of moral truth, strained comparisons may still serve useful rhetorical purposes. (Jews and Israelis also often make inapt Holocaust and Nazi comparisons.) Let's concede, too, that the comments cited above amount to criticisms of Israeli policy, nothing more.

For the sensible people in society--those that still remember history--the idea of a Holocaust conference to question whether or not Jews were murdered by the Nazis is nauseating. These are people who hate the Jews. They always have. This will never change. The Islamofascists in Iran, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, will never accept the Jews being in Israel. They have been waging war on them since their nation was established by the United Nations in 1947. And, the Arab SS forces in World War II relished the opportunity to hunt down Jews who were escaping the Final Solution in Germany.

The Holocaust was one of the darkest periods in mankind's history, and one that hjas been matched twice by other dictators (Stalin and Mao). But Hitler took the cake by targeting, for the most part, one specific demographic. Yes, others were murdered by Hitler and the SS. There were Christians, gypsies, Communists, and other "social agitators" that were rounded up and sent to the camps. But I urge people to read the protocols established by Reinhard Heydrich, and the other attendees of the Wannsee Conference. It is positively sickening to see how "efficient" and "systematic" their so-called solution was.

Bret Stephens is very correct in asserting that the only reason that something like this conference could go on is because the way society has "evolved." We are such a PC oriented, emasculated society that we simply shrug our shoulders at the audacity of a thug and dicator like Ahmadinejad. Instead of raising holy Cain over this, we made the usual platitudes. We condemn it. We call it sick, depraved, and disgusting. And yet the world does nothing more. Ahmadinejad ultimately wins in the end because he is fanning the flames of Anti-Semitism in the region, and across the globe.

No one can believe that Ahmadinejad is conducting a "scholarly" investigation into the Holocaust. The man's denied its very existence numerous times. This conference was a farce from the get go, and society simply let it happen. The phrase "Never again" seems to have escaped our collective consciousness. We, as a society, swore that things like the Holocaust would never happen again, and yet we are watching a replay of history unfold today.

How long will it be before the world wakes up and realizes what's happening? A madman who bitterly hates the Jews is racing towards nuclear weapons, and has threatened to destroy Israel. He's not content to push laws that remove the Jews from our societal lives. He wants them gone in the blink of an eye. Ban Ki Moon, the new UN secretary general, has his work cut out. If he is going to restore faith in the UN, he has to confront Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and end this regime's insane desire to annihilate an entire race of people. Genocide is something that concerns him, as we can clearly see with his comments regarding Darfur. While Darfur is definitely a subject of consternation among many, it will be even worse if the world twiddles its thumbs until Iran reaches its goals, and we watch Israel disappear under a mushroom cloud.

Sabrina McKinney