Dartblog

Hatred of the Jewish people is not new to America’s Islamist foes, but Holocaust Denial is a relatively fresh tack of theirs. Emory University is doing its part, mounting a fundraising campaign in order to have its excellent Holocaust Denial on Trial website, currently available only in English, translated to Arabic, Russian, and — eyes on, Mahmoud! — Farsi. The new endowment will be two million dollars strong, and the fund’s use will be limited to combating historical revisionism aimed at World War II.

The website was borne of the Irving v. Lipstadt case, wherein denier David Irving sued Emory professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel after the former claimed in “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” that Irving lied in his publications in order to claim that the Holocaust had never occured. A British court agreed with Lipstadt. “The trial experience,” the introduction to the website says, “reinforced the importance of scholarship in sustaining historical truth…” And that is precisely what the website does: It is a repository for data proving that Germany’s Third Reich government engaged in the mass extermination of Jews.

Of course, maintaining that historical truth is crucial, because it keeps genocide firmly within the realm of the possible. Nothing would benefit radical Islam more than for extermination of the Jews to appear to be an empty threat.