In Denial
by Walter Reich
The Wall Street Journal
March 2, 2006

It's time for Europeans to decriminalize Holocaust denial. And it's time for them to act against threats, increasingly murderous, of a new genocide against the Jews.

David Irving, the British pseudo-historian who was sentenced last week to three years in prison by an Austrian court for being a Holocaust denier, is as despicably foolish as his ideas. But being despicable and foolish doesn't make Mr. Irving or his ideas so dangerous that they justify the curtailment of speech.

Some European countries that have passed those laws, such as Germany and Austria, may have wanted to expiate their guilt for having carried out the Holocaust. Others may have wanted to mollify their bad consciences for having stood by as it happened. Still others may have wanted, finally, to do the right thing.

But those laws won't bring back the dead. Rather, they violate a principle -- freedom of speech -- that helps protect societies from becoming murderous themselves. And they allow those societies to piously believe that they care about the ethnic group against which the Holocaust was perpetrated even as they ignore or brush aside the threats that promise a new genocide against that very group.

And I do mean genocide. The call last October by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel to be wiped off the map, even as his country was developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons, was nothing less than the promise of a new genocide against the Jews; after all, Israel contains 40% of all Jews in the world. That call was especially ominous because it wasn't the first by an Iranian leader. Four years before, the chairman of Iran's Expediency Council, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything," and that "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."

President Ahmadinejad's statement stirred some comment in Europe, but not much. And Mr. Rafsanjani's stirred, as far as I know, none at all.

Nor has much comment been stirred by the numerous statements emanating for years from Muslim pulpits, as well as from Arab governments, organizations and media outlets, justifying and inciting the destruction of Israel and its Jews, as well as the murder of Jews everywhere. To be sure, Arab Holocaust denial occasionally provokes a mild shaking of European heads. But the promise of a new genocide provokes almost nothing. Last week, on its Web site, the "military wing" of Hamas, the political party that recently won a majority in the Palestinian legislature and that's backed by Iran, posted an animated cartoon of a Star of David, the symbol of Israel, being obliterated, again and again, by an atomic bomb. Yet Russia is doing business with Hamas (and Iran), and Europe seems ready to stand in line.

Europe and Russia -- and, indeed, America -- ignored Hitler's promise, eight months before he launched World War II, that in such a war he would annihilate the Jews of Europe. That was a tragic error. Ignoring an Iran that makes the same threat against the Jews of Israel could prove to be equally tragic.

The Holocaust's historical truth sits atop a mountain of evidence so massive that anyone who denies it, such as David Irving, condemns himself as a fool. Let this pathetic straw man be ignored. Europe would do everyone a far bigger service by acknowledging and battling the threat of another genocide against the very people who, at the hands of Europeans, suffered so massively during the Holocaust.

Dr. Reich, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995-98, is a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.