Originally Posted by the fantastic flying fox

i thought everyone hated him because he was conspiracy mad guy

Originally Posted by the fantastic flying fox

i thought everyone hated him because he was conspiracy mad guy

Originally Posted by fagarielina

they didnt mention th khazars!

Originally Posted by vegyrex

Chumpsky's anti semitism possibly stems from his defense of holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson.

Originally Posted by Kolodny

1. Is it true that you stated that you saw "no anti-semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust"? Did you mean this in a purely formal sense? In any other way, it seems strange to me that you wouldn't at least suspect the motives of someone who does seriously attempt to deny that event.

Originally Posted by Chomsky

The issue of the Faurisson affair is very far from settled, in two respects. First, the actual issue has not yet even been addressed. Recall the facts. A professor of French literature was suspended from teaching on grounds that he could not be protected from violence, after privately printing pamphlets questioning the existence of gas chambers. He was then brought to trial for "falsification of History," and later condemned for this crime, the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will determine historical truth and punish deviation from it. Later he was beaten practically to death by Jewish terrorists. As of now, the European and other intellectuals have not expressed any opposition to these scandals; rather, they have sought to disguise their profound commitment to Stalinist-Nazi doctrine by following the same models, trying to divert attention with a flood of outrageous lies. So, the issue has not been settled, or even addressed.

...

Now your first question. The "statement" to which you refer is a distortion of something that I wrote in a personal letter 11 years ago, when I was asked whether the fact that a person denies the existence of gas chambers does not prove that he is an anti-Semite. I wrote back what every sane person knows: no, of course it does not. A person might believe that Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews in some other way without being an anti-Semite. Since the point is trivial and disputed by no one, I do not know why we are discussing it.

In that context, I made a further point: even denial of the Holocaust would not prove that a person is an anti-Semite. I presume that that point too is not subject to contention. Thus if a person ignorant of modern history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans are capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an anti-Semite. That suffices to establish the point at issue.

The point is considerably more general. Denial of monstrous atrocities, whatever their scale, does not in itself suffice to prove that those who deny them are racists vis-a-vis the victims. I am sure you agree with this point, which everyone constantly accepts. Thus, in the journal of the American Jewish Congress, a representative of ASI writes that stories about Hitler's anti-gypsy genocide are an "exploded fiction." In fact, as one can learn from the scholarly literature (also Wiesenthal, Vidal-Naquet, etc.), Hitler's treatment of the gypsies was on a par with his slaughter of Jews. But we do not conclude from these facts alone that the AJC and ASI are anti-gypsy racists. Similarly, numerous scholars deny that the Armenian genocide took place, and some people, like Elie Wiesel, make extraordinary efforts to prevent any commemoration or even discussion of it. Until the last few years, despite overwhelming evidence before their eyes, scholars denied the slaughter of some 10 million native Americans in North America and perhaps 100 million on the [South American] continent. Recent studies of US opinion show that the median estimate of Vietnamese casualties [resulting from the Vietnam War] is 100,000, about 1/20 of the official figure and probably 1\30 or 1\40 of the actual figure. The reason is that that is the fare they have been fed by the propaganda apparatus (media, journals of opinion, intellectuals, etc., "scholarship," etc.) for 20 years. We (at least I) do not conclude from that fact alone that virtually the whole country consists of anti-Vietnamese racists. I leave it to you to draw the obvious analogies.

You ask whether one wouldn't at least suspect the motives of someone who denies genocide (the Holocaust, in particular). Of course. Thus, I do suspect the motives of Wiesel, Bernard Lewis, the anthropological profession, the American Jewish Congress and ASI, Faurisson, Western intellectuals who systematically and almost universally downplay the atrocities of their own states, and people who deny genocide and atrocities generally. But I do not automatically conclude that they are racists; nor do you. Rather, we ask what leads them to these horrendous conclusions. There are many different answers, as we all agree. Since the points are again obvious, a rational person will proceed also to question the motives of those who pretend to deny them, when it suits their particular political purposes. In this respect too the Faurisson affair is far from "settled," as you put it; in fact, the issues have yet to be addressed. In fact, they will never be addressed, because they reveal too much about Western intellectual culture.

Originally Posted by book bbq

He spoke pragmatically about “comparative costs”; i.e. Pot wasn’t such a bad guy, he was doing the best he could. But then the facts became insurmountable and Chomp pretty much shutup on that issue.

Originally Posted by chomsky

The original claim that the Khmer Rouge had "boasted" of having killed 2 million people was by Jean Lacouture in the New York Review, quickly taken up by Anthony Lewis and others. Lacouture was reviewing a French book by Francois Ponchaud, a priest who had lived in Cambodia. I was curious, obtained Ponchaud's book from a friend in France, and read it ...

What Ponchaud actually wrote was that the US war had killed 800,000 people (which seems to be a considerable exaggeration) and that according to the US Embassy, 1.2 million had died since (that would be from April 75 through 1976 -- the statement was flatly denied by the Embassy). Adding these two (incorrect) figures, we get two million. The boast comes free. A few weeks later, in "corrections" (which I brought to his attention, privately), L. says that maybe there were only thousands killed, but asks whether it really matters -- a position for which he has won great acclaim. When Ed Herman and I responded to his challenge to me by saying that we thought that a factor of 1000 did matter, that aroused huge outrage, which still continues ("nit-picking," it's called on the left).

Originally Posted by bunny gamer

Yeah, too bad Chomsky already dealt with that issue in detail, and the answer was so sexily brilliant it got me pregnant for the 83rd time. Here, you guys can read it too:

Originally Posted by chomsky

In that context, I made a further point: even denial of the Holocaust would not prove that a person is an anti-Semite. I presume that that point too is not subject to contention. Thus if a person ignorant of modern history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans are capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an anti-Semite. That suffices to establish the point at issue.

Originally Posted by bunny gamer

Bullshit on the whole thing. When there aren't major Jewish organizations allowed to exist that deny Hitler's slaughter of gypsies, maybe we can talk about why every single person who criticizes Israel should be called an anti-semite. Try again.

Originally Posted by MODIYA Project

It was on this basis that the Holocaust deniers' method was built: they considered all Jewish witnesses liars; they ignored all pre-Liberation documents. Nazi documents were, in their opinion, fabrications, false confessions from Nazis at the Nuremberg trials obtained under torture. Any other pre- or post-World War II historical evidence is ignored, falsified, taken out of context or rapidly put aside (e.g. they never mention that gypsies and homosexuals were also sent to gas chambers; they question one sentence of a survivor’s testimony to discredit every eye-witness account). Under the guise of wanting to denounce a lie, the Holocaust deniers defend the Nazis and dream of their comeback.

http://dlibdev.nyu.edu/modiya/handle/1964/251

Originally Posted by Jewish Virtual Library

It is extremely difficult to locate the sorts of sources about Gypsies in the Holocaust of the type widely available about Jewish victims of the Nazi terror. This may reflect difference between an extremely literate culture and a largely illiterate one. It is known that perhaps 250,000 Gypsies were killed, and that proportionately they suffered losses greater than any other group of victims except Jews. The accounts here were collected, and made available on the net, from various sources.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...t/gypsies.html

Originally Posted by ADL

The Holocaust refers to a specific genocidal event in twentieth-century history: the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims-6 million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped, and Poles were also targeted

http://www.adl.org/education/holocau...guidelines.asp

Originally Posted by U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

GENOCIDE OF EUROPEAN ROMA (GYPSIES), 1939-1945



Roma (Gypsies) were among the groups singled out on racial grounds for persecution by the Nazi regime and most of its allies.

The Nazis judged Roma to be "racially inferior," and the fate of Roma in some ways paralleled that of the Jews. Roma were subjected to internment, forced labor, and massacre. They were also subject to deportation to extermination camps. Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) killed tens of thousands of Roma in the German-occupied eastern territories. Further, thousands were killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka extermination camps. The Nazis also incarcerated thousands of Roma in the Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrueck concentration camps.


http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php...uleId=10005219