Dr. Kevin Barrett: Holocaust history denial: A clear and present danger!

Bishop Richard Williamson has been prosecuted for Holocaust heresy. I used to believe in the Holocaust. Not as a religion, I've never been to any of the museum temples, or made a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, or pored over the sacred texts. And I never was stupid, or crazy enough to accept the Holocaust as a valid excuse for the Zionist theft of Palestine. If the Holocaust had anything to do with Israel, then Israel would have been established in Germany, not Palestine. In short, I believes in the Holocaust as history, because I assumed that 99% of Western academic historians can't be wrong. I assumed that about six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis in concentration camps, mostly in gas chambers, as part of a preplanned effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As far as I knew, all of the reputable Historians believed this. The handful of dissenters, I assumed, were cranks of one sort or another. And though I had met many Muslim academic colleagues, who were Holocaust skeptics, I thought they were probably biased, due to their anti-Zionism. Then in 2006, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, I was attacked on Wikipedia as a holocaust denier. In fact, I was a well known skeptic about 9/11, not the Holocaust. I knew next to nothing about the controversies surrounding the "alleged" gas chambers. Wikipedia claimed I was a supporter of David Irving, Mark Green, and Ernst Zundel. In fact, I had never heard of Green, and barely even knew the names of Irving and Zundel. I had spent most of the 1990s reading every French literary classic for my French Literature MA, then learning Arabic, and studying Islam and Morocco for my Ph.D, while supporting my wife, and two small children, so I wasn't really paying attention to Holocaust controversy news. I tried to correct the erroneous information, which came from some crank's personal website, and had never been checked, much less corroborated, along with the dozens of other derogatory factual errors, on my Wikipedia page. The corrections would always be removed, and the lies, reinstated, by the next day. Sometimes it happened in a matter of hours. This was enough to make me slightly paranoid. But as hippies used to say,just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Somebody was trying to frame me as a Holocaust denier, presumably to damage my credibility on 9/11. Why would they do that? By 2010 or so, I finally got around to reading a few books about the Holocaust controversies. The first book I read was Denying History, by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman. It had been recommended as the best introduction to why the Holocaust deniers are wrong.