Response to Bernie Farber's “Denial” editorial in the National Post

By Carolyn Yeager

BERNIE FARBER IS THE FORMER LONG-TIME DIRECTOR OF THE CANADIAN JEWISH CONGRESS, therefore a long-time fighter for Jewish interests. After retiring, he is now CEO of another Jewish organization, the Mosaic (as in Moses) Institute. His father was a Polish Jew who says he lost his first family in the “Holocaust,” while he alone survived and came to Canada.

Farber praises the new Deborah Lipstadt film “Denial” in his Sept. 20 editorial in the Canadian National Post, a newspaper of which he is a semi-regular contributor. He confidently sets out to demolish David Irving and holocaust revisionists, knowing he will receive no blow-back for telling lies. And lies he does tell, while utilizing the familiar method of accusing those he is lying about of being liars. Yes, it is pure Jewish argument.

Farber starts out with the “fine acting and superb character development” of the film, which had its world premiere in Toronto recently. He then directly hits “Holocaust denial” as “hateful propaganda” that states “the Holocaust never occurred.” First lie.

In Bernie Farber and Deborah Lipstadt's world, revisionism equals holocaust denial (their term) and to deny the holocaust is to deny any persecution of Jews. Simplissimus. In this deliberate confusion of terms and meanings, the film “Denial” portrays David Irving as proclaiming “the Holocaust” never happened.

Revisionists do not deny that Jews were forced into concentration & labor camps and ghettos during WW2 – but do dispute what happened to them in those places. To question the grotesque narrative developed by the Jews and their six million legend does not equate to “denying the holocaust.” To say it does, like Farber and Lipstadt do, is deliberately stating a major falsehood. Why do they feel the need to propagate this lie? Clearly, to stop people from reading or listening to the reasonable questions and powerful arguments of the perfectly respectable revisionists.

Farber quotes a U.S. Senator from the 80s and 90s, saying “Daniel Patrick Moynihan hit the nail on the head when he noted, 'You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.'” Farber is turning things upside down because it's he, Farber, who is the one making up facts. He said this in reference to his charge that holocaust deniers invented the hateful proposition “that world Jewry made up [the holocaust story] to secure monetary reparations from Germany to help the fledgling state of Israel.” He calls such a belief “a damnable lie often perpetrated by sophisticated liars like Irving.”

“Politicians around the world, and especially in the United States, are increasingly spouting political rhetoric that is demonstrably false, racist and bigoted,” he wrote, by which he is actually pointing at Donald Trump! He claims the film's director, Mick Jackson, was alluding to Trump when he noted that “the movie refers to Irving as a 'liar, a racist and a demogogue' and added sardonically, 'Does that sound familiar'?” Jackson is cleverly killing two birds with one stone.

I dispute Farber's claim that the Jewish desire for monetary reparations is "a damnable lie.” On the contrary, it is well-known that vast amounts of time and energy have been expended by the World Jewish Congress in the interests of drawing every last dime from Germany, and now from any other European country they can mount a claim against – in the name of holocaust reparations for Jews. This money machine is so addictive that now heirs of 'survivors' are bringing claims if they can show their relatives did not get as much as they should have while they were alive. We've also been through the corruption scandals that plagued the Jewish Claims Conference when it was proved that high-and-mid-level managers added false names in order to personally benefit themselves financially. So Bernie Farber is on very shaky ground (like standing on Jello) when he insists these wide-spread beliefs that the holocaust is in large part a money-making endeavor for Jews are “damnable lies.”

Cherry-picking from the trial testimony

Farber then cherry-picked a couple of sentences from the trial transcript to give a biased impression of what occurred. He misrepresents Robert Jan van Pelt, who was an expert witness for Lipstadt at the trial, although not really an expert. Farber writes: “… it was Robert Jan van Pelt, a cultural and architectural historian from the University of Waterloo, who arguably helped put the final nail into Irving’s Holocaust denial coffin.”

In fact, van Pelt was a disaster as a witness. He was forced to admit that the four alleged “insertion holes” for Zyklon B in the roof of Crematorium 2 could not be found. These alleged insertion holes were claimed by Lipstadt to have been on blueprints of the crematorium that she had seen! It was a total lie. Van Pelt then tried to push the ridiculous speculation that the Nazis covered up the holes before blowing up the building – without presenting any evidence for it. Irving also got van Pelt to admit that he was only a professor of cultural history, not an expert on architecture at all.

Farber does the same with the trial judge, Sir Charles Gray. He quotes Gray's final decision, but ignores that the Justice famously said: “I have to confess that, in common I suspect with most other people, I had supposed that the evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling. I have, however, set aside this preconception when assessing the evidence ...”

Gray had to acknowledge “the apparent absence of evidence of holes” (on page 490 of the verbatim transcript) and conceded that “contemporaneous documents yield little clear evidence of the existence of gas chambers designed to kill humans.” (p. 489). Still, he found in favor of Lipstadt because of the technical 'justification defense' used by her attorneys.

Unsurprisingly, Bernie Farber closes by leveling the charge of anti-Semitism against all revisionists. He calls it “the longest hatred” and adds that, in spite of it, “from time to time, facts will triumph over fictions.” Well, that is the biggest fiction of all – that holocaust believers are in possession of the facts. Farber failed to show even one instance of it in his editorial.

See http://denialthefilm.com/ for more about this propaganda movie.