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The moral inequivalence of 9/11 and Holocaust denial

by · 15th June, 2009

Yesterday, there was another of Nick Cohen’s rambling pieces in the Observer, drawing a moral equivalence between those who deny that the 9/11 attacks were the work of al-Qa’ida (so-called truthers) and Holocaust deniers. He compares the rantings of James von Brunn, the man who murdered a guard at the Washington Holocaust museum, to things he heard said by Gilad Atzmon at a recent symposium on anti-Semitism in Oxford. If it hadn’t been for someone posting Atzmon’s account of the event to DeenPort, I would not have known what Cohen did not tell us in his ramble yesterday, namely that Atzmon was there to debate with Cohen and David Aaronovitch.

Cohen tells us that whenever he debates with “truthers”, he always points out that “they are the children of the Holocaust-deniers”:

Just as the old far right denied the crimes of the German fascists of the 1940s, so they deny the crimes of the clerical fascists of our day. Yet although I have no doubt some of them will end up in neo-Nazi parties, I sense that the majority are moving in a new direction.

In Voodoo Histories, his elegant evisceration of the paranoid mentality, David Aaronovitch points out that former fascists and communists, secular Ba’athists, radical Islamists, Russian nationalists and America firsters - people who would never have worked together in the past, and who indeed killed each other in the past - are fusing ideas and creating a new ideology. Their politics, he writes, is “a loose coalescence of impulses: anti-globalisation, broadly anti-modernist and anti-imperialist - with imperialism being inevitably and solely associated with American power”.

Speaking as one who participated in the anti-war coalition of 2003, I cannot remember seeing many fascists and Ba’athists at the rallies. I did see the Socialist Workers and what he calls “radical Islamists”, as if to lump al-Qa’ida and the Muslim Association of Britain into one group, but as I recall, there has always been an effort to keep the fascists and racists, including Holocaust deniers, out. In fact, when Gilad Atzmon started associating with people like “Israel Shamir” who is a known anti-Semite (and is not really Jewish) and coming out with many of the same ideas, many on the anti-Zionist and anti-settler front disassociated themselves from him.

It’s true that there is an alliance between some of these people and some on the American isolationist right (Pat Buchanan et al), but it is strictly on these matters of foreign policy. Changing circumstances bring changing alliances, much as the whole content of Nick Cohen’s writings have changed drastically since 9/11, and particularly since the invasion of Iraq, much as Christopher Hitchens’s output has, as have his alliances and friendships. Since the period since 9/11 has seen a rash of foreign adventures coupled with anger at home in response to 9/11, with resulting harm to innocent people, it is not surprising that new fronts would have to be built to resist it.

What I find most offensive is the suggestion that 9/11 revisionism is morally equivalent to Holocaust denial, and it is significant that he brings Muslim opinion into this rather than simply concentrating on the western conspiracists, many of whom are indeed cranks. Muslims did not rush to accept that 9/11 was the fault of Muslims because of the implication of collective guilt and the justification of prejudice and of state harassment of ordinary Muslims that this would entail (there was also the element of approval of some of the jihadists’ other actions, but it was not only these people who took a position of denial in the beginning). The attitude was a defensive posture by a minority which felt under threat, but even outside this group, there were those who believed 9/11 was an ideal pretext for the Bush/Cheney government to change its foreign policy in a new and aggressive direction and throw off the mask of “compassionate conservatism”.

Holocaust denial, at least in the West, was always the preserve of racists and fascists whose purpose was to rehabilitate Hitler; the material almost always came from people who were highly active in the far right, and these people must be suspected of simply lying, particularly as many neo-Nazis glorify the Holocaust instead (this does not apply to some of those who disbelieve in the Holocaust because of its value in justifying Zionism). Their explanation for why so many Jews died (or why far more were missing than emigrated to Israel) is that they died of diseases such as typhus, and given that most of those who were not abducted from their homes and herded into concentration camps did not, this explanation hardly exonerates the Nazis. The scale of the atrocities was also completely different, in terms of how long they took, how many people were involved in carrying them out, and how many people were killed. The Holocaust, unlike 9/11, was the deliberate massacre of a population on an industrial basis by the state.

9/11 revisionism is an understandable, but misguided and discreditable, means of defending Muslims from prejudice and harassment and resisting the destructive and pointless wars waged in reaction to it. A better line of argument would be that the west took the bait thrown at it on 9/11, getting itself mired in Iraq while its intellectuals gave in to acrimony and distrust at home, while elements of the same group that perpetrated it are still active in Pakistan. Nick Cohen fell for it worse than many on the left, and persists in using his column to berate those who did not maintain ideological purity by disassociating from those he calls fascists, most of whom are in fact nothing of the kind.

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