A Danish denier and irate Israelis

The recent decision by the Danish Arts Council to grant research funding to a holocaust denier has attracted criticism from commentators in Israel. This is both baffling and alarming when you consider that the subject of the student’s study is the involvement of Danes in Hitler’s SS, and not the existence or otherwise of the Final Solution. There is no need here to extrapolate from the particular abhorrence of holocaust denial, the legitimacy of the moral indignation that it provokes, and the need for it to be fought wherever it raises its ugly head. But it must be fought on the proper grounds, using the proper tools; and that is the ground of open and informed debate, using the tool of reasoned argument. What is not acceptable is the attempt to suppress unfavourable beliefs through legislation or through the refusal of funds for academic study.

The fact is that morality and moral censure, no matter how justified, have no say in the process of allocating research funding. It is worth remembering that some of the greatest advances in human history have been the product of research considered heretical or immoral at the time. In the context of fund allocation, the only relevant criterion is the academic merits of the scholar's submission. This doesn’t mean that, free from the shackles of moral oversight, any offensive crackpot theory may count on megabucks for its investigation as, clearly, part of what it means to have academic merit is not to fly in the face of extensively researched historical data. If the Danish student in question had attempted to get money for a project on holocaust denial, it would have been rejected on this basis.

But the fact is, he did not. His submission wasn’t a crackpot theory, but a legitimate area of study. It was merely his incidental belief in an offensive theory that has attracted so much controversy. Not only is this idea absurd (should hard-line but non-violent Muslims be barred from studying the ecology of the Galapagos Islands? Are anti-immigration campaigners to be denied access to Quantum Theory?), but it is hugely dangerous and self-defeating for a thriving democracy. The moment the determination of government funding for students depends on the applicant’s personal beliefs is the moment academic freedom wheezes its last breath, to be replaced by a stultifying and oppressive conformity in the academic community - supposedly the vanguard in thought and attitude - which would then suffuse society as a whole. The fact that such obvious dangers are lost on the detractors of the Danish Arts Council’s decision is worrying, and indeed hypocritical given the much-lamented boycott by British institutions that Israel’s academics are currently enduring. So it seems that denial and myopia are the order of the day.

Beau Hopkins

It's a Shoah-down!

To those searching for the new political battleground of the 21st century - I've found it! The intellectual artillery of the forces of progress and reaction will be fired over... wait for it... er... the speaker's roster at numerous public lectures across the world(!) Armies of Jewish terrorists and Muslim Zionists [sic], dubious academics and free-world vigilanties will square-off over who is allowed to speak where and to whom (and how the promotional material is to advertise the event).

I'll cite a few random recent examples:
- David Irving, professional Holocaust denier, was recently asked to leave a Polish book festival.
- Last week the leader of the New Black Panther Party (a man apparently prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering) provoked outrage in Toronto's Jewish community after being invited to speak to the 'Black Youth Taking Action' group.
- In February, Muslims at the University of California, Davis, protested the invitation to speak extended by campus Republicans to a 'former Islamic terrorist' turned 'Zionist-Islamofacism-warrior'.
- Last week, Muslims at that same university welcomed Norman Finklestein - son of Holocaust-vicitms, anti-Zionist, and alleged Holocaust-denier - which was duly opposed by Jewish students.
- Also in the past week, an Italian university prevented a French Holocaust-denier from speaking on campus.

Now, each case does have its intricacies which complicates the cases slightly. For example, while in the UC Davis cases students invited the contentious speaker, in the last case Robert Faurisson (the denier) had been invited to speak at the University of Teramo by the very director of the master's programme in Middle Eastern studies (for the sake of 'balance', here's a link to the Italian story from an Iranian site, the previous link above being to the Jerusalem Post - though both stories say much the same thing). In addition, the university cited 'security concerns', rather than 'objectionable content' as the reason for denying the denier. In the David Irving case, the festival's planners had legal concerns as Holocaust-denial is illegal in Poland. At UC Davis, the Jewish students complained that while the anti-Islamofascist speaker had been funded privately, the university had paid some $400 to the Muslims group to fund Finkelstein's lecture expenses.

But actually these details are hardly relevant - in fact they're a total distraction (and in most cases they were merely spurious excuses for what was really censorship). The real story of note here is the total absence of political content to these cases. Rather than a proper argument about the Israel-Palestine question or even about the historical understanding of the Holocaust (though really there should be little need to discuss the latter), partisans of both sides engage in lectern-wars over who can and cannot speak. The censorious nature of no-platform policies has been widely discussed (in fact, the columnist for the Sacramento Bee is quite good on this question), but equally worrying is the promiscuous use of inflammatory terms to describe 'the enemy' - something I just indulged in, above. For these political questions - one of the few to still genuinely inflame passions - it is almost as if we need a new language to discuss the issues. The old terms have become tainted through association with the dog-whistle-politics being practiced on university campuses thousands of kilometres (or indeed decades) away from the site of actual political conflict. The bans and counter-bans, the Zionist/Islamofascist name-calling, the promiscuous use of bad historical analogies - these do not constitute politics, they are the enemy of politics.

Alex Hochuli

Unmaking history

April Fool’s day has come and gone, but at least one crazy story remains real: schools are dropping History lessons on the Holocaust and the Crusades for fear of offending Muslim pupils. A Department for Skills and Education report revealed that a school in northern England avoided the Holocaust for fear of confronting ‘anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial’ among some pupils, while another avoided the Crusades because ‘their balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was being taught in some local mosques’.

This is the politics of multiculturalism taken to its most relativistic and dangerous limits. The pernicious notion that all cultures and beliefs are equal and should be elevated above criticism in order to promote social harmony naturally translates into a degraded relativism where there is no one truth whose foundations cannot be assailed on cultural grounds. Because some -in practice, probably very few indeed- Muslim pupils are peddled propaganda at home or at the mosque, everyone learning history at these schools is denied the opportunity to learn about these important historical events is not only reprehensible, but also potentially dangerous, as those children who are fed lies will never see them challenged in an open environment.

The stupidity of such practices, particularly at a time when bleating about ‘Holocaust denial’ has reached epic proportions, is astounding. Here we have schools practically guaranteeing ignorance about the Holocaust, and thereby creating fertile ground for denial to take root, simply because of their own cowardice in trying to avoid a clash of cultures in the classroom. Education should be challenging. It should open up new worlds for students and, yes, shock them out of narrow-minded prejudices and encourage them to engage critically with what they encounter. Otherwise, what is the point? We might as well leave kids at home and let them simply parrot whatever they overhear. Or invite religious organisations to take over education wholesale. Ah, but I forget: that policy is already being implemented.

Lee Jones