Illusions About Holocaust Deniers

The following is excerpted from a Reuters article as published in The Toronto Star. The thesis is that if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, he would alter his belief the Holocaust never happened.

The problem with that is the dubious assumption Ahmadinejad doesn't think the Holocaust happened.

Ahmadinejad is not a stupid person; I find it very hard to believe he doesn't know the truth; he's just evil and uses Holocaust denial as a convenient tool for spreading hatred of Jews.

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Truth So Stark Even Deniers Would See It

JERUSALEM–They should persuade Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, to visit this city and to take a stroll through a large triangular concrete structure that knifes its way through the Mount of Remembrance in the pine-forested hills of western Jerusalem.

The building is Israel's hauntingly magnificent Holocaust Museum, designed by Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie and opened in 2005 – a powerful exploration of a bleak and shameful subject.

You need a good three hours to make a careful tour of the exhibits, but Ahmadinejad should be able to spare that much time from his presidential duties, and it would be well worth his while.

True, the experience might not alter his hostile attitude toward Israel. But one thing is sure.

No one, not even the president of Iran, could tour the museum at Yad Vashem and yet remain under any illusion that the Holocaust – the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II – is not an historical fact.

Granted, there are not a great many people nowadays who take this view, but Ahmadinejad is certainly among them.

Give the man a few hours of solemn contemplation here, and it is difficult to imagine he would not change his mind.

…

The penultimate exhibit in the museum is the justly famous Hall of Names, a vast circular library surrounding an illuminated dome. Here, the names and biographical details of some 3 million Holocaust victims are recorded in hundreds of indexed volumes.

But many of the shelves remain empty, for there are roughly 3 million more names to be identified and remembered.

Finally, in a dark room, a simple film repeats itself endlessly, thousands of pulsating letters that spell out a series of reflections penned by the famous or the unsung.

Wrote one woman, identified only as Hulda:

My dearest loved ones, We are all seized with an overwhelming desire to write letters before we die.

I can well imagine this to be so, and I imagine Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would believe it, too, along with many other things, if he would spend a few hours here.