Ele Ludemann: It really did happen

To disagree is normal, to base the disagreement on denial of facts is either stupidity, or a means to a very dangerous end.

At least some of the people who deny the holocaust weren’t born when it happened or in the immediate aftermath but that is no excuse.

There are first hand accounts and proven historical records from its victims and survivors, from the soldiers who liberated the concentration camps; and from the Nuremberg Trials, including confessions from those guilty of the crimes committed.

It’s difficult to understand how anyone could deny all that, harder still to understand how, just one year after the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel the horrors of which were reported and broadcast world-wide, there are people who deny that it happened.

It really did happen and if you have the stomach for it, Phillip Crump writes of bearing witness to the barbarism:

. . . Eight weeks after the attacks, I was invited to the Israeli Embassy in Wellington to watch the 47 minutes of footage compiled by the Israeli Government called “Bearing Witness”. It represents only a fraction of the 150,000 video clips collected by Israel from webcam footage, phones, security cameras and other recording devices that were operating that day.

The Embassy invited approximately 60 people from New Zealand media to attend – 12 of us accepted. I have set out below what I saw – it is not intended to be partisan but simply an account of what happened that day and my impressions as an observer.

Did watching “Bearing Witness” alter any of my opinions? Yes, it did.

I expected to see men, women and children slaughtered but the level of hatred and barbarity was incomprehensible. Often the mutilation continued after the victim was killed as if that were only one stage in a process that would continue until what was left was unrecognizable. We saw 139 killings or bodies but in many cases the bodies were so disfigured or burned that they ceased to look human.

At the viewing we were joined by an American forensic pathologist who now lives in New Zealand but who volunteered to travel to Israel in the days following the attack to help identify the bodies. She recounted to us that DNA testing was conducted in order to match body parts with the correct bodies as often parts of different victims had been mistakenly bagged together.

It does, I think, at least partially explain Israel’s ferocious response in the year that has followed the attacks. In my view, anyone in the Israeli government or military who viewed that footage would conclude that they face an immediate existential threat. Their enemies do not simply wish to take territory or wage a war – killing was not enough. Their enemies that day wished for the elimination of every Jewish man, woman and child until nothing remained but dust. That was the point that I did not fully appreciate until I saw this footage. . .

That is the point, not just of the October 7 atrocities but of the radical Islamists who want to kill all they label infidels – starting with all Jews but not stopping there.

Note, that is radical Islamists, not all Muslims, who are content to live in peace and let others do the same, but there are enough of the radicals to endanger not just Israel and Jews, but all they consider infidels and they are assisted in that by too many in the West, who, Brendan O’Neill writes failed the moral test of 7 October:

So, it is here: the anniversary of fascism’s return. It is one year since Hamas’s pogrom. One year since that army of anti-Semites invaded the Jewish State and visited unspeakable terror on its people. One year since the atavistic hatreds of the last century leapt from the pages of the history books and violently imprinted themselves on our complacent world. One year since the pact humankind made in the aftermath of the last Great War – ‘Never Again’ – was turned to dust in the Negev desert and the kibbutzim of southern Israel.

Today is first and foremost a day of remembrance for the slain. Jews and their allies will light candles for the more than 1,100 souls extinguished by Hamas’s fascists. People will say ‘Never Again’ again. Yet alongside recalling the inhumanity Hamas wrought in Israel on 7 October, let us spare a thought for what that darkest of days revealed about our own societies, too. What it told us not only about Hamas, the Jew-killing machine that masquerades as a national-liberation movement, but also about us. About how far we have strayed from the path of reason. About our betrayal of civilisation.

To my mind, there were two horrors on 7 October last year. There was the horror of what Hamas did. Its rape, kidnap and murder of more than a thousand Jews. Its execution of the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazis. Its gleeful, boastful sadism – let us never forget that this racist militia relished in its atrocities, filming them for posterity and even phoning home to gloat to loved ones about how many Jews had been slaughtered. Then there was the horror of the West’s response. The horror of our failure – our unforgivable failure – to stand with the Jews against their persecutors. . .

He outlines some of the anti-Sematic acts in the guise of pro-Gaza protests and continues:

In the face of the slaughter of Jews, and the rank apologism for it in our own cities. Reprehensible doesn’t cover it.

The West’s moral failures in the aftermath of 7 October were of an entirely new order. They exceeded even my grim fears. They shone a harsh, inescapable light on the retreat from reason and abandonment of Enlightenment many of us have warned of for years. In the hours and days after the pogrom, a dawning, chilling realisation came: the West’s activist class and its educated elites were sympathising more with the pogromists than with the pogrom’s victims. They went from saying ‘Never Again’ to saying ‘All Right Then, One More Time’. The delirium of our post-civilisational era emerged into broad daylight. It was undeniable now: the West is in the stranglehold of a profound moral crisis.

And it continues to this day, the first-year anniversary of that wicked intrusion into Israel. Think about this: today is the anniversary of the worst act of racist violence of modern times, and yet so-called anti-racists will not be marking it. They won’t be putting a black square on their Instagram pages. They won’t hold any vigils. Not one tear will touch their cheeks for the thousand human beings murdered by racists a year ago today. No ‘anti-fascist’ will decry this fascism. On the contrary, they will spend today doing what they always do: feverishly hating on Israel, puking yet more wordy bile on to the Jewish State. They will hijack this day of Jewish remembrance to further their defamatory hatreds of the Jewish nation.

What we have seen over the past year is that when the young in particular are invited to reject Western civilisation, they might very well be tempted into the arms of its opposite: barbarism. When you educate a new generation to be wary of the West, to view our claim to be enlightened as just so much white man’s arrogance and bluster, you might just push them towards the West’s enemies. When you depict Western society as fallen, racist, phobic, shit – as so much fashionable thought does right now – you make anti-Westernism, even violent anti-Westernism, seem exotic, enticing. The sympathy for Hamas on our campuses and streets is fundamentally an extension of the West’s own crisis of meaning, of our denial of our own insights, of our betrayal of our history.

A war for the soul of humanity must now be fought. On two fronts. On the physical front of Israel’s borders, where some of the most regressive movements on Earth, sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran, openly lust and agitate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish nation. And on the intellectual front here at home. In the academy, in politics, in hearts and minds. Only a full-throated defence of the virtues and wonders of Western civilisation might see off the moral derangement of our times and the Jew hatred it has nurtured. We owe it to the dead of 7 October to stand by Israel and repair our own broken societies.

These are very strong words and it is strength that is needed to counter the denial, the ignorance and the morally deranged who use any excuse to fight those virtues and wonders among which must be peaceful, tolerant and democratic societies based on the rule of law and respect for human rights.

The Holocaust really did happen, the barbarous actions of Hamas on October really did happen, and if the evil isn’t defeated such atrocities will happen again.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.