There Are No Holocaust "Revisionists"

Two recent headlines in the New York Times referred to a "Holocaust Revisionist":

Vance Declines to Denounce Carlson After Interview With Holocaust Revisionist

No, no, no, no, no. The so-called "revisionist" in question is Darryl Cooper, who in fact is a flat-out H0locaust denier. As the Times explains several paragraphs into the article:

Mr. Cooper, who has a podcast and newsletter called “Martyr Made,” proceeded to make a variety of false claims about the Holocaust and World War II, including that millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” merely because the Nazis did not have enough resources to care for them, rather than as a result of the intentional genocide that it was.

The White House got it right, which wasn't difficult:

“Giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over six million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism and to every subsequent victim of antisemitism.”

Holocaust deniers routinely call themselves "revisionists" to give their "moral rot" (as the White House put it) a veneer of respectability. One of their main organizations, for example, is called the Institute for Historical Review.

But the truth is that they are antisemitic deniers with no intellectual legitimacy, as Deborah Lipstadt proved in London almost 30 years ago.

There is no excuse for the Times to use the term "Holocaust revisionist" in 2024. I realize that the reporters don't write the headlines, but the editor who wrote this one should be reassigned.

Posted by Steve Lubet on September 6, 2024 at 02:41 PM | Permalink