Quotes from Deborah E. Lipstadt

No one who offers the "yes, but" rationalization actually engages in racist violence or even thinks that they are condoning it. But they are virtually guaranteeing that it will continue because what they are doing is facilitating it.

I'll close by referring to a comment I made at the outset of this exchange, when I expressed the hope that my answers would leave both those on the right and the left discomforted. That discomfort should be caused by an acknowledgment on everyone's part that extremism and antisemitism are found not only among people on the other side of the political spectrum. As long as we are blind to it in our midst, our fight against it will be futile.

To defeat your adversary and bury him is one thing. To dress him in a jester's costume and have him perform for you is another, more crushing blow. He survives to give witness to his own powerlessness."16 This is what both Chaplin and Brooks did to Hitler.

At last, some recognition that terrorist acts may at first be directed at Jews, but they never end with Jews.

There are of course also Jews who—intentionally or unintentionally—traffic in antisemitic stereotypes. When this seeps into the larger culture, it signals that it's okay for non-Jews to do likewise.

When groups that have been subjected to discrimination and prejudice denigrate themselves, they do more than internalize a negative self-perception. They give license to others to do likewise. This is not harmless humor. It belittles Jews and women. The fact that it has its roots among Jews makes it no less debilitating.5 Whether coming from Jews or non-Jews, this manifestation of latent antisemitism spreads hateful and hurtful tropes and ideas.

Well, that's quite a taxonomy we've assembled: the extremist, the enabler, the dinner party, and the clueless antisemite. Sometimes the categories blend into one another. We've also seen that sometimes the most harm can be done, not by the violent, in-your-face, self-professed Jew-hater, but by ordinary people who have acquired these views almost through cultural osmosis.

We will in the future continue to witness instances of soft-core denial. On some level, this is much harder to fight than the hard-core deniers, but fight it we must.

It is doubtful that Corbyn deliberately seeks out antisemites to associate with and to support. But it seems that when he encounters them, their Jew-hatred is irrelevant as long as their other positions—on class, race, capitalism, the role of the state, and Israel/Palestine—are to his liking.

We began our visit at the archives. When we entered, the architectural plans for the crematoria were already spread out on the table. Some of these meticulous plans had been drawn by inmates, who, Robert Jan pointed out, signed them with their prison numbers, no names. All I could think of at that moment was Primo Levi's observation about his time in Auschwitz, where a number was tattooed on his arm: "Only a man is worthy of a name."6

As has become evident in recent years, there are those on the far left who also engage in denial. During a BBC interview in September 2017 on leftist antisemitism within Britain's Labour Party, Ken Loach was asked to comment on a session at the party's annual conference where a participant called for a "yes or no" discussion of the Holocaust. Loach's rather ambiguous response: "I think history is for us all to discuss, wouldn't you?

Ultimately, it's hard to gauge whether deniers have increased in number or are just good at using social media to make themselves seem more numerous than they actually are. While either alternative is disturbing, the deniers clearly feel more emboldened than ever before.

No, Eichmann assured him, there was no specific talk of killing methods. -- The Eichmann Trial, page 137

Deniers are not the equivalents of flat-earth theorists, nor are they just plain loonies. Theirs is not a cognitive error that can be rectified by showing them documentation or evidence. They are, pure and simple, antisemites, and their agenda is to reinforce and spread the very antisemitism that produced the Holocaust. They can't be completely discounted.

Leon Wells told of Operation 1005, the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to eradicate the evidence by opening mass graves and exhuming, burning, and pulverizing the bodies. -- The Eichmann Trial, page 87

In 2016, protesters at London's King's College disrupted a talk by Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel's version of our FBI. Students from a pro-Palestinian group chanted, threw chairs, smashed windows, and repeatedly set off the fire alarm in the room where Ayalon was speaking about the two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine situation, which is something he strongly supports.

Long before Eichmann's capture, Auerbach had conducted research on Operation 1005, the large-scale secret campaign to destroy evidence of the Final Solution by digging up the mass graves, pulverizing the bodies in specially adapted cement-mixer apparatuses, and erasing all traces of the atrocities. She also found two people who had participated as slave laborers in this effort. -- The Eichmann Trial, page 53

This toxic brew of race, religion, politics, and pseudoscience became the cornerstone of Nazi antisemitism and is today a cornerstone of the white power movement and white supremacist antisemitism.

A particularly cruel irony inherent in the targeting of Israeli academics, artists, and intellectuals is that a disproportionate number of them publicly oppose many of Israel's settlement policies. Instead of encouraging their efforts, BDS lumps them in with the very people and policies that they oppose. All this does is bar Israeli advocates for change from participating in the larger conversation with like-minded Palestinian individuals, and instead empower extremists on both sides.

The structure of antisemitism means that it's not just a bunch of haphazard ideas, but it can result in, as Fein notes, "actions—social or legal discrimination, political mobilization…and collective or state violence." It also has an internal coherence.

British sociologist David Hirsh rightly observes that "much of the important communication between Palestinians and Israelis has been conducted via academic engagement." If one wants to resolve this political situation, efforts should be made to "facilitate communication, not exclusion, [to] listen, not close down voices.

A central tenet of academic freedom is that a scholar's academic work and politics are separate and distinct from each other.

According to Christian doctrine as it was taught for millennia, Jesus was crucified because, among other things, he threatened Jews' power and financial well-being.

How ironic it is that leftist BDS supporters have adopted the tactics of right-wing McCarthyites.