The motive behind the claim that there is widespread Holocaust denial is not hard to find. In a society saturated with the Holocaust, how else to justify yet more museums, books, curricula, films and programmes except by conjuring up the bogey of Holocaust denial?

Thus Deborah Lipstadt’s acclaimed book, Denying the Holocaust, as well as a contrived poll alleging pervasive Holocaust denial, were released just as the Washington Holocaust Museum opened. Denying the Holocaust is an updated version of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ tracts. To document widespread Holocaust denial, Lipstadt cites publications by — in Novick’s words — ‘a tiny band of cranks, kooks and misfits’. Her piece de resistance is Arthur Butz, the protagonist of her chapter ‘Entering the mainstream’. Butz, who teaches electrical engineering at Northwestern University, published his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century with a crackpot press; were it not for the likes of Lipstadt, no one would have heard of him

The one truly mainstream holocaust denier is Bernard Lewis. A French court even convicted Lewis of denying genocide. But this was the Armenian genocide and Lewis is pro-Israel. Accordingly, this holocaust denial raises no hackles in the US; the fact that Turkey is an Israeli ally was a further extenuationg circumstance. Mention of the Armenian genocide is, therefore, taboo. Wiesel, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg withdrew from an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv because the sponsors, against government urging, included sessions on the Armenian case. Acting at Israel’s behest, the US Holocaust Council ‘virtually effaced’ mention of the Armenians in the Washington Holocaust Museum; and Jewish lobbyists in Congress blocked a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide.

To question a survivor’s testimony, to denounce the role of Jewish collaborators, to suggest that Germans suffered during the bombing of Dresden or any state except Germany committed crimes in WWII is, according to Lipstadt, all evidence of Holocaust denial. But the most ‘insidious’ form of Holocaust denial, she suggests, is ‘immoral equivalencies’: that is, denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust. This argument has intriguing implications. Goldhagen argues that Serbian ‘deeds’ in Kosovo ‘are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale’. That would make Goldhagen ‘in essence’ a Holocaust denier. Across the political spectrum, Israeli commentators compared Serbia’s ‘deeds’ in Kosovo with Israeli ‘deeds’ in 1948 against the Palestinians. Reckoning, then, by Goldhagen, Israel committed a holocaust. Not even Palestinians claim that any more.