I was asked this question by a friend in Australia today.
I said that people deny the Holocaust because they want to get back at Jews.
Imagine your face, body and life had been terribly disfigured by a brutal battle with cancer. Now you’ve staggered back to work and you’re trying to get yourself going again. What would be the most hurtful thing somebody could say to you? To deny that you had cancer and to claim that it was all in your head.
My life was disfigured at age 21 by something that some doctors called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I was essentially bedridden until 27 and then moderately hobbled after that. Few things felt more hurtful for many years (until I became largely inured) than people denying the reality of what I had endured.
So too with Jews. They’ve staggered away from the Holocaust, but it has left an open wound on the Jewish psyche. To deny the Holocaust is to deny the thing that is most sensitive to Jews. We all have the ability to wound others and so when we want to inflict pain, we’re all pretty good at finding at these sensitive points.
My friend particularly heard from one South African mate who denied the Holocaust. I said that while most Jews went along with apartheid, many of the regime’s most prominent critics were Jewish and so you could, in part, blame the Jews for the fall of apartheid.
To back up my point that denying the Holocaust was just a tactic to get back at Jews, I said that you will notice deniers never contain themselves to history. They immediately jump from denying the Holocaust to complain about Jews running the media and the banks and the politicians and the like. So their real beef is not with historical facts about WWII, but with Jews.
