Soft Denial in Different Political and Social Areas on the Web

Abstract

This chapter is concerned not so much with Holocaust denial in those European countries where it is an offense, but rather examines the various and different forms of trivialization of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. This trivialization of the Nazi genocide does not always occur with the intention of diminishing it but rather with the intention of using the Holocaust to draw attention to political or social issues, such as abortion, mass animal transports and so on or, indeed, simply to serve as an advertising ploy. Those who use such a clearly loaded historical term in order to dramatically publicize their concerns usually do so not to defame or discredit Jews. This is different to what is often referred to as ‘Holocaust distortion’ in which a reversal of perpetrator-victim depicts Israel as the ‘new Nazis’ and puts ‘the Jews’ in general under general suspicion for all the evil in the world and in particular for the conflict in the Middle East. In this instance, the conduct of the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government’s policy is equated with Nazi persecution. The terms ‘Holocaust inversion’ and ‘Holocaust equivalence’ thus describe a situation in which Israel is delegitimized because the government or the military are accused of behaving toward the Palestinians in the same way as the Nazis had against the Jews, leading to the ‘annihilation’ of the Palestinians.