We already knew that there’s a place of honor in the contemporary Catholic Church for serial child molesters. Now, by reinstating Richard Williamson as a bishop, Pope Benedict XVI has made clear that Holocaust denial is also welcome.
According to the NY Times, Williamson just last week “said he did not believe that six million Jews died in the Nazi gas chambers.” That’s interesting, because no one believes six million died by gas. There were many, many other methods. On Hitler’s Eastern Front, in Poland and the Baltics [farther east as well – DA], hundreds of thousands were herded into forests, mowed down by gunfire and dumped into mass graves, for instance, greatly contributing to the total.
As others have pointed out, Holocaust deniers don’t deny that Jews died during World War II. They just deny that this was part of Hitler’s elaborately engineered final solution (which it was). Therefore they can say, as Mel Gibson did in defense of his Holocaust-denying father, “Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. […]” But six million people is not “some” people. It is a vastly disproportionate number from one single ethnic-religious group, and there’s something obscene in even having to say so.
Anyhow, the Pope can tell us all he wants that he doesn’t share Williamson’s view. The thing is, he’s not particularly bothered by it.
Incidentally, I’ve noted on occasion that contrary to what many assume, the “9/11 Truth” movement is largely a phenomenon of the extreme right, not so much the extreme left. So it’s little surprise that Richard Williamson, a believer in the hoax of Holocaust denial, is also an ardent “Truther,” a promoter of the nonsense that the Bush administration — yes, the utterly inept Bush administration — engineered one of the most complex and diabolical schemes ever unleashed on a domestic civilian population. “A pretext to invade Afghanistan,” Williamson calls it. Please. Bush made it abundantly clear that to invade a country — say, Iraq — under a pretext, you just go ahead and do it.
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