An important association of Jewish legal experts is demanding new and more severe laws against Holocaust revisionism, reports a front-page article in the Athens News, June 28, 1998. A conference of International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IAJLJ), meeting in June in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, warned that "the international revisionist movement, using the Internet and an orchestrated propaganda campaign, could warp the historical memory of younger generations."

"The denial movement has a historical institute which is reviewing history and whose real aim is to deny the Holocaust," charged Itzhak Nener, an Israeli who is deputy president of the IAJLJ. "They have tremendous sums of money," he added.

"One aim of the conference," the Athens News reported, "is to convince more countries to pass legislation outlawing Holocaust denial." As it is, several European countries, including France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, already enforce censorship laws making it a crime to dispute the orthodox Holocaust extermination story of six million Jewish wartime dead. "Nener and his colleagues said the relevant punishment was too lenient, and more countries should crack down on people claiming the Nazi slaughter of Jews never took place," the Athens paper went on.

Another conference participant, Isidor Wolfe, a lawyer from Vancouver, Canada, said: "This growing [revisionist] group is using web sites to make amazingly ridiculous claims, like that they measured the gas chambers and found they were not big enough for people."

The IAJLJ plans to hold conferences in more than 20 other European countries to lobby for more anti-revisionism laws.

The statements by Nener and Wolfe are typical, in that they exaggerate the financial resources of the international revisionist movement and grotesquely misrepresent revisionist arguments and findings. If revisionist arguments were really as absurd as these Jewish legal experts contend, there would hardly be a need for laws to punish anyone espousing them.

Actually, the anti-revisionist laws that are already in place, and the IAJLJ conference's call for more such legal measures, confirm the tremendous importance of the Holocaust story for Jewish-Zionist interests, and underscore the inability of defenders of the orthodox Holocaust story to respond to revisionist evidence and arguments with compelling evidence of their own.

Given the record, the IAJLJ call for harsher anti-revisionist laws is likely to be successful. In recent years European governments have generally been unwilling to resist Jewish demands for money or legal measures directed against real or perceived enemies.

- M. W.