Israel Matzav: Say it isn't so: Charles Johnson trivializes the Holocaust

Say it isn't so: Charles Johnson trivializes the Holocaust

Once upon a time, I was a mere commenter on Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs. Eventually, I posted so many well-received comments on LGF that I started this blog. I admired Charles Johnson as one of the righteous gentiles. Life was good.

But like more than 1,500 other people, when Charles turned Left in November 2008, I became expendable and was eventually banned from posting on LGF. From what I can gather, since I was banned in August, LGF has continued to lurch Leftward.

On Monday night, Charles published a screed entitled Why I parted ways with the Right (Hat Tip: Memeorandum) in which he tries to explain what we bloggers on the Right see as inexplicable - unless the photoshop above is true. Among the reasons Charles cites for his parting of ways is

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

It's almost beside the point to point out that the whole notion of whether 'climate change' exists has been called into serious question over the past week. But what the heck is 'climate change denialism'? Ron Rosenbaum explains.

When I started paying attention again to the controversy after the release of the pathetic CRU e-mails, I noticed the most desperate of the last ditch defenders of the CRU charlatans — and indeed the CRU charlatans themselves — would resort to calling any of those who disagreed “denialists.” That the use of “denialist” had grown as the failure of their predictions (the discredited “hockey stick” chart) increased.

To me that shameful, trivializing word use alone is more exposure than any e-mail could be of their lack of critical intelligence of the sort that makes them unfit to call themselves scientists, or, in the case of many of their “green journalist” sycophants, ignorant of how actual science works.

Are they really so stupid they can’t see the difference? Let me try to explain it in simple terms for them: The holocaust happened. Already. It’s history. Up to six million were exterminated. They’re gone and their families still mourn. Climate scientists show us graphs and charts and predictions of terrible things that will happen (but have not or may not) because of human perpetrators. Unfortunately, many of their predictions have not come true. Others are based on (we now know) flawed or terminally tweaked models and dishonestly skewed data sets. There is doubt, there is room for skepticism. There may be warming, but it may not be caused or curable by man. So you see, denying every tenet of anthropogenic global warming is not the same as denying the Holocaust. Get it?

Having dealt with the question of Holocaust denial in my book, Explaining Hitler, and a number of later essays, I find it hideously offensive, this conflation of an unimaginably horrific history of mass murder with an alleged immutable “scientific consensus” that (if it isn’t dodgy and sketchy) is at best a majority vote, not the same thing as scientific truth. Using the bodies of the dead to stifle dissent when your “science” isn’t persuasive to some.

Indeed. Do you think the use of the term 'denialist' with respect to 'climate change' isn't intended to evoke images of the Holocaust? Consider this (Hat Tip: Clive Hamilton).

If the David Irvings of the world were to succeed, and the public rejected the mountain of evidence for the Holocaust, then the consequences would be a rewriting of history and a probable increase in anti-Semitism.

If the climate deniers were to succeed, and stopped the world responding to the mountain of evidence for human-induced global warming, then hundreds of millions of mostly impoverished people around the world would die from the effects of climate change.

They will die from famine, flood and disease caused by our unwillingness to act.

Is it a coincidence that Holocaust denier and White Supremacist Nick Griffin of Britain's British National Party (a group that Charles has correctly criticized for their neo-Nazi leanings in the past) will be representing the EU at the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen?

One of the things Charles has never understood is that very little in this world is black and white - it's mostly different shades of gray. Holocaust denial is one of the few things that is either black or white. Please Charles, tell us you haven't joined the deniers.

Israel Matzav: Say it isn't so: Charles Johnson trivializes the Holocaust