Gilad Atzmon: Taking Deborah Lipstadt Apart
In a recent article, Shoa-logist Deborah Lipstadt attempts to reinstate her argument against historical revisionism.
Lipstadt is clearly opposing holocaust deniers whom she also identifies as anti Semites, yet, she fails to define what denial means. She also comes short of suggesting what anti Semitism stands for. I guess that for Lipstadt, ‘deniers’ are those who insist that our past must be revisited, scrutinised and be told from different perspectives. People who hold such views are usually called historical revisionists or simply historians. Yet, historical revisionists are clearly perceived by Lipstadt as anti Semites -- I guess that for Lipstadt , those who dare touch or fiddle with the Jewish past are nothing less than enemies.
The ‘deniers’, according to Lipstdat, are a lively movement that is working vigorously to “distort history and inculcate anti-Semitism”. Yet, it is far from being clear how anyone can ‘distort history’, for history is not a singular set of facts laid down and dictated by one group of people alone. Rather it is an attempt to transform the past into a story aspire to as full a narrative as is possible, drawn from as many points of view and from as wide a body of research as is available. History is an attempt then, to build a narrative. Different people should be entitled to hold different perspectives of their past.
Until now, it' been a real source of pride amongst Israel's support network that big name musicians have felt 'safe' to appear at Zionist fund raisers. Even whilst Israel commits ever more stomach churning war crimes in Palestine and -as we saw in May with the attack on the Freedom Flotilla - in international waters. 
