The lie about the Jews was born in Europe
There is a history most people do not know, and it explains a great deal of what we are hearing now.
When the war ended in 1945, Europe held the evidence. The camps, the paperwork, the bodies, the numbers. But Europe held something else too: millions of people who had collaborated, looked away, or informed on a neighbour. And a political movement that had just been convicted of the worst thing human beings have done to each other.
Fascism needed to survive. It could not survive with Auschwitz around its neck.
So the work began. It started in France. As early as 1948 Maurice Bardèche published a book that turned the whole thing upside down: Nuremberg was victors’ justice, the numbers were inflated, the Germans were victims too. After him came Paul Rassinier, who had himself been held in Buchenwald, and who made denial respectable by saying he had been there.
In the 1970s it moved to America. Arthur Butz wrote his book in 1976. Two years later Willis Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review in California, which wrapped it in academic language: conferences, journals, footnotes. In France the literature professor Robert Faurisson made it a public affair.
In England David Irving became the best known of them all, until he brought a libel case in London in 2000 and lost it. The court found he had deliberately distorted the historical record.
Notice what this is. French, American, English. Not Arab.
What was it meant to achieve?
Three things, and they connect.
Fascism had to be washed clean so it could stand for election again. Without Auschwitz, Nazism is just one hard nationalism among others, and the political work can continue.
Guilt had to be lifted off nations. Germany would be spared a century of shame, France would be spared Vichy, Eastern Europe would be spared its own record.
There is something deeply seductive about being told that the thing you feel sick about never really happened.
And antisemitism needed a new language. You could not say the old thing out loud after 1945. But you could say: they are lying. They invented it. They profit from it. Same hatred, new packaging, and now dressed up as source criticism.
Then it travelled to the Middle East.
Not because it originated there, but because it was useful there. The French philosopher Roger Garaudy published a book in 1995 on the founding myths of Israeli politics. He was convicted in France and became a bestseller across the Arab world. In 2006 Iran hosted an international denial conference with European revisionists as guests of honour.
Be precise here. Hostility to Israel in the region is not built on denial. It is built on 1948, on land, on displacement, on the defeats of 67 and 73. Denial arrived afterwards as an argument that could be used.
The classic Arab objection was not that it did not happen, but this: it happened, it was Europe’s crime, why are we paying for it.
But once it was there, it was woven into textbooks, sermons and television. Which is why it is worth noticing that Saudi textbooks today have removed the antisemitism without adding the Holocaust. You can delete the hatred without inserting the truth.
And now it is back.
But it looks different. Today you rarely hear anyone say it did not happen. You hear something more dangerous: that it no longer means anything. That Israel is the new Nazi Germany. That Gaza is Warsaw. That Jews “use” the Holocaust as a tool.
That requires no denial at all. It requires only that you empty the event of weight, then turn it against the descendants of the victims.
We do not owe that lie to the Middle East. We made it ourselves, we exported it, and we took it back when it returned in a new shape.
Europe invented denial to escape its guilt. We have not escaped. We have only changed the words.
The lie was born here. It dies here, TODAY!❤️🔥🪽