Dear Professor Dawkins,
I write to you as a lifelong atheist. On Sunday, I saw you on the BBC TV programme The Big Questions. At one point you ridiculed a black woman who objected to the practice of homosexuality – gay I believe you called this perversion. You went on to claim that her personal opinions about God and Creation were irrelevant because they were not based on evidence. Then you referred to people like me as Holocaust Deniers, and said that what we believe is a lie. At this point I wish to indicate that your opinion about this subject is totally irrelevant because like this woman’s it is not based on evidence. Indeed, yours is far less relevant because it is based on parotting easily provable lies. The biggest lie is that there is such a thing as “Holocaust Denial”; this phrase, popularised if not invented by the polemicist Deborah E. Lipstadt, is an epithet which is designed to bring Holocaust Revisionists into ridicule, hatred, scorn and contempt, and to discourage honest, intelligent, independent thinking men and women ‐ such as you would have us believe you are ‐ from examining the evidence and arguments they adduce.
In fact, whatever your credentials and however vastly superior they are to mine, when you talk about the Holocaust you are little better if not far worse than the Creationists you so obviously despise, because for you the Holocaust is a revealed truth, and no amount of reason, logic or hard evidence will ever permit you to challenge even in the slightest the dogmatic assertions of the Holocaust lobby, however ludicrous they are. So what exactly are MY credentials for making these claims?
I was one of the speakers at the December 2006 Holocaust Conference in Tehran; ironically I picked up a copy of your book The God Delusion at Heathrow on the way out.
The so-called Holocaust is of course a complex subject but if you can be bothered, you will find the full text of my speech at the url below:
http://www.alexanderbaron.150m.com/iran_holocaust_speech_full_version.html
this url http://www.alexanderbaron.150m.com/tehran-diary.html
gives some of the background to the conference.
The lies about this meeting which were spread around the world are easily falsifiable. For some time the hawks in Washington have been attempting to stoke up a war against Iran, and the claim has been repeated time and time again that Iran’s charismatic President is a Holocaust Denier and an anti-Semite who has vowed to wipe the State of Israel off the map. No less a person than Condoleeza Rice has made this claim; as like you Rice is not only a highly qualified academic, but also Secretary of State, she has absolutely no excuse for endorsing such lies.
Holocaust Revisionists seek to establish the truth about such things as the alleged homicidal gas chambers, like the delousing chamber at Dachau that was passed off onto a credulous public after the war as an execution chamber. They seek to sort the wheat from the chaff, such as the photographs of burial pits at Belsen, which as Professor Butz points out were the mass propaganda proof of genocide, and so on. When you have spent as long in the archives as I have going through this evidence painstakingly, you will be in a position to express an informed opinion on the subject, in the meantime I suggest you stick to those you know about – like evolution.
You also make much of the supposed ignorance and bigotry of Islam, September 11 being the mass propaganda proof of this, and of course the affair of the blasphemous cartoons. The slightest critical analysis exposes this nonsense for what it is. Mohamad Atta and his fellow murderers may have nailed their flags to the mast of Islam, but what they are really fighting is a race war, or perhaps you hadn’t noticed the dearth of white faces in this perfidious movement. They could just as easily have chosen Sikhism or a “radical” branch of Christianity like the misnamed Christian Identity Movement, which is really a racial movement disguised as a religion.
As for the cartoon affair, it is true that some hotheads have made a big issue of this, but perhaps you are unaware of similar persecutions that Revisionists and others have suffered, not by unrepresentative radicals but by the state. You are perhaps unaware that in 1996, a London magistrate issued a warrant for the arrest of a cartoon, a character named Titty Fart, based on Kitty Hart, a professional Holocaust survivor who claims to have witnessed one of the Auschwitz gas chambers in action.
Mrs Hart’s book is full of the most arrant nonsense, as are the memoirs of most Holocaust survivors, but it has become a crime not simply to challenge them but even to ridicule them.
In the programme I was surprised to hear you refer to Jesus of Nazareth as though he were a real person, instead of ‐ at best ‐ a composite character. No, he wasn’t the Son of God, you got that much right, but the difference between Jesus and Muhammad is that the latter was a real live human being, a man of flesh and blood, like you and I. And he had essentially the same message as the mythical Jesus, the message that lies at the heart of all the world’s great religions. The Great JC distilled his message from the Ten Commandments into two; I can I think dispense with the one about loving God, but treating your neighbour and your fellow man generally the way you would wish to be treated, who can argue with that? Everything else from keeping the Sabbath to the prohibition of alcohol is simply window dressing. I’m surprised you don’t seem to realise that.
[The above was E-Mailed To Professor Richard Dawkins. I did not receive any sort of reply. The archived version can be found here.]
Back To Correspondence And Open Letters Index
Back To Site Index