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Modern deconstructionist thought argues that experience is relative and nothing is fixed.

Thus, this atmosphere of intellectual permissiveness makes it difficult for people to assert that

anything is false or off-limits. How can one say that the Holocaust denial is a movement with no

scholarly, intellectual, or rational validity? After all, no fact, no event, no aspect of history has

any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no

ultimate historical reality. Knowledge dissolves into nothingness.

4) Holocaust denial rehabilitates anti-Semitism in the modern world. As Walter Reich,

former director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, wrote in the New York Times on July 11,1993,

the deniers, "by convincing the world that the great crime for which anti-Semitism was blamed

simply never happened--indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by Jews, and

propagated by them through their control of the media," make anti-Semitic arguments seem once

again respectable in civilized discourse and even acceptable for governments to pursue anti-

Semitic policies. Holocaust denial makes the world safe for anti-Semitism, and in effect, as

historian Yehuda Bauer has said in my hearing, creates the preconditions that would deny the

Jewish people the right to live in the post-Holocaust world. Or as French literary historian Pierre

Vidal-Naquet puts it: "It is an attempt at extermination on paper that pursues in another register

the actual work of extermination. One revives the dead in order the better to strike the living."

(Assassins of Memory, p. 24)

5) Finally, Holocaust denial is a deterrent to exploring the deep effects which sin has on

human society. Historians, theologians, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have

sought to explain the Holocaust by asking the most fundamental question of all about the human

condition: "Why did this happen?" As we explore the matter ourselves, we as Christian scholars

are prepared to include human sin as a root cause. However, the deniers respond: "It didn't

happen." Thus, we don't need to ask this ultimate question about human failure. But as

Christian scholars, is this not the very place where we should begin our inquiry?