Sorry everyone, I know I still owe you a response on the Gaza piece, but I’ve been distracted fighting with Holocaust (quasi) deniers and the Jews who defend them

A quick update: last night, the comedian Dave Smith posted on X to his 800,000 followers: “You cannot be pro-life and pro-war.”

Smith is wrong. Wrong generally and specifically. War is sometimes necessary. Israel had to invade Gaza in 2023, even if it is wrong to put civilians at risk now.

But if Smith’s name is familiar to you, it may be from his April appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Smith debated Douglas Murray about Israel – and the historian Darryl Cooper, whose revisionist (to put it politely) takes on World War 2 and the Holocaust are highly popular with the isolationist right.

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Cooper is very clever.

He does not deny the Nazis killed Jews, he just refuses to admit that those killings came in an organized, genocidal campaign to eradicate Jews.

I don’t know why Cooper won’t admit the truth. Only he does. But in doing so he denies the true horror of the Nazis and the reality of the Holocaust.

Even stranger to me: Smith, who claims to be Jewish and have lost family members in the Holocaust, defends Cooper — as he did on Rogan’s show.

So I mocked Smith’s “pro-life and pro-war” tweet, saying he “thinks Auschwitz is a spa and Unit 731 was a cool sushi place.” [Unit 731 was a Japanese military division which killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese prisoners in some of the most inhumane medical experiments imaginable during World War 2.]

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SOURCE

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Smith didn’t like my calling him out. Then Cooper got involved too. I had a long back-and-forth with both on X.

Now I have agreed to debate Smith on Rav Arora’s podcast tomorrow (Rav is an independent journalist – I published his interview with Dr. Philip Krause, a former top vaccine regulator, in May).

So instead of explaining to all of you why I think Israel can and must prevent famine in Gaza, I need to get ready to debate a guy who seems to think Israel has no right to defend itself at all. “Israel’s intention is to have all the land,” Smith said on November 3, 2023 — November 3, 2023, even as Israel was still counting its dead from the October 7 attacks.

Yep, looks like it’s one of those weeks when I have managed to make both sides want to punch me in the face. Doing somethin’ right!

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(Defending the truth and historical reality — from left and right. Nothing matters more to me.)

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I am going to follow up on that Gaza piece. I fully expect a lot of you will remain unconvinced. But I want to say: it’s precisely because of the insidious games guys like Smith and Cooper play that people who believe Israel does have the right to defend itself (as I do) insist that it do so according to the laws of war and not fall into the trap of dehumanizing a civilian population.

That doesn’t mean avoiding all, or even most, civilian casualties. But when Israeli government officials talk about “driving out” the Gazan population, they are crossing a very bright line. I cannot disagree with Dave Smith on that.

So.

Wish me luck tomorrow. Rav’s Substack is here. Not sure about timing.

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My piece last year about Darryl Cooper and the rhetorical games he plays is here: