ABSTRACT
Among the various forms of travesty and exploitation of the Holocaust—relativization, mitigation, appropriation—the crudest but also most highly publicized is the outright denial that the destruction of European Jewry ever took place at all. Noam Chomsky surely recognizes that the underlying motive of the Holocaust deniers, like that of much of his own political labour, is hatred of the state of Israel. Indeed, the crucial place of Israel in the demonology of the deniers is the most relentlessly pursued theme of Deborah Lipstadt's book. Almost without exception they claim that the Jews invented the "legend" of the Holocaust because they wanted license from the world to "displace" the poor Palestinians and establish the Jewish state; and they wanted the helpless, defeated Germans to finance the operation. The Holocaust deniers may be devilish, but they have little of the devil's traditional guile or subtlety in promoting their grotesque absurdities.
