Dan Diner, director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig, observes that different interpretations have already changed the collective Holocaust memory. "In years past," he writes in the Berlin daily Die Welt, "those Holocaust books which have achieved greatest popularity -- and which have chalked up almost sensational sales figures by the standards of historical works -- have tended to disregard hostility to Jews as the central ground for the destruction of European Jewry." These contemporary works, in their exploration of human motivation for perpetuating such evil, focus more on the issues of robbery and plunder, greed and economic calculation, and not anti-Semitism. It's easier to understand base emotions with a utilitarian purpose than to fathom the murder of people simply because of who they are.
Throughout history anti-Semitism has thrived from many perspectives, calculated to take advantage of political problems, but the bottom line reasoning always starts with Jew-hatred. Before the Third Reich, the Jews who converted to other religions could sometimes escape prejudice, but Hitler ordered the deaths of second- and even third-generation converts because their "blood" was contaminated.
Holocaust denial in the Middle East has other roots. The contemporary version goes back to the 1950s just after the state of Israel was born. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who celebrated pan-Arab nationalism in the 1960s, said "no person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the 6 million Jews who were killed." This big lie has been adopted by the Islamists who, in reality and not just in rhetoric, make no distinctions between Zionists and Jews. Their ultimate purpose is to act on Ahmadinejad's exhortation "to wipe Israel off the map."
In 1943, Heinrich Himmler warned that it was dangerous to speak publicly of the Nazi determination to exterminate the Jews. In 2001, Ahmadinejad is not so squeamish. Attention must be paid.