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Normally this is the sort of offense I’d chalk up to the juvenile vandalism impulse and not assign it any metaphysical motive. But the nature of a recent cyberattack strongly suggests it was just such an event. The New Jersey Jewish News reports on the takeover of some Jewish Web sites (WebCite cached article):
Anti-Semitic hackers invaded the websites of 50 Reform synagogues before Shabbat on Nov. 23 with an hour-long video that argued that the Holocaust did not occur. …
The hackers appear to be a group calling itself “Moroccan Ghosts,” according to Jeffrey Salkin, New Jersey community director of the Anti-Defamation League.
According to the group’s Facebook page, the Moroccan Ghosts targeted synagogues belonging to the Union for Reform Judaism because they consider the organization, said Salkin, quoting the website, “one of the most significant and very extreme Zionist assemblies that supports Israel in America.”
These sites were all hosted by the Union for Reform Judaism. As the NJJN explains, this is not the first time the group has hacked into sites in order to promote their Holocaust denials. They appear to subscribe to a view common in the Arab world, that the Holocaust was fabricated by the Jews in order to evoke sympathy for them and justify granting them their own state in the Levant.
The folly of this view is clear when one realizes that Jews had been living in the Levant for many centuries; by World War I the British, who then controlled the region, had expressed the goal of establishing a Jewish state there. For Jews to have gone to the elaborate machinations required to “stage” the Holocaust, merely to justify something that a lot of folks (in the occidental world at least) already supported for decades by the 1940s, seems more than a little excessive.
The irrationality of this claim, however — as with just about every elaborate conspiracy theory that’s ever been cooked up — escapes those who hold it. Telling them there’s no evidence for their conspiracy doesn’t work, because they view the lack of evidence ironically as evidence in favor of it (“See how effective the Jewish cabal was? They successfully cleaned up all traces of what they did! What better proof could there be?”).
Photo credit: Johnk85, via Flickr.
Hat tip: HartfordFAVS.
