Cenk Uygur’s Holocaustian Faux Pas at the Web Summit

A few days ago, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks show on YouTube was moderating a panel discussion at the second annual Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. When a Muslim on the panel said that Muslims should pursue moderation (thus implying that some Muslims had in some way gone wrong), Uygur undertook to defend Islam by attacking Christianity:

“The Holocaust was what? Seventy years ago? It seems like Christianity was monstrous, just seventy years ago, way worse than Islam has ever been, than any religion has ever been. If you took your point of view in 1942, you would say: The Christians are the worst; the Christianists are the ones that are destroying the world! We must reform Christianity, which is so barbaric that it has just killed thirteen million people! These Christians are the problem!” (Cenk Uygur at the 2017 Web Summit)

In the ensuing argument, Uygur emphasized that Christians were by far the most bloodthirsty people of all time, much more so than Muslims:

“Seventy years ago they killed more people than any people in the history of the planet!” (Cenk Uygur at the 2017 Web Summit)

This is egregious. Although the Holocaust gets more attention than any other accusation of mass murder, even mainstream holocaustography – today – does not claim that the Holocaust was the largest mass murder of all time. (This was however a claim made in the US government's 1946 film Death Mills, which alleged that 20 million had been murdered in the German concentration-camps.)

If Cenk Uygur (purportedly an ex-Muslim) really meant to defend Islam, attacking Christianity was a very poor way to do it, since it tends to perpetuate the notion of a “clash of civilizations,” which mainly benefits Zionism. Invoking the Holocaust is especially counterproductive because the Holocaust is used to gain indulgence for the State of Israel, and to stir up wars against that state's adversaries, like Bashar al-Assad.

While the likely effect of Uygur's rhetoric of recrimination is unhelpful, there is also a problem with his “facts” about the Holocaust, which are out of date and do not match the current position of the Jewish authorities.

Uygur must have missed the news last January, that the non-Jewish death toll of the concentration camps has now been reduced, according to Israel's august authority on the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, to less than half a million. This clarification was issued to refute the Trump Administration's out-of-date position that there had been five million non-Jewish victims. Somebody should tell Uygur about this change in the Holocaust. (See my article, “Anti-Gentiles Deny the 5 Million!")

Beyond that, it is not evident that either war propaganda or Zionist propaganda ever blamed Christianity for deaths of non-Jews during the Second World War. Rather, the exaggerated claim of five million (S. Wiesenthal, 1970s) or eight million (A. Rueckerl, 1968) or fourteen million (OMGUS, 1946) non-Jewish deaths was explained as following from the false premise that Hitler's Germans regarded themselves as “the master-race,” a false accusation left over from the First World War.

Since Jews (most-vociferously Deborah Lipstadt) now define the Holocaust as being strictly about Jews, it is wrong to count even the alleged half-million non-Jewish dead as part of the Holocaust.

From any perspective, thus, Cenk Uygur's conception of the Holocaust is misinformed.

Journalistic reaction to Uygur's statement, however, added even more errors. Jordan Schachtel (formerly a national-security correspondent for Breitbart who followed the lead of Ben Shapiro and other Jews in resigning in early 2016 because of the site's support for Donald Trump) wrote about Uygur's statement for Conservative Review (9 November 2017). The title was:

“Young Turks' Cenk Uygur blames Christianity for the Holocaust: a new and loathsome variant on Holocaust Revisionism.”

For once, mainstream media say "Holocaust Revisionism" instead of "Holocaust Denial"! But it is certainly not Holocaust Revisionism to say that Christianity caused the Holocaust. That proposition has been around for a long time.

In 1961 Jewish scholar Jules Isaac gave a lecture at the Sorbonne that was translated and published by the National Conference of Christians and Jews (of which Isaac was honorary president) with the English title Has Anti-Semitism Roots in Christianity? The translation was accompanied by an introduction from Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston. In this lecture Isaac contended that Christianity was responsible for the Holocaust. (A. Meisels, AP, 15 June 1961)

The Jewish Post of 19 May 1961 quoted extensively from Professor Isaac's lecture, wherein he said:

“It is an essential factor that Hitlerian racialism appeared on ground which previous centuries had prepared for it. Did the Nazis spring from nothing or from the bosom of a Christian people? The autobiography of the Commandant in Chief of the Auschwitz Camp, Rudolf Hoess, is being published. This man charged with monstrous crimes for which he showed no remorse, came from a pious Catholic family and had considered taking Holy Orders.”

After quoting traditional unflattering teachings about the Jewish religion from Catholic schoolbooks, the professor observes:

“Phrases from a school manual but let there be no mistake— they are but the echo of other phrases which are to be found at a higher level, in the works of theologians of repute.

“That is where we stand less than twenty years after Auschwitz, after the death of Anne Frank and thousands like her. Is it not sad, terribly sad? Is it not a challenge to true Christian charity?” (Jewish Post (Indianapolis), 19 May 1961)

This Jewish historian who blamed Christianity for gassings at Auschwitz was not an unimportant person. He was the author of several histories, and at one time France's Superintendant of Public Instruction.

On 16 October 1949 Jules Isaac was granted an audience with Pope Pius XII wherein he complained about a traditional Catholic prayer recited on Good Friday, Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis (Let us pray also for the treacherous Jews). The prayer was revised by the next Pope, John XXIII, in 1959. On 13 June 1960 Isaac was granted a private audience with Pope John wherein he complained more generally about the traditional Catholic teaching about Jews. The result was Nostra Aetate, a declaration of the Church's attitude toward non-Christian religions, which was approved by the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

This idea that Christianity was to blame was included in the Holocaust miniseries aired by NBC television in 1978. Some Christians complained about it at the time.

Why then, does Schachtel seem to be totally unaware of this long history of Jews blaming Christianity for the Holocaust? It seems to have everything to do with the fact that he is operating in a Neoconservative milieu. Conservative Review happens to be under the editorship of prominent Neoconservative Mark Levin.

As already mentioned, President Trump came under fire last January for not explicitly stating the Jewishness of the Holocaust on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was a collision between the old war propaganda — trusted, apparently, by President Trump — wherein almost everybody was a victim of the evil Nazis (or Germans), and the later, Zionist version of the story, dubbed "the Holocaust," wherein the victimhood of Jews has been strongly emphasized and a large part of the non-Jewish world (including Christianity, or especially Christianity) is to blame.

Trump clashed with Lipstadt et al. because he was not on board with the Zionist version of the story. What happened between Cenk Uygur and Conservative Review seems to represent yet another collision resulting from the practice of reshaping the Holocaust to fit a political agenda.

It was an underlying idea in Zionism, that Jews could not trust the rest of the world and had to do things for themselves. They needed to have their own country. This idea was presented in the Holocaust miniseries in 1978.

By contrast the Neoconservatives, rising to prominence circa 1980, represent a new approach to Zionism that deemphasizes conflict between Christians and Jews in order to cultivate Christian (especially Premillennialist) support for the State of Israel and for Zionist wars.

Unlike Jules Isaac, who used guilt to influence the Catholic position toward Judaism, the Neoconservatives used flattery to influence Protestants to support the State of Israel. A notion of shared “Judeo-Christian tradition” and “Judeo-Christian morality” was promoted, and fundamental differences between Christians and Jews were swept under the rug. One may question their sincerity, but the fact is that you will not normally hear a Neoconservative Jew say anything other than praise about Christianity – at least not in public.

For the Neoconservatives, therefore, any reminder that prominent Jews ever blamed Christianity for the Holocaust is highly inconvenient. An effective response is to turn it around by having a Jew conspicuously defend Christianity, assigning blame for the Holocaust preferably to some putative enemy of both Christians and Jews, which is how Schachtel represents Hitler.

Thus a writer for a Neoconservative publication condemned Cenk Uygur's mention of an old Jewish interpretation of the Final Solution as “Holocaust Revisionism.”