“Two outs,” Sam said, glancing up at the television. “I know you, Ott,” Sam said. “I know what you want. I’m just like you.”
Ott looked down, embarrassed.
“I’m not a religious zealot, and neither are you” Sam continued. “We’re practical men. My mother was a Roman Catholic, and that’s how I was raised; I converted to Islam purely for authenticity. The simple reality is this: In 1948, the Jews evicted Arab families from their homes and re-created a state that didn’t exist between the year seventy and nineteen forty-eight. Think about that. There was no Israel for one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-eight years. What happened to the Jews in the nineteen forties to change all that?”
“The Holocaust?” Ott said.
“See, I told you we think alike,” Sam said. Ott smiled. “Now, the Jews base their claim to Palestine on a four thousand year old legend of self-serving hearsay-an alleged oral promise supposedly made by God to Abraham. There’s no writing, no deed, no nothing; just a single Hebrew man’s claim that God told him the land was his and his descendents’. God didn’t tell the rest of the world about the deal; he didn’t say a single word about it to the other people living there; he supposedly just whispered it to one man, who happened to be a Jew, who happened to want to live there. If that happened today, and this guy showed up in court to claim his land, he would be laughed out of the place; but since it happened four thousand years ago, and one of the guy’s ancestors wrote it down in the Bible, some people believe it must be true. Amazing. That’s a pretty thin reed to build a country on, but it’s not by any means unprecedented. Every civilization, and every conquering power, has claimed their land as a matter of Divine Providence; that’s what leaders need to say to motivate their people to kill other people, and that’s what leaders and their people need to say to each other to soothe their consciences.
“Now think about this: For nearly two thousand years, this alleged promise from God wasn’t enough to restore Palestine to the Jews. If God really wanted the Jews to have that land, don’t you think he would have made sure they had it? He is, after all, God. So, again, any rational human being would conclude that the claim that God promised the Jews a home in Palestine is a fabrication, pure and simple. But the Jews have been clinging to it for two thousand years, because they really want that land. Then, in 1948, they finally get their chance.
“There’s no dispute that many millions of people were killed during World War II; it was an ugly, horrendous war. And there’s no doubt that the Nazis, like the Soviets, had prison camps and they did their share of mass killings of all sorts of people for all sorts of despicable reasons. It’s also true that your grandfather’s incinerators turned thousands of bodies at those camps into ash. But the big question everybody’s eager to overlook in indicting an entire nation for genocide is what kinds of bodies were processed in those incinerators, and how did they die?
“Yes, there is significant evidence of anti-Semitism among Hitler and other Nazis, but that has been true of all of Europe and Russia for centuries. We must concede that, for centuries, Christian Europe greatly preferred that Jews find someplace else to live. We must also concede that, for centuries, Jews have resisted this; but, suddenly, they came up with a bold, new idea. Instead of demanding room in Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, and London, they offered to leave willingly if they could return to Palestine. And, guess what? The Europeans just happened to control Palestine after the war! How convenient! But there’s a big problem: the Arabs who already live there. The Europeans are a people with high ethics and morality; they’ve just fought two world wars and they’re not about to take part in the eviction of another people from their land. So, the Jews come up with yet another bold, new idea. They convince the world that they alone were singled out, above all others, for extermination by the Nazis, and that this will happen again and again unless they have their own state in Palestine. They also remind everybody that they lived in Palestine until the Romans-another European power-kicked them out in 70 A.D. So, the Europeans of today would only be righting the wrongs of the past by helping the Jews re-create the State of Israel. And, besides, they argue, using the same bigotry they claim led to the Holocaust, it’s just a bunch of stupid Arabs on a worthless piece of desert! Who cares about them? Who cares about desert? It’s genius, really. The Europeans gave up the innocent lives and lands of millions of Arab people as a burnt offering for their own sins. My family became the fatted calf for somebody else’s sacrifice.”
Sam lit a new cigarette, visibly angry. Ott was astonished. For the first time, he had met somebody like himself, with a legitimate reason to be angry at Jews. But it still didn’t mean the Holocaust was a hoax. He felt sorry for Sam and called for Trudy to bring them another round.
“I never looked at it that way,” Ott said. “I guess I’ve never thought of the Arabs as having so much in common with the Germans. So that’s why your people are blowing themselves up in Israeli markets-because your land was taken from you?”
“No,” Sam said, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke in disgust. “We do suicide bombings because we’re stupid, uneducated, and don’t know any better. That only hurts us, not the Jews. Do you see Jews blowing themselves up? Or Germans? Or anybody else? Of course, Jews have been working on taking back Palestine for two thousand years, while we’ve only been at it fifty; who knows, maybe the Jews were doing suicide attacks against the Romans in the first century? It takes time to see reality and the path from here to there; history is as much a function of the present as the past, and it’s more a function of emotion than fact. History and truth are what we want them to be, Ott. For example, most historians now agree that fewer than one million people in total died at Auschwitz, not the four million originally claimed. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Okay. Did you know that many historians also agree that fewer than four million Jews in total died during World War II, not the six million in schoolbooks-versus twenty million Soviets, fifteen million Chinese, six million Poles, and nearly three million Japanese?”
“No, I didn’t know that either.”
“And no credible historian believes Germans turned Jews into soap and lamp shades.”
“I never believed that,” Ott said. “Germans aren’t animals.”
Trudy brought the drinks. She heard this last comment, raised her eyebrows, shook her head and walked away. Ott sipped his beer more slowly now. He was beginning to feel intoxicated, and he worried that he wouldn’t be able to follow what Sam was saying.
“Did you know,” Sam asked, “that more Jews died of disease and malnutrition in the camps than of unnatural causes? Why are the so-called ‘facts’ changing over time? Now consider this: standard disinfection and delousing techniques across Europe to control the spread of typhus and cholera in prison populations included fumigation of inmates with insecticide gases in the nineteen-thirties. So, yes, in a sense, the Jews were gassed, but not to kill them, to save them, and other prisoners, from infestation. And air raid shelters at the camps, and throughout the rest of Germany, utilized airtight doors for fear of chemical attacks after the terrors of World War I, and shower facilities at the camps often doubled as bomb shelters.”
“Struck out,” Ott said with a groan. “Game’s over.” Sam glanced up at the television, then back at Ott.
“Add to this that cremation has always been viewed suspiciously by the Jews, who thought of it as a sacrilege and means of concealing crimes. Then consider that the Soviets, more bloodied by the Germans than anyone else-and governed by pathological, Stalinist liars-captured the prison camps in eastern Europe and denied access to the west. Today, those camps are the only camps believed to have had gas chambers; even the Jews now agree no gas chambers existed on German soil. Now consider this: The eastern European Jews were the ones most insistent upon the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine before the war began; and they were the ones who claimed the Germans were gassing them. Motive and opportunity, Ott, motive and opportunity. All you have left to support the Holocaust stories are the tortured confessions of some Nazi officers and the inconsistent accounts of a few prison camp survivors about the general horrors of war.”