I can disabuse him of that BS in about 90 minutes:
A nice little piece of filmmaking, by the way.
Posted on 02/11/2009 9:36:09 AM PST by NYer
Bishop Richard Williamson's denial of the Holocaust has done serious damage to the Catholic Church. In an e-mail and fax exchange with SPIEGEL, the ultra-conservative bishop says that he is willing to "review the historical evidence."
SPIEGEL: The Vatican is demanding that you retract your denial of the Holocaust, and it is threatening to not allow you to resume your activities as a bishop. How will you react?
Williamson: Throughout my life, I have always sought the truth. That is why I converted to Catholicism and became a priest. And now I can only say something, the truth of which I am convinced. Because I realize that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must now review the historical evidence once again. I said the same thing in my interview with Swedish television: Historical evidence is at issue, not emotions. And if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.
SPIEGEL: How can an educated Catholic deny the Holocaust?
Williamson: I addressed the subject in the 1980s. I had read various writings at the time. I cited the Leuchter report (eds. note: a debunked theory produced in the 1980s claiming erroneously that the Nazi gas chambers were technically impractical) in the interview, and it seemed plausible to me. Now I am told that it has been scientifically refuted. I plan now to look into it.
SPIEGEL: You could travel to Auschwitz yourself.
Williamson: No, I will not travel to Auschwitz. I've ordered the book by Jean-Claude Pressac. It's called "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers." A printout is now being sent to me, and I will read it and study it.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
I can disabuse him of that BS in about 90 minutes:
A nice little piece of filmmaking, by the way.
Apparently, Rom 11:28.
I don’t know but I don’t think he was Jewish.
Williamson is not denying the Holocaust, but he is questioning its scope. It is based on a book that he read (mentioned in the article at source) and the book convinced him. He now promises to study the rebuttals of the book and see if the rebuttals change his mind. That is not a behavior of an irrational person.
He was Anglican.
Pressac was originally a Holocaust denier who, with Robert Faurisson, attempted to disprove what he considered historically inaccurate depictions of the concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau as extermination camps. Upon visiting Auschwitz, however, Pressac was able to view first-hand the extensive archive of construction documents which had survived due to being located in the construction office rather than the administrative offices. These convinced him that his former views were in error, an event he describes in the postface of Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, saying that he "nearly did away with myself one evening in October 1979 in the main camp, the Stammlager, overwhelmed by the evidence and by despair". [1] He published his conclusions along with much of the underlying evidence in his 1989 book, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers [2] . In his 1993 Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz [3] , he further delineated the operation of the crematoria at Auschwitz, and their integration into the larger Nazi program to eradicate the Jews of Europe. Pressac estimates that between 631 000 and 711 000 were killed at Auschwitz.[4]WIKIPEDIA
In fact, I think I should like to read that one myself.
I think it’s going on my book list too.
I couldn't disagree with you more. There's a lot of perfectly-legitimate questioning of the scope of the Holocaust (i.e., Smith says 6.1 million Jews, Jones say 6.8 million, Brown says no, more like 5.4 million). Even Raul Hilberg's seminal work from the early sixties (The Destruction of the European Jews) claimed 5 million as I recall. That number reflected the understanding of the time.
But there's got to be some kind of line beyond which "questioning the scope of the Holocaust" becomes "questioning the Holocaust." I seem to recall this Williamson guy claimed the number was 200,000 to 300,000.
Such a claim serves to deny the systematic murder of at least 5 million Jewish victims (not to mention the non-Jewish victims, a population equally difficult to count with tight precision).
Pinging our Anglican brethren! What, if anything, do you know about Williamson's past? Just curious.
Nonsense. The person who controls whether or not they get to return to the Church obviously has considerable leverage, unless they don't give a damn (so to speak) whether or not they get back in. The latter is clearly not the case, or else Williamson would be responding to the interview questions with the verbal equivalent of an upraised middle finger rather than with Clintonesque parsing.
Well, he is not denying the Holocaust in essence: deliberate, utterly evil mass murder of Jews based on their ethnicity alone. I agree that the numbers he is throwing around are ridiculously low.
My point is, he is not an idiot; I read some of his writings on other subjects and he is a thoughtful man. Is he also an anti-Semite? Possibly, even though he denies that.
Oooo, I’m adding that one too!
I think the key to my point is "mass" murder. He's off by at least one order of magnitude.
Worse still, I believe he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz (note that he attributes his views to Leuchter, who made that same denial).
Exactly! Satan took bits of the Bible out of context too.
How about the CONTEXT of that misquoted verse, Romans 24-27:
For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree? For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins.
It seems Pressac’s book is available online (legitimately) and in English, but I can’t get any of the links to load right now.
Really? I’ll have to look....
Right, that’s the book that convinced him, Leuchter. He promises to study the rebuttals to it. Good for him.
200,000 is still mass murder. In fact, 20 is already a mass murder. The holocaust denying I cannot stomach is one that says that those killed deserved it. That is not what we have here, at least based on Williamson’s public record.
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