In a sense, I appreciate people like Sylvia Stolz and Hamas. I don’t have to waste time proving that they are antisemitic. I don’t have to show that Hamas incites and commits murder or that Stolz is insane. They do this themselves by word and deed.
German prosecutors on Tuesday charged the former lawyer for far-right activist Ernst Zündel with incitement, accusing her of denying the Holocaust and ending one of her legal filings with “Heil Hitler”…
During Zündel’s trial, Stolz repeatedly disputed the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews, called for hatred of the Jewish population and ended a legal document with the words “Heil Hitler,” the [prosecution] statement said…
“We are under foreign occupation, and this foreign occupation has portrayed Adolf Hitler as a devil for 60 years, but that is not true,” she said. “But the real truth can only be told when someone attempts to break this taboo.” — Jerusalem Post
Right. A class-A nutter (I wrote previously about Zündel himself here).
But in another sense, she is a big problem. When I Googled her for this article, most of the first twenty hits or so were all pro-Stoltz. One of them referred to her as “a German Jeanne d’Arc”! Google ranks sites in a complicated and proprietary way, based in part by the number of external links to the site, and the rank of the sites that have these links. So what this means is that there is a huge network of linked websites where this kind of stuff is not considered evidence of insanity. And indeed this is true.
There is a similar network of extreme anti-Israel sites as well (some of them are the same, of course). After many years of reading and thinking about the phenomenon of Jew-hatred in all of its forms (yes, Israel-hatred is a form of Jew-hatred), I am still to a certain extent mystified.
I think I am going to stop worrying about it. Just as there are certain forms of compulsive behavior and sexual fetishes such that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would engage in them, there are ways of thinking that I can’t get my brain around. The inner life of Sylvia Stolz and friends will have to join that of Ilan Pappé as inaccessible.
But I won’t forget that they are out there.