“In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” — Adolf Hitler – January 30, 1939

After providing the quote of the day…

“One group of journalists claiming to be morally superior to another is like two hookers arguing over who has the cleaner house.”

…Brendan Shanahan of Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph smacks a rival newspaper around for leaving a local (to there) Holocaust denier it featured unchallenged:

Describing Sheik Hilaly as, among other things, “otherworldly” and “a symbol of resistance to the more materialistic elements of Australian culture”, this effort to soften the mufti’s image was bolstered by a photograph of him in a stripey apron cooking a pot of stew. The bakin’ sheik looked like a Margaret Fulton of the madrassas. All very friendly and cosy. Then the subject of the Holocaust came up and the Hilaly of old came shining through. “I, like many researchers in the world,” he was quoted as saying, “shy off the number of innocent victims that had been estimated at six million.”
…
Like most Holocaust deniers, Hilaly doesn’t reject the existence of death camps. His preferred tactic, like that of other “researchers”, is to play games with the numbers: one million dead as opposed to six being more of a minor skirmish than a holocaust.

This, of course, is the basis of the standard Islamic fundamentalist conspiracy theory: that Jews exaggerate the number killed during the Holocaust in order to guilt Western powers into supporting the expansion of Israel.

This long-term goal has been further aided by their staging of the September 11 attacks which gave Zionism a blank cheque to crush the Muslim world using George W. Bush as their puppet.

These demented conspiracies are, from personal experience, mainstream in many countries and lent tacit endorsement by public figures in the West so keen to prove their credentials on issues like Palestine that they will nod and smile in the face of the most blatant madness.

When Hilaly’s views are presented, unchallenged, as simply a matter of opinion it paves a dangerous road in which historical fact counts for nothing and the little old ladies in the Eastern suburbs who woke up under a pile of corpses are just another voice in a “debate”.

In their desperate efforts to play devil’s advocate, the [Sydney Morning] Herald is being intellectually dishonest. Journalists would do well to remember that they are nowhere near as clever as they like to think and not half as clever as a snake like Hilaly.

Perhaps the Herald’s owners read the New York Times during World War II and will plead ignorance. Yet the latter paper amended its ways these last six decades, after remaining mute about the Holocaust as it was occurring. Those at the Sydney Morning Herald might read some history, do some fact checking, and review the publications of those with whom they disagree. Nazi Germany first banned the thoughts of others before it exterminated millions of human beings. The few newspapermen who dared too late to speak against the regime were not spared.