Northwestern University: Fire His Butz

This whole Holocaust denial stuff has gone too far.

It used to be the almost exclusive purview of the lunatic fringe to march around in faux Nazi dress, with pretensions of Reich-hood, proclaiming that the extermination of over 6,000,000 European Jews never happened.

But the torch has been passed to a new generation of nutjobs, headed by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who, unfortunately, is in a position to do a great deal of harm by acting out on his anti-Semitic beliefs. Sadly he is receiving aid and comfort from fellow delusionists in academia.

... tenured engineering professor Arthur Butz commented in the Tribune and in the Iranian press that he agreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's assertions that the Holocaust is a myth.

Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency and the English-language Tehran Times have published Butz's comments, promoting the Northwestern professor as one of the world scholars who support the Iranian president. Ahmadinejad, who also has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," recently ordered the restart of uranium enrichment, raising fears that Tehran could try to build a nuclear weapon.

People who believe the moon landings were faked are charming Luddites.

People who believe the Holocaust was faked are dangerous. They deny one of the greatest evils of all time, a mass depravity that was documented, filmed and preserved for posterity by the oh, so very methodical and orderly Nazis of 20th Century Germany. Further, the camps, the graves, the ovens, the gaunt survivors, the wrist tattoos, some of the leftover belongings to people who were hauled like cattle by rail to to the camps and thus disappeared from the face of the earth, all these were witnessed by the troops, American, British and Soviet, who liberated Europe from the Nazi master race mongers.

If a hoax had been perpetrated upon the world, the Nazis were willing collaborators. Indeed, the hoax would have been their own idea.

Oh, if only it had been a hoax. Then millions of moms and dads would re-emerge from behind the barbed-wire to reunite with their lost children. Six million plus Jews and perhaps nearly as many gypsies, Catholic priests and nuns, and people otherwise considered "undesirables" by Hitler's Third Reich and his conquering horde.

But the victims are dead, erased prematurely from history by madmen driven by a diabolic ideology.

Some things go beyond the pale. One of them is denial of the Holocaust. That Northwestern University permits this engineering prof to teach and have an office under its auspices is an offense against God and humanity. Prof. Butz, as an American, is entitled to his warped views. He is not entitled to a teaching chair and a salaried position.

Buy him a ticket to Tehran and fire his Butz.