An article about the Australian government’s dealings with an organisation that denies the Armenian genocide prompted a spate of antisemitic comments denying the Holocaust.
The article by Meher Grigorian, published in the New Matilda online magazine, discussed the Australian Human Rights Commission’s connection with the Turkish Advocacy Alliance (ATAA) via its “Racism: It Stops With Me” campaign.
Grigorian argued that the ATAA and Turkish government aim to diminish the crimes of the Ottoman authorities and explain the mass murder of civilians as a matter of “military necessity”, while blaming the victims for the atrocities committed against them.
The ATAA’s website states: “…there is no historical evidence showing that [the] Ottoman Government ordered a systematical [sic] killing of the Armenian people like Hitler did against the Jewish people in Europe,” which it has been argued desecrates the memory of the Holocaust by using it to diminish another genocide.
The article’s comments section soon attracted a contribution about Jews being responsible for the world’s evils. When alerted, New Matilda removed the comment and stated that any members engaging in Holocaust denial would be banned.
This prompted a response from a convicted Holocaust denier named Fredrick Toben, who runs an antisemitic website. He asked: “…does this mean your site will not even entertain discussing how the Holocaust narrative has changed over the past three decades?”
Another reader argued that Jews and Americans lead an attempt to ignore genocides other than the Holocaust, and that the “…Zionist-subverted Western Mainstream media ignore the ongoing Palestinian Genocide … and the US Alliance-imposed carnage in the Muslim World…”.
Another contributor offered conspiracy theories about the “Freemason Zionist” B’nai B’rith organisation, linking to a White Pride organisation by way of evidence.
And yet another tried to play down the Holocaust by asking: “Isn’t acceptance of the Armenian genocide ’minimising the holocaust’ by admitting there have been other and just as deadly holocausts since humans learnt to kill?”
New Matilda’s editor promised that “any comments which seek to minimise or deny the Holocaust will result in an immediate ban of the reader from our site.”