Forgiving Ararat (27 page)

“Yes, there is significant evidence of anti-Semitism among Hitler and other Nazis, but that has been true of all of Europe and Russia for centuries. We must concede that, for centuries, Christian Europe greatly preferred that Jews find someplace else to live. We must also concede that, for centuries, Jews have resisted this; but, suddenly, they came up with a bold, new idea. Instead of demanding room in Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, and London, they offered to leave willingly if they could return to Palestine. And, guess what? The Europeans just happened to control Palestine after the war! How convenient! But there’s a big problem: the Arabs who already live there. The Europeans are a people with high ethics and morality; they’ve just fought two world wars and they’re not about to take part in the eviction of another people from their land. So, the Jews come up with yet another bold, new idea. They convince the world that they alone were singled out, above all others, for extermination by the Nazis, and that this will happen again and again unless they have their own state in Palestine. They also remind everybody that they lived in Palestine until the Romans—another European power—kicked them out in 70 A.D. So, the Europeans of today would only be righting the wrongs of the past by helping the Jews re-create the State of Israel. And, besides, they argue, using the same bigotry they claim led to the Holocaust, it’s just a bunch of stupid Arabs on a worthless piece of desert! Who cares about them? Who cares about desert? It’s genius, really. The Europeans gave up the innocent lives and lands of millions of Arab people as a burnt offering for their own sins. My family became the fatted calf for somebody else’s sacrifice.”

Sam lit a new cigarette, visibly angry. Ott was astonished. For the first time, he had met somebody like himself, with a legitimate reason to be angry at Jews. But it still didn’t mean the Holocaust was a hoax. He felt sorry for Sam and called for Trudy to bring them another round.

“I never looked at it that way,” Ott said. “I guess I’ve never thought of the Arabs as having so much in common with the Germans. So that’s why your people are blowing themselves up in Israeli markets—because your land was taken from you?”

“No,” Sam said, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke in disgust. “We do suicide bombings because we’re stupid, uneducated, and don’t know any better. That only hurts us, not the Jews. Do you see Jews blowing themselves up? Or Germans? Or anybody else? Of course, Jews have been working on taking back Palestine for two thousand years, while we’ve only been at it fifty; who knows, maybe the Jews were doing suicide attacks against the Romans in the first century? It takes time to see reality and the path from here to there; history is as much a function of the present as the past, and it’s more a function of emotion than fact. History and truth are what we want them to be, Ott. For example, most historians now agree that fewer than one million people in total died at Auschwitz, not the four million originally claimed. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Okay. Did you know that many historians also agree that fewer than four million Jews in total died during World War II, not the six million in schoolbooks—versus twenty million Soviets, fifteen million Chinese, six million Poles, and nearly three million Japanese?”

“No, I didn’t know that either.”

“And no credible historian believes Germans turned Jews into soap and lamp shades.”

“I never believed that,” Ott said. “Germans aren’t animals.”

Trudy brought the drinks. She heard this last comment, raised her eyebrows, shook her head and walked away. Ott sipped his beer more slowly now. He was beginning to feel intoxicated, and he worried that he wouldn’t be able to follow what Sam was saying.

“Did you know,” Sam asked, “that more Jews died of disease and malnutrition in the camps than of unnatural causes? Why are the so-called ‘facts’ changing over time? Now consider this: standard disinfection and delousing techniques across Europe to control the spread of typhus and cholera in prison populations included fumigation of inmates with insecticide gases in the nineteen-thirties. So, yes, in a sense, the Jews were gassed, but not to kill them, to save them, and other prisoners, from infestation. And air raid shelters at the camps, and throughout the rest of Germany, utilized airtight doors for fear of chemical attacks after the terrors of World War I, and shower facilities at the camps often doubled as bomb shelters.”

“Struck out,” Ott said with a groan. “Game’s over.” Sam glanced up at the television, then back at Ott.

“Add to this that cremation has always been viewed suspiciously by the Jews, who thought of it as a sacrilege and means of concealing crimes. Then consider that the Soviets, more bloodied by the Germans than anyone else—and governed by pathological, Stalinist liars—captured the prison camps in eastern Europe and denied access to the west. Today, those camps are the only camps believed to have had gas chambers; even the Jews now agree no gas chambers existed on German soil. Now consider this: The eastern European Jews were the ones most insistent upon the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine before the war began; and they were the ones who claimed the Germans were gassing them. Motive and opportunity, Ott, motive and opportunity. All you have left to support the Holocaust stories are the tortured confessions of some Nazi officers and the inconsistent accounts of a few prison camp survivors about the general horrors of war.”

Ott teased himself.
Could it be true? Yes, he thought, it had to be! The Jews weren’t butchered and burned in the improved crematoria of Jos. A. Rabun & Sons!

“And here’s the clincher,” Sam said. “I had a chemist do a forensic analysis at three of the so-called death camps. He detected high levels of Zyklon B cyanide gas embedded in the concrete walls of the delousing chambers in Auschwitz and Treblinka, but nothing—nothing—in the showers.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Sam said, clinking his glass against Ott’s. “If the showers had been used to gas millions of Jews, traces of cyanide would be all over the place. It’s a hoax, and it’s all in my documentary. By convincing the world of a German Holocaust, the Jews did in five years what even God couldn’t do for them in two thousand—they created a Jewish state in Palestine that now has a military stronger than all of the other Arab nations combined.”

Ott shook his head, thinking. He was convinced, but he was still trying to come up with a counterargument. “What about the pictures of all those dead bodies? What about the incinerators?”

“I’m not saying the Nazis were angels,” Sam said. “The camps were terrible places, as are all prison camps during a war. People were killed, many Jews among them. As the Allies squeezed Hitler, Hitler squeezed the country, and the entire German population began to starve. The prisoners in the camps were the last to be fed or receive medical care. They were worked like animals, and disease was rampant. Many died in the camps, and there were, of course, many executions as well. Germany’s ‘final solution’ for all the dead bodies piling up everywhere was to cremate them. But that’s not the same as mass genocide.”

“How are you going to get the documentary distributed?” Ott said. “What can I do to help?”

This was the moment Sam had been waiting for, the reason he had come to see Ott. “We need money,” Sam said. “But the documentary is just the beginning of the story for me. You just want to clear your family’s name, and we can definitely do that; but the misery of the Jewish occupation of Palestine continues for my people, all of whom now live like prisoners in concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza with the Jews as Nazi guards and executioners. What the Arabs fail to understand is that suicide bombers and guns won’t push the Jews back into the sea, any more than bombs and guns would push the Palestinians out of Palestine. The Jews will only go out through the door they came in—the revolving door of public opinion.”

Sam was animated now, his voice raised, using his hands.

“When the world believed the Jews were liars, thieves, and murderers—responsible for everything from Jesus’ death to economic collapse—the world contained them, enslaved them, scattered them, and hunted them down. There isn’t a country that hasn’t done it, from the Egyptians to the Romans, from the Crusades to the Inquisition. But when the world believed the Jews had been driven almost to extinction during the Holocaust, the world felt guilty about it, and created the State of Israel as a nature preserve to save them—a refuge for an endangered species. Anybody who hunts Jews now is punished, and the world is determined to protect them. It’s like gray wolves. Do you know the story about gray wolves?”

“Yes,” Ott said, immediately seeing the analogy. “When gray wolves were considered a threat to humans and livestock, the government funded programs to exterminate them, and they were hunted to the brink of extinction; but when there were only about four hundred left, we started feeling guilty about it and thinking they weren’t so bad after all. Big nature preserves were created for them in Yellowstone, and we punished anybody who hunted them. It’s been a big success; there are thousands of wolves roaming the wild again.”

“Exactly,” said Sam. “But now there are news reports that they’re back to killing cows again, and scaring people in the middle of the night, and suddenly we’re starting to remember why we got rid of them in the first place and realizing we were pretty stupid for letting them come back. They’re back off the endangered species list again, and you can go out and shoot one any time you like. It’s just the same with Jews. When the world sees them as a threat again—and it’s happening, every day—then the beautiful nature preserve of Israel will fall. The Jews have been successful and prolific, like wolves, and the world is beginning to see them as a threat to peace in the Middle East. They can’t control their appetites. They keep demanding more land and more settlements, and they keep hunting and killing Arabs. There’s no peace. To get away with this, the Jews don’t dare let the rest of the world stop feeling guilty for the Holocaust. So, they keep writing books, making movies, and building museums about it, and they keep shouting, ‘Never again!’ All the while, they, themselves, are perpetrating a Holocaust on the Arabs. It’s been an effective strategy so far; it’s what’s been keeping the nature preserve open. Only when the world is able to relieve itself of the guilt and shame of the Holocaust can the hunting of Jews start again. For Arabs, the equation should be very simple: If you can erase the Holocaust, you can erase Israel.

Ott was excited. “You’re right,” he said, slurring his words slightly and slamming down his beer, slopping it onto the table.

“All we need to do is seed some doubt,” Sam continued. “Doubt grows into skepticism, and skepticism changes beliefs. Truth is what we decide it should be. Look at what just happened. You believe what I’ve said just now because you want to believe it, because it sounds plausible, because nobody trusts the past, and nobody trusts governments, prosecutors, communists, or Jews. Scientists have convinced us that we can’t even trust our own memories. The seeds of doubt are there, waiting to sprout. All we need to do is give them a little water to make them grow. And the best way to add water is with film, because seeing is believing. That’s why I’ve done a documentary instead of writing a book. Nobody reads books, but everybody watches movies and TV.”

Sam leaned back and stretched. Ott regarded him with envy and admiration, thinking that if he had had an older brother, he would have chosen Sam. They both turned toward the television. The Channel 10 Evening News was coming on now, with its triumphant music and flashing montage of scenes from central Pennsylvania, ending with the camera zooming in on the graying anchorman.

“Good evening,” he said in an authoritative baritone. “Football star O.J. Simpson is questioned in the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend; President Clinton is set to announce a plan for national welfare reform; and, break out those tie-died shirts for Woodstock ’94...but the big story tonight on Action News is our exclusive undercover investigation with startling evidence tying popular local charity Educate-for-Tomorrow, and its founder Holden Hurley, to a local white supremacist group.”

“Oh my God,” Ott said.

“Can you turn this up?” Sam hollered to Trudy.

“Here with the story is Action News investigative reporter, Bo Wolfson....”

T
rudy turned up the volume on the television and the camera panned back to show Bo Wolfson, handsome and grave, sitting next to the anchorman.

“Thank you, Rob.” he said, then turned and looked directly into the camera. “Every school district in central Pennsylvania now has computers and Internet access in the classrooms. Those computers are a gift from a local, non-profit corporation called Educate-for-Tomorrow and its founder, Holden Hurley. A native of Orbisonia, and a former computer programmer, Mr. Hurley founded Educate-for-Tomorrow—known as EFT—three years ago, and since then he has obtained more than five million dollars in grants from state and federal governments, private foundations, and charities, including the United Way, to bring computers and the Internet to rural schools. But, as a result of an exclusive undercover investigation, Action News has learned that an EFT subsidiary called TechChildren, Inc., paid more than seven hundred thousand dollars of those grant funds to an entity called EduSoft. According to the Pennsylvania Secretary of State, EduSoft is the registered alias of a white supremacist group known as The Eleven, which has a concealed and heavily guarded compound and training camp in the mountains just outside of Huntingdon. Over the past two months, Action News producer Bobby Wilson infiltrated The Eleven and videotaped Holden Hurley, the founder of EFT, speaking at meetings of The Eleven, making racist and anti-Semitic remarks. We confronted Mr. Hurley with that videotape in an interview conducted earlier today.”

Sam and Ott looked at each other in disbelief as the screen filled with the sign and office building for EFT, the reception area, and finally Holden Hurley seated at his desk with a wide grin on his face, his slicked-back black hair shining like dashboard plastic. Bo Wolfson was seated across from him. It was a complete setup. Hurley had obviously agreed to the interview because he thought they were doing a story on the good things EFT has done for the community.

“Mr. Hurley,” said Bo, after some preliminary questions, “EFT receives its funding from state and local governments, private charities and foundations. How is this money spent?”

“Well,” said Hurley, with the soothing voice of a reference librarian, his big, beefy face frozen in a prideful smile. “We use the money to purchase computers at a discount for schools, and then we also provide networking services, Internet connections, and training to the teachers and kids. We’ve put twenty school districts, and over forty thousand children, online so far. I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, but there’s much more work to be done.”

“What does TechChildren do?”

“Yes, well, TechChildren is an EFT subsidiary involved in developing educational software for kids. Our plans include developing software to help kids learn quicker and easier. Classrooms will look a whole lot different in the future. The blackboard and paper textbook days are coming to an end.”

“Have you ever heard of a company called EduSoft?”

Hurley began looking around the room, stalling, searching for the answer. “Yes,” he said, his smile forced now. “EduSoft is an educational software consultant.”

“Do EFT and TechChildren do business with EduSoft?”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know.”

“Have you ever heard of an organization called The Eleven?”

Hurley’s face crimsoned, but the smile remained, like somebody who has just accidentally walked into a post in front of a crowd and wants them to believe he meant to do it.

“I don’t believe this,” Sam said to Ott, watching his dreams unravel in the bar. “I don’t freakin’ believe this.”

“No, I can’t say that I have,” Hurley said. “Is it a computer company?”

“No,” said Bo. “The Eleven is a white supremacist group. Are you sure you’ve never heard of them?”

“No,” said Hurley, his voice rising. “What does this have to do with EFT and computers for kids? What are you suggesting?”

The camera switched to Bo, who stared down Hurley with calm contempt, hungry for the kill. “I’m suggesting, Mr. Hurley, that EFT is a front organization for a white supremacist group; that state, federal, and charitable funds have been used improperly to support this group; and that you, sir, are a white supremacist.”

Hurley leered back at Bo. “That’s an outrageous accusation, Mr. Wolfson, and you are doing tremendous harm to the children of central Pennsylvania by making it.”

“I have a videotape I’d like to show you, Mr. Hurley, and then I’d like to give you a chance to comment on it.”

A small television monitor is arranged on Mr. Hurley’s desk. A dimly lit videotape with a muffled sound track, as if the camera were hidden inside a bag, shows Holden Hurley in front of a roomful of white men, pacing back and forth in front of a Nazi flag.

“My Aryan brothers,” Mr. Hurley says, “today is a great day! Today we are ready to begin to Educate-for-Tomorrow the white youth of today on how we will win the coming race war, and we’re going to do it by using EFT’s computer intranet, built with the kikes’ and niggers’ own money, right under their own crooked and flat noses! And it all begins with this man, my brothers—our very special Aryan brother from the Arab world, Samar Mansour, who with our help, has just finished a documentary proving that the Holocaust was nothing but a Jew lie.”

Ott looked at Sam in the bar, watching with his mouth open.

On the screen, Sam stands up to accept the applause of the members of The Eleven and thank them for their support. “It is time,” he says, “for Arabs and Aryans to join forces against their common enemy. This documentary is the first step in what I hope will be a long and successful collaboration. My contribution to the battle will not be another suicide bombing like my brave Palestinian brothers, who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the cause. No, I intend to demolish not just a few bricks of the State of Israel but the very foundation upon which the State of Israel was built. No gas chambers, no Israel!”

The room erupted into applause.

Trudy, the bartender, looked from the television to Sam and back.

“It’s all over,” Sam said to Ott. “They’re probably out looking for me right now. I’ve gotta go.” He left twenty dollars on the table and walked out with Trudy looking after him.

Ott turned back to the television to see Holden Hurley’s face twisted into a shape as ugly as the Swastika behind him on the small monitor in his office. He said to Bo: “Sometimes people got to stand up for what’s right and fix what’s wrong. One day you’ll understand that I’ve been doing both and you’ll make me a goddamned hero. Now get the hell out of my office.”