One of the funniest recent South Park episodes is last year’s ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour,’ an on-the-button satire of Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s claims to want nothing more than a quiet, peaceful life while simultaneously publishing tell-all autobiographies, attempting to secure a Netflix deal, and touring the world as public dignitaries. In the episode, Harry and Megan travel the world by private jet, emerging noisily at various international airports with painted signs and chants of “WE WANT PRIVACY!” and “STOP LOOKING AT US!” The episode came to mind as I read a recently published article by the Jewish academic and anti-free speech activist Raphael Cohen-Almagor, “The Liberal Defence of Holocaust Denial: A critical examination.” The article is the fourth in a series of five essays that Cohen-Almagor hopes will provide the intellectual backing for the introduction of anti-free speech laws in countries like the United States where ‘Holocaust denial’ remains legal. Like many examples of Jewish rhetoric, Cohen-Almagor’s essays are replete with clever inversions of logic, the most striking being the claim that restricting the ability of American and European populations to speak freely will give them more freedom and improve their democracies.
The Jewish practice of pilpul, a special style of argument specific to the study of the Talmud, tends to suggest that almost anything can be argued for, provided there is enough hairsplitting and force of rhetoric. And this in turn lends Jewish argumentation a shameless quality that is ripe for satire, were it not for the fact that so many gullible Whites buy into it with disastrous consequences. Take, for example, the fact that Jews advance ideas of their powerless victimhood via political over-representation, specially crafted speech laws, dominance in the media, nepotistic control of elite universities, and powerful coordinated boycotts of dissenters. Jews will quite earnestly tell you that they are powerless victims while threatening to imprison you, ruin your life or, if you’re unfortunate enough to live beside their Middle Eastern headquarters, bomb your neighbourhood back to the Stone Age. Jews will tell you with a straight face that they are freeing the people of Gaza while reducing it to a mangled pile of rubble and corpses. And, they will tell you that the Holocaust absolutely, completely, unquestionably occurred according to the earliest provided narratives of that event, even when many of those narratives have no supporting evidence or have been proven false. They will tell you they were massacred by a nation that viewed itself as comprised of a special, superior people, while maintaining that the Jewish war dead deserve special commemoration by the entire world because the Jews occupy a special place in world history as a uniquely innocent and eternally persecuted group. They desperately want the event to be remembered, the sole proviso being that they want you to remember only what they want you to remember. In the Worldwide Holocaust Tour, the appropriate chant would be “NEVER FORGET WHAT WE TOLD YOU!”
Raphael Cohen-Almagor’s Pilpul
Too often Whites neglect the activism of Jews in the sphere of speech legislation until it is too late, and Jews have been instrumental throughout the West in orchestrating legal restrictions on speech (see, for example, the cases of Australia, Canada, and Britain. I note also a recent journal article on the origin of speech laws in Norway in which the earliest drafts of the legislation were discovered in the headquarters of a Jewish group). Today, there is probably no Jew more active internationally in the sphere of lobbying for speech restriction than Cohen-Almagor. An Israeli living in England, lecturing in politics and information studies, his concern is international, and he has invested decades in promoting laws that will restrict what people can say about Jews. Cohen-Almagor is particularly vexed by America’s First Amendment, seeing it not as a benchmark of freedom, but as a tool for hate. In his own words, “the United States is the only country in the world where people are free to hate on whatever grounds. Due to its importance as the indisputable leader of the free world, the United States has immense influence in dictating boundaries to free expression online and offline.” In other words, if Cohen-Almagor can persuade American lawmakers that speech seen as harmful by Jews should be made illegal in the United States, then cultural domino effect will take place, and Jews can finally declare an international victory against free speech.
One of Cohen-Almagor’s most significant productions in recent years, titled “Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet,” appeared in 2018 in the International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy. Along with an earlier piece from 2016, the article is an excellent sample and summary of Cohen-Almagor’s work, and also acts as a remarkable and important example of Jewish manipulation of discussions of free speech and the politics of White advocacy. The article’s basic argument is that American so-called “White supremacist” websites are a hotbed of dangerous hate speech which can be conclusively linked to criminality. Since hate speech “can and does inspire crime,” it is incumbent upon governments to introduce legislation banning such speech under harsh legal penalties.
The Jewish argument is to assert that speech itself can be harmful and that “the audience” can be harmed merely by exposure to it. In practical terms, Cohen-Almagor contends that James Fields drove his car into a crowd at Charlottesville solely because he was exposed to hate speech — not because of his mental health, situational factors that day and immediately prior to his conduct in the vehicle, or because of catastrophic policing failures. Why everyone else “exposed” to “White supremacist hate speech” didn’t engage in similar conduct is left unexplained. Instead, we are to agree with Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish colleagues that “hate speech should not be dismissed as ‘mere speech.’ … The preferred American liberal approach of fighting ideas with ideas, speech with speech, is insufficient. Hate speech needs to be taken more seriously by the legal authorities than it currently is.”
Just as the James Fields episode is extrapolated exponentially to define an entire movement, so the issue of “hate speech” and censorship is based on an extremely small number of exceptional cases. Cohen-Almagor claims that “internet hate can be found on thousands of websites, file archives, chat rooms, newsgroups and mailing lists,” so one might assume that his methodology and argument would involve a wide range of examples where these thousands of sources are linked to thousands of instances of violence and criminality — particularly since Cohen-Almagor argues that “White supremacist” websites are “like terrorist groups.” The problem, however, is that he does no such thing, because there are no such examples.
In order to present even the most tenuously relevant research, Cohen-Almagor relies purely on unsophisticated comments from a handful of the most extreme and obscure racialist sites on the internet, and even here the author fails to provide a single instance where a White racialist website has suggested any acts of violence. So inconsequential and amateurish were such sites that by the time of writing his article Cohen-Almagor had to concede “quite a few sites discussed here are now defunct.” Having initially made a small directory of such sites, he admits the “vast majority of the web pages in that directory are no longer operative.” It is surely a damning indictment of the state of modern peer-reviewed academic journals that someone could publish an argument against the principle of free speech solely on the basis of the putative content of obscure and minuscule internet sources which are no longer even in existence.
In fact, Cohen-Almagor can’t even come to a fixed and satisfactory definition of “hate speech” or “hate sites.” This is presumably by design, with the intention that the topic is plagued by so many gray areas that any future legislation in the area is, like all existing examples of hate legislation, destined to be rhetorically capacious enough to ensure easy arbitrary interpretation by those in control. Early in his essay he asserts that “Hate speech is intended to injure, dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and victimize the targeted groups, and to foment insensitivity and brutality against them.” But he also later endorses a definition of the Alt-Right, which is routinely portrayed by Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish allies as a body of “hate groups,” as merely “critical” of “multiculturalism, feminists, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities.” Criticism thus becomes conflated with hate. It goes without saying that there is a crucial difference between the two definitions, and it is in the gulf between these two definitions that these activists seek to destroy freedom of speech. Mere criticism may not “injure, dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and victimize” anyone, but the existence of a legislative framework privileging minority interpretations of such criticism will surely consign it to hate speech categorization.
Cohen-Almagor and his co-ethnic activists are equally vague in explaining exactly how “White supremacist” websites are morally or legally wrong. Despite its initial claims and promises, much of the article is in fact taken up with banal observations. White racialist websites, Cohen-Almagor informs us, often have “forums, discussion groups, photos and videos.” They offer “eye-catching teasers such as symbols and pictures.” Readers of such websites “talk to each other, thereby reinforcing their commonly held views, empowering people who share their beliefs.” A key strategy involves “encouraging interpersonal socialization in the offline world.” Members “use cyberspace as a free space to create and sustain movement culture and coordinate collective action.” Website proprietors can also “make appeals for funding.” Perhaps this is quite terrifying to Jews, but as a philosophical argument for the annihilation of free speech it is catastrophically lacking.
Cohen-Almagor provides no evidence suggesting a link between even the most incendiary racial commentary on the internet and acts of violence. The only two examples he attempts to provide are almost two decades old, and concern individuals with clearly unsound mental health — spree-shooter Benjamin Nathaniel Smith having exhibited all the signs of conduct disorder and psychopathy in adolescence prior to his 1999 rampage, and Buford O. Furrow having been hospitalized a number of times due to psychiatric instability and suicidal tendencies prior to his shooting spree at a Jewish community center, also in 1999. Even the most basic critique of such a proposed link would ask why, given the proliferation of the internet and social media between 1999 and 2018, there has been a decrease in violence from the far right. Indeed, if one can excuse the continued use of the “racist” and “hate” buzzwords, it’s difficult to disagree with one University of California, Berkeley study that pointed out: “Although White racist groups have proliferated on the Internet in recent years, there appears to have been no corresponding increase in membership in these groups or in hate crime rates. In fact, one might argue that the prevalence of racist groups on the Internet works to reduce hate crime, perhaps by providing less physical, more rhetorical outlets for hate.” The entire foundation of Cohen-Almagor’s argument — that there is a link between internet activity and White racialist violence — is a total fabrication.
Cohen-Almagor and The Worldwide Holocaust Tour
Cohen-Almagor is highly antagonistic to the idea that ‘Holocaust denial’ is best challenged with facts and education. Underlying this antagonism, I believe, is an acceptance of the fact that this “facts and education” is either itself flawed, or that it is insufficient to deal with the increasing historicisation of World War Two and Jewish casualties within that. Cohen-Almagor’s panic strikes me as a stark admission that the Holocaust narrative is weakening on multiple fronts — not merely the issue of homicidal gas chambers with which ‘Holocaust denial’ has long been associated, but whether Jewish death totals are accurate, as well as the deeper philosophical issue of why Jewish deaths should be regarded as special and worthy of unceasing international commemoration. In a couple of decades we will have reached a century since the end of World War Two, and in that century we will have witnessed new wars, new mass casualties, and atrocities of all descriptions including those perpetrated by the Jewish state. Time alone will ensure that the fate of the Jews between 1939 and 1945 will fade and dissolve into the pages of history, and no amount of appeals to “remember” this or that will prevent that from happening.
Cohen-Almagor’s drive for speech laws can be seen as a fanatical, deluded attempt to wind the clock back by force to the 1960s–1980s, post-Eichmann trial, cultural heyday of what can arguably be seen as the Spielbergian peak of ‘Holocaust acceptance.’ It was during these two decades that the American public in particular was manipulated into an appetite for PBS specials, the books of Elie Wiesel, Schindler’s Ark, and assorted maudlin spectacles of manufactured grief. Holocaust memorial statues sprouted up across the West like weeds. Some rural town in the midwest probably never had a Jew walk its streets, but this was the period in which the same streets damn sure needed a Holocaust memorial for its History-channel-watching public to sombrely gaze upon. Perhaps some Jewish pensioner from a nearby city, whose cousin may have known someone who knew a guy who smuggled himself from Germany to the US a few years before Hitler came to power, could be prevailed upon to sit in front of a bunch of school kids and tell them about the horrors of Auschwitz and why the lesson here is that it’s important to love Black people or something like that.
Time vs The Worldwide Holocaust Tour
More so than with the issue of gas chambers, which Jews have clumsily but effectively handled with several impactful trials, they are less prepared to deal with historicisation. The following excerpt from Cohen-Almagor’s essay is telling in this respect:
Some scholars differentiate between Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion. While denial aims to negate established facts about the genocide of Jews during the Second World War, distortion recognises certain aspects of the Holocaust while simultaneously excusing, downplaying or misrepresenting it. Distortion tends to underestimate victim numbers, inflate the number of rescuers, and downplay the collaboration of others and the widespread complicity in the genocide.I have been teaching core modules in Politics for many years. Every year, leading publishers in Britain send me their textbooks. It is common practice for publishers to request integration of their texts into core modules. One of the books claimed that five million Jews were killed by the Nazis. No reference was provided. I promptly wrote to the publisher, saying that I will not include the book in any of my modules nor will I recommend it to my colleagues and library as long as this unsupported figure remains in the book. This textbook is an example of Holocaust distortion.
It’s clear from Cohen-Almagor’s essay that he sees no distinction between ‘Holocaust denial’ and ‘Holocaust distortion.’ The issue taken with the textbook is not only a clear self-admission of Jewish gatekeeping on the subject matter at the upper levels of academia, but also an example of how far Cohen-Almagor wants legislation to go. Suggesting that less than precisely six million Jews were killed by Germany in World War? Illegal. In Cohen-Almagor’s ideal world, the author and publishers would be severely fined or imprisoned. All this in the name of freedom and democracy, according to the Worldwide Holocaust Tour.
A generation is growing up that enjoys TikTok and Instagram, and while this brain rot brings its own problems, that same generation couldn’t care less about Elis Wiesel and would find Schindler’s List boring on levels unimaginable (Black and White? Gross). Cohen-Almagor’s proposed speech laws are therefore not solely, or even primarily, about sending people to prison for studies on trace levels of Zyklon B, but about providing legal support for the ongoing but currently troubled (in light of events in Gaza) cultural protection of Jews. He writes:
A 2018 CNN poll showed that in Europe, one in 20 Europeans surveyed had never heard of the Holocaust. More than a quarter of Europeans in the poll believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in four said Jews had too much influence in conflict and wars across the world. In 2019 the Guardian published a public poll that showed one in 20 British adults did not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8 per cent said that the scale of the genocide had been exaggerated. Almost half of those questioned said they did not know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and one in five grossly underestimated the number, saying that fewer than two million were killed. A 2020 survey, conducted in the United States, showed that almost two-thirds of young American adults did not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust. A 2023 poll shows that a fifth of Americans aged 18–29 believe the Holocaust was a myth. … Additionally, non-Jewish individuals tend to display less interest in the subject, perceiving it as exclusively pertaining to the Jewish community.
Jewish power hides in the long grass of perceived victimhood. Remove the sob stories, or even their comparative legitimacy (for example, in light of the shredded bodies of Palestinian children), and Jewish power is both obvious and hideous. The more aggressively Jewish power asserts itself, the more one can expect howls of pain and anguish from the aggressor. The demolition of Gaza, and the flooding of the West on behalf of ‘tolerance and inclusion,’ will be accompanied by the construction of Holocaust memorials in every major Western city. New Holocaust memorials and museums are planned, or have been recently built in locations as diverse as Boca Raton, Niskayuna New York, Amsterdam, Berks Country Pennsylvania, Clacton England, Montreal Canada, and, in an apparent to reach young gamers, a digital Holocaust museum has even been built within the open world game Fortnite.
In Britain, the new government has committed to building an aesthetically disgusting Holocaust memorial right beside Parliament. In order to construct this eyesore, a law dating back to 1900 is being revoked which had prevented the proposed location from being as anything other than a public park. It’s an apt metaphor for the broader situation, since the Western public is continually giving its space and freedom to the Jews. The land will be taken from the public in the name of freedom and tolerance, in order to make their lives better and ‘remind’ them of how awful their civilization has been in the past. Such is the claim of the Worldwide Holocaust Tour.
Proposed Holocaust Memorial: An Eyesore Intended to Contrast with the Traditional English Architecture of the Area
Notes
R. Cohen-Almagor, ‘Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet,’ International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2018), pp.38-57.
R. Cohen-Almagor, ‘Hate and Racist Speech in the United States: A critique,’ Philosophy and Public Issues, Vol. 6, No.1, pp.77-123.
J. Glaser, J. Dixit & D. Green, ’Studying Hate Crime with the Internet: What Makes Racists Advocate Racial Violence?’ Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2002, pp. 177–193 (p.189)
