IsraCampus.Org

A few days ago I posted on my personal blog some 'dialogue' that was being disseminated via the anti-Semitic 'ALEF' chat list that operates under the auspices of the University of Haifa, attempting partially to deny the Holocaust. The material can be read here.

The ALEF list is a list for outright anti-Semites, cheerleaders for terrorism, and Neo-Nazis, operating through the University of Haifa computer and under its auspices as a university chat list. The 'dialogue' concerning the Holocaust began when one Shraga Elam, an ex-Israel best known for his lavish praise for David Irving, claimed that 'at most' 5.1 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during World War II. This was supposed to be based on an estimate of the world Jewish population posted on a Hebrew University web site by HU's demographer Prof. Sergio DellaPergola here.

There it says that there were 11 million Jews world wide (elsewhere it says 11.4) after World War II and 16.5 before the war in the entire world.

Elam and his ilk then claim that 'at most' 5.1 million Jews were murdered, and the 'Six Million' number is Zionist propaganda. Elam was then joined on the ALEF list by Stalinist British anti-Semite Tony Greenstein and others (including a professor of psychology from Haifa University), who agreed.

This is all familiar stuff taken from Neo-Nazi and Holocaust Denial web sites, who make similar 'statistical arguments.'

What is one to make of all this?

First of all, the 11 and the 16.5 numbers on the Hebrew University web site are hardly firm authoritative data points and are little more than wild guesses.

But suppose for the sake of argument that they are correct. Would this give credence to the claims of the anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis that the Six Million number is a fabrication? An invention of Zionists? Where is the 'missing million' if we take those numbers at face value?

The answer is that the claim reveals far more about the demographic illiteracy of the anti-Semites than about the actual scope of the Holocaust. The 'claim' of the anti-Semites that the numbers show that fewer than Six Million were murdered in the Holocaust ignores natural growth of Jewish populations in other, non-European parts of the world, that is, the excess of births over deaths there. (These included all high-birth Jewish populations in North Africa and Asia.) It assumes a static world Jewish population between 1939 and 1946, other than the effect of the Holocaust.

If the Jewish populations outside Europe in 1939 were about ten million, and if these Jewish populations were growing naturally at 2% per year during the years of World War II, which is probably close to or less than they were actually growing, then do the math and that more than 'explains' the supposedly 'missing million' in the 'data' of the anti-Semites.

In fact, the number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust may have been closer to 7 million than six million.

The anti-Semites, including the Jewish anti-Semites, are misusing demographic data about the Holocaust so that they can engineer a second Holocaust of Jews.

Contact information for University of Haifa officials can be found here.