Confrontation not Conciliation

Confrontation not conciliation should be the response to Holocaust deniers. I say this as someone who at one time made a different choice.

A number of years ago, while serving as a volunteer for a Catholic religious order, I was asked to dinner by some acquaintances. I was grateful for the invitation since I had a reputation as something of a hot-head, a walking caricature of the Northeast liberal, eager to challenge death-penalty supporters and gun-control opponents--not a good way to win friends where I was working.

As dinner was ending, conversation turned to the Holocaust. I don't remember how or why the discussion moved in that direction, but I do remember someone saying how much the "Jews had profited from the Holocaust," the evidence for this supposedly being all the Jewish names on the credits of Hollywood films. It was then that another guest commented, quite matter-of-factly as I recall, that it was for this reason that he had come to doubt the reality of the Holocaust itself. I didn't need a Ph.D. to recognize the standard anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes. But I was young and away from home. I needed friends, so I changed the subject. And by ignoring the Holocaust denial, I effectively chose conciliation, not confrontation.

Confrontation or conciliation is the choice posed to us by the likes of Bishop Richard Williamson and Mahmud Ahmedinejad. When Pope Benedict XVI struck a conciliatory posture to the Society of St. Pius X, it did not mean that he was somehow sanctioning the Holocaust denials made by Williamson, the traditionalist Catholic group's most well-known bishop. But the Holy Father's initial failure to confront Williamson's anti-Semitism had the unintended effect of amplifying the schismatic Bishop's most extreme pronouncements much in the way that sound echoes and reverberates in the quiet of an empty building. When Williamson's superior, Bishop Bernard Fellay, imposed restrictions on Williamson's public pronouncements, it was certainly necessary but not sufficient The Pope's most recent demand that Williamson recant is a more appropriate form of confrontation that sets the conditions for any future conciliation.

With regard to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the president of Columbia University found himself faced with whether to ignore or confront the reality of Holocaust denial. Faced by stinging criticism over his invitation to let Ahmedinejad speak, Lee Bollinger delivered a scathing rebuke as he introduced the Iranian president. Like the Pope perhaps, Bollinger realized that lack of confrontation could appear to be imprudent conciliation. But in spite of the strength of Bollinger's remarks, the most revealing confrontation came in the question and answer period during which Ahmedinejad memorably claimed that homosexuals did not exist in Iran. It was precisely through confrontation, through interrogation, that Ahmedinejad's blinkered bigotry became so undeniably manifest.

For most of "On Faith" readers and panelists (though most certainly not all), Williamson and Ahmedinejad are distant figures--confronting them is rather cheap and easily done through the media of cyberspace and the opinion blog. The real challenge is when distant figures and extreme ideas come close--as they so often do. The closer Holocaust deniers are, the greater temptation it is to ignore them--at least that's the paradoxical lesson I learned one night over dinner. Confrontation might seem like a useless effort to challenge ideas that are best ignored, lest recognizing them be understood to confer a perverse kind of legitimacy. But lack of confrontation can all too easily appear to be conciliation, even complicity.

By Mathew N. Schmalz  |  February 9, 2009; 4:51 AM ET  | Category:  Interfaith Issues , Religion & Politics , Religious Conflict
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