Last week (via Mark In Mexico), I found this startling discussion of Iranian President Mohamed Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial:

Yesterday we noted that a Reuters dispatch, titled "Iran's President Questions Holocaust," included this sentence: "Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust." A later version of the dispatch, however, deleted the words "Historians say" and presented the Holocaust as fact: "The Nazis killed some 6 million Jews during their 1933-1945 rule."

But today, Reuters has a new formulation:

Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Regarding this widely-accepted view, Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency IRNA . . .

Reuters, of course, famously forbade its "reporters" from referring to the Sept. 11 attacks as an act of terrorism.

I was reminded of that today by this Reuters report of Ahmadinejad's latest assertion that the Holocaust was a fabricated "legend":

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday the Holocaust was a myth, reiterating a view that has caused international uproar and drawn a rebuke from the U.N. Security Council.

"They have fabricated a legend under the name 'Massacre of the Jews', and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves," he told a crowd in the southeastern city of Zahedan.

Denial by radical Muslims of recent, eyewitnessed history fits right in with their denial of ancient history. I've been over this before, but it's been some time, and it seems that the radical Muslims are in need of another history lesson.

The Romans struck coins and built many monuments to commemorate their various battles with the ancient Jews who lived in Roman occupied Palestine. Here's an example of one such coin:

The coin celebrates the military exploits of emperor Vespasian who, as a Roman general, was sent in to destroy and occupy Judea in 66 A.D. (Vespasian became emperor in 69 A.D., and the coin dates from his reign.)

And here's a section from the triumphal arch of Titus, built by the Romans to commemorate the Roman victory over the Jews in AD 68.

The above shows the Romans carting off the menorah from the sacked Temple of Jerusalem (which was of course completely destroyed).

But according to many Mideastern governments, the Romans lied! Their coins are Jewish forgeries, and the Arch of Titus is a fraud, because the Jews never lived in Judea:

The Palestinian Authority, and some other Arab governments and universities, teach that Jews never lived in Israel. They teach that all archaeological proof to the contrary is part of an international western anti-Arab conspiracy. In this view, the Bible's claims are deliberate fictions, and the ancient Jews actually came from Yemen, on the Arabian peninsula. This is a mainstream Arab view, taught in many schools across the Middle East.

This view has garnered support among many Muslims because it is in accord with traditional Muslim beliefs. According to Islam, the leaders of both Judaism and Christianity deliberately altered the true word of God, and thus led all of their believers down a false path. In the Quran, Mohammed charges the Jewish people with "falsehood" (Sura 3:71), distortion (4:46), and of being "corrupters of Scripture." This belief was developed further in medieval Islamic polemics, and is a mainstream part of both Sunii and Shiite Islami today. This is known as the doctrine of tahrifi-lafzi, "the corruption of the text".

NOTE: The above came from a Wikipedia entry, which has apparently been pulled! It no longer says what it said when I linked it. What that means, I guess, is that it's considered "insensitive" to point out the denial of history!

Cowardly bastards. But at least others are keeping track of Wikipedia's censorship. (The above can still be found here.)

I'm sorry, but this voluntary delusional behavior is no different from saying the earth is flat.

The problem I'm having is that by characterizing this thinking as a "psychotic delusion," I may be falling into the trap I condemned earlier (of allowing bigotry to be written off as "mental illness.")

I think that willful delusions, while bigotry, are an extreme form of it, but it's still bigotry. It's so irrational as to be beyond disagreement. I note that in many European countries, denying the Holocaust is a criminal offense.

But are Holocaust deniers mentally ill?

Personally, I don't think so.

I think they're willfully evil.

And I think their delusion is deliberate. To say otherwise makes about as much sense as calling a man blind because he refuses to open his eyes.