I had a ‘Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense’ recommendation sent to on X which I checked and was – to put it mildly – rather confusing and in the interests of completeness I thought I’d comment on it here.
The Indian Christian apologist-cum-televangelist Ravi Zacharias – who it has since emerged was misusing donations to his ‘Christian ministry’ to the tune of the tune of tens of thousands of dollars to fund his frequent sexual indiscretions with/sexual molestation (and sometimes rape) of ‘massage therapists’ across the United States, India, Thailand and Malaysia – (1) wrote in the second edition of his book ‘Cries of the Heart’ that:
‘Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winner and Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, tells of the time when he was in a concentration camp and was compelled, along with a few others, to witness the hanging of two Jewish men and one Jewish boy. The two men died quite instantly, but the dying of the young lady for some reason became protracted as he struggled for half an hour on the gallows.
Somebody behind Wiesel was head to mutter, “Where is God? Where is He?” Then the voice ground out the anguish again, “Where is He?”
Wiesel also felt the question irrepressibly springing from within: “Where is God? Where is He?”
Then he heard a voice softly within him saying, “He is hanging there on the gallows.”
Author Dennis Ngien, in his article “The God Who Suffers,” added a footnote to that story. He quoted theologian Jurgen Moltmann saying that any other answer would be blasphemy.
I can ask the question, Can any faith other than Christianity answer that question in its fullest sense? As we look around at the feelingless atrocities we wonder, Where is God? And the answer comes: He is right in the middle – at the receiving end of our atrocities.
These very unconscionable and pitiful acts of blowing up a building and thus killing men, women, and children and of suffocating a newborn baby are acts against Him.’ (2)
Now this passage is rather confusing as the person who recommend it to believed to refer to ‘suffocating a newborn baby’ during the so-called ‘Holocaust’ and while I can see why he would have come to that conclusion – Zacharias’ book’s written style and structure leaves much to be desired – I think that the ‘suffocated baby’ that Zacharias is referring to is not a baby in the ‘Holocaust’ but rather a new-born baby being suffocated on 9/11 hence the sentence’s context of ‘blowing up a building and thus killing men, women, and children’.
Thus while I don’t believe this is truly a piece of ‘Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense’ it is never-the-less a testament to how much the ‘Holocaust’ has been the epicentre of morality in Western modernity in that a Christian evangelist uses the ‘Holocaust’ as a reference point for 9/11 even though the ‘Holocaust’ had little if anything to do with 9/11 outside of being the potential motivation for Israeli involvement in that atrocity back in 2001.
References
(1) https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/02/ravi-zacharias-rzim-investigation-sexual-abuse-sexting-rape/; https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/ravi-zacharias-sins-of-sexual-abuse-went-undetected-for-years-here-are-the-lessons-the-church-needs-to-learn/14737.article; https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/19-february/news/world/zacharias-ministries-admits-it-was-wrong-about-its-founder-s-abuse
(2) Ravi Zacharias, 2002, ‘Cries of The Heart: Bringing God Near When He Feels So Far’, 2nd Edition, Thomas Nelson: Nashville, p. 59