>If I in any way miscontrued or misunderstood your position or confused with with Barkley's I sincerely apologize.> No problem. >I do not believe that in my response to either you or Barkley I was hurling invective as I tried to present my position with supporting evidence and/or reasoning and/or supporting opinion free of invective.> Rather than rake over that, let me suggest a potential benefit in putting ourselves in the other guys' shoes for a moment. I'm no doctor of psychoanalysis, but I never thought much of them anyway. You describe your adversaries as Holocaust deniers for their indifference to the fate of non-jews during WWII or any other time. For most, I would say, the issue is not a lack of knowledge of the facts, especially regarding the European holocaust. They may not know beans about Indians or Armenians. What's in question is their emotional scope, not their intellectual understanding; what they care about and how they relate to other people. By contrast, among deniers of the Nazi sort, the issue is either a disbelief that mass murder ever occurred, or a desire to deny it for perverse political reasons. This sort of denial is somewhat different from those Jews who don't want to hear about the suffering of other groups. I think that's really what's operating. Not, "I don't believe you," but "I don't want to listen to you." The political corrollary is, our fates have nothing in common. Isn't this exactly part and parcel of racism in the overarching historical sense? The isolation of a group for victimization is aimed at inducing the victims to isolate themselves, as in divide and conquer, 101. Isolation is expressed as desperate efforts of self-defense ('we have to save ourselves first'), in betrayal of one's own for the sake of an individual or narrow sub-group, and, after the fact, in a denial of the suffering of others. In other words, what you call holocaust denial, which in a certain literal sense is an apt description, is also an artifact of victimization, and perhaps better understood in the latter respect. Victimization in this sense is obviously much more attenuated for some than for others. Nobody borne after WWII could have known anyone who fell victim to the Nazis. The transmission of pain from elder to younger would obviously vary among families and according to individual sensitivity. Some with virtually no experience of such grief are probably among the leading deniers of non-Jewish victimization, but I think the general point holds. It's hard to determine who is who in this vein from e-mail. Denial can derive from evil politics, from callousness towards others, or from willful refusal to admit to the truth of facts about mass murder. Alternatively, it could stem from the predictable emotional self-centeredness that follows from a searing experience of victimization, perhaps transmitted from parent to offspring. I think the distinction is worth keeping in mind. The ability of anyone so victimized to keep their mind open to the universality of such suffering is testimony to their individual qualities, but everybody will not qualify for sainthood. For those with little or no direct experience, such as myself, seeing the plurality of genocides is no great feat of imagination. Regards, Max A side point: >. . . (If one is a such a Zionist, why isn't he/she living in Israel putting body and lifestyle on the line?) > Because we can't all be heroes. We often espouse ideals that we do not fully live up to, for one reason or another. It's not evil.