From the moment absurdity is recognized, wrote Albert Camus, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. In politics the extent and irrationality of that passion has often been exhibited, and none more so than in attitudes to the Jewish people and the State of Israel.   Those attitudes have increasingly taken the form of political fiction. Even ardent advocates of free expression may be troubled by the fact that Amazon is selling books that promote the motifs that the Holocaust was a hoax and that the alleged genocide of Jews was exaggerated or fabricated. Noted propagators of this absurdity include the American Arthur Butz, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University who concocted The Hoax of the 20th Century: the Case against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, and a British member of the British National Front who raised the question, Did Six Million Really Die?     Such absurdity in politics is familiar and often...(Read Full Article)