The Holocaust and the Old Testament               It would have been good if we could have stopped at this point and gone on to the next chapter. Since, however, some have been extremely diligent in their attacks on Christianity, and have left no stone unturned in their attempts to link Christianity and the bible to the Holocaust, it is necessary to look at the assertion that the crimes of the Nazis have parallels in the Old Testament.    The most obvious parallel is between Hitler's massacre of the Jews and the Jewish massacres of the Canaanites. Comparisons have also been drawn between the Nuremberg Racial Laws forbidding marriage between Jews and Germans, and Old Testament prohibitions on marriage between Jews and the peoples around them. One of the Nazi war criminals, Julius Streicher, even used this defense during his trial at Nuremberg - the Nazi race laws were no different from what the Jews had done themselves.     I am sure that most Jews who try to link Naziism to Christianity would not be pleased to see Naziism linked to Torah as well. Perhaps one of them has written something highlighting the differences between the conquest of Canaan and the Nazi genocide. It is not only the Jews that need to be concerned with this, however. Christians like myself who consider the Old Testament to have been divinely inspired, and see it as a vital part of the New Covenant revealed in Christ, should also have something to say about this.    Most people who make these comparisons are not, unlike the aforementioned Herr Streicher, interested in justifying Nazi crimes. Their motive rather is to attack the bible. By linking Hitler's ideas and actions to the bible, they hope to show that the book, and of course the people who believe in it as well, are dangerous, a menace to society; or, they want to discredit the biblical conception of God, and show it to be unworthy of belief.    Of course, there are people who are impervious to argument. Like those anti-Americans who compared the US occupation of Western Europe to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and insisted that NATO was basically the same as the Warsaw Pact, some people who compare certain events and ideas of Torah to the Nazi program of genocide will never be impressed by any amount of arguments. They have an underlying personal motivation which holds reason and logic in captivity. Logic is often subordinate to will, so people believe what they want to believe, and find those arguments most effective which most closely conform to their prior inclinations.    Christians are not of course immune to this common human failing, but it is helpful to have a higher independent and external source of knowledge. Once this is accepted by faith (and faith is the gift of God), it at least makes possible a certain measure of self-denial and objectivity. Secular humanists will laugh at the idea that belief in God and in the bible allows for the possibility of greater epistemological self-denial, self-transcendance, and objectivity. They like to imagine that it is the rejection of God that guarantees objectivity, that religious belief is hopelessly, irredeemably subjective. This is, as was said before, a faith assumption. It cannot be verified empirically, and is only a statement of personal belief. When Christ returns with great power and glory to judge the world, we will find out who was right and who was wrong.    At this point, it is useful to remember that commandment of Christ's: "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement." Someone may say that the Soviet and the American occupations of Europe were the same - if they refuse to consider or respond intelligently to contrary evidence, what can be done? Someone could argue, "The Germans invaded France in 1940, and the Allies invaded France in 1944," or "the Germans bombed British cities and the Allies bombed German cities" and conclude that the British and the Americans were the same as the Nazis. If people refuse to consider differences of motive and result, they are either incapable of rational discourse on the subject, or else are merely propagandizing, trying to advance their own agenda. That such arguments are in fact made will be seen when we consider the argument in another chapter, that just as German Christians supported Hitler's invasion of Poland, American Christians supported the government in the first Gulf War - as if the two situations were identical.