Robert Faurisson, a French academic who participated in Ahmadinejad’s recent gathering of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, stated he had never found documents to support the Holocaust.

He can’t have looked very hard, because, as Anne Applebaum writes in The New York Sun, victims of the Holocaust bear witness in hundreds of books, scholarship on the subject adds up to billions of words, and abundant films, documents, etc., provide the history of the Nazi regime.

Anyone tempted to dismiss this latest exercise in Holocaust denial as mere propaganda and nuttiness should note the scholar Gregory Stanton’s observation that genocides unfold in eight stages, starting with classification, symbolization, and dehumanization, and ending in extermination and denial. About this Bret Stephens comments:

What has happened in Tehran — denial — may seem to have turned that order on its head. It hasn’t. The road to Tehran is a well-traveled one, and among those who denounce it now are some who have already walked some part of it.

Personally I favor the response by Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York state official, to Ahmadinejad and his claque of academic and other deniers. All of us, says Weiner, have to “respond as if this guy is as crazy and his country as erratic as it seems to be.”

Amen to that.