When one is told that a resolution has been passed without a vote but “by consensus,” one’s first impression is that everyone has agreed to it. And so when the press reported last week that the United Nations General Assembly had passed “by consensus” a resolution condemning Holocaust denial in a session at which only Iran spoke out against, one took this to mean that the rest of the world’s governments unanimously thought that Holocaust denial was a bad idea.

Unfortunately, “by consensus” can also mean something else. It can mean that not everyone agrees but that those who don’t would rather not be on record as not doing so. And this, in fact, was the kind of “consensus” on Holocaust denial that the General Assembly witnessed last week.

Let’s look at the numbers. The United Nations has in it 192 member states. Of these, 103 put their names on the Holocaust denial resolution as co-sponsors. Since this was in effect the only way of voting “yes” in a voteless procedure, this was how many “yes” votes there were.

On the other hand, 10 members states of the United Nations, among them Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe, and Cambodia, instructed their delegates not to attend the session at all. Since this was in effect the only way of voting “no,” this was how many “no” votes there were.

This leaves 79 countries. Of these, the delegates of three registered as arriving late, while the delegates of 76 others, among them China, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Yemen, simply sat there while the resolution was declared adopted. Since this was in effect the only way of abstaining, this was how many abstentions there were.

To sum up: The General Assembly resolution condemning Holocaust denial passed by a vote of 103 to 10 with 76 abstentions, the latter camp including every Arab country and every Muslim country except Turkey. The delegates of several of the abstaining countries took advantage of the opportunity to speak. One of them, the Egyptian delegate, expressed identification with the resolution despite his nonsponsorship of it.

The Indonesian delegate declared that the Holocaust, though worthy of remembrance, was “hardly the only human tragedy” to offer the lessons that it did and should not overshadow such other expressions of intolerance as the Muhammad cartoons. The Venezuelan delegate stated that the resolution also should have included a reference to the sufferings of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation.

And the delegate of the United States, Ambassador Alejandro Wolf, who spoke on behalf of the resolution’s sponsors? Ambassador Wolf actually spoke twice, once at the General Assembly session itself and once in a press release afterward. In his remarks to the General Assembly, he did not mention that the Holocaust was aimed almost exclusively at the Jewish people — in fact, he did not mention the Jews, let alone the state of Israel, at all.

In his press release, on the other hand, he referred, in discussing the resolution’s context, to both. Clearly he was of the opinion that explicitly connecting the Holocaust with the Jewish people, and with a Jewish state that is being threatened with genocide, would not be a wise move in front of the 192 members of the United Nations.

Did we really need this?

I have always been of the opinion, like many other people, that Holocaust denial laws and regulations are foolish. Not only are they an infringement on freedom of thought and speech, they are counterproductive in terms of their intentions. If a country were suddenly to pass a “solar orbit denial law,” criminalizing the belief that the earth stands still in space, it would be natural to wonder what that country’s astronomers know that we don’t to have made it so hysterically afraid of anyone saying that Copernicus was wrong.

The same holds true of Holocaust denial. For anyone who is neither a lunatic nor a fool of one kind or another, the Holocaust is as much a fact as the earth’s orbiting of the sun. To make denying it illegal can only suggest to the poorly informed but not necessarily bigoted that it may not be such a fact after all and that there are things about it that need to be hidden in order to keep the illusion of its factuality alive. Precisely this, indeed, was the public relations pitch of the recent “Holocaust conference” in Tehran.

Yet even if one sides with Holocaust denial laws on the grounds that denying the Holocaust is a form of hate speech that deserves to be outlawed, an affirmation of “Holocaust remembrance” accompanied by an overlooking of the Jewishness of most of the Holocaust’s victims is simply exchanging one form of Holocaust denial for another.

The delegate from Indonesia was right. The Holocaust is not the world’s “only human tragedy,” and if we wish to turn it into a universal symbol of human tragedy, or of human evil, we are ignoring the most important thing about it, which is that it would never have taken place, or proceeded as far as it did, had not much of the world, though disliking the Nazis, thought that the people they sought to exterminate deserved it because they were Jews. If the world can’t remember that about itself, there’s not much point in remembering the Holocaust at all.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.