---

February 15, 1998

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

"A renewed effort by a veteran Holocaust denier to target college students was reported by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). According to ADL, Bradley Smith has inundated campus newspapers with requests to place anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial ads. The League is alerting campus editors and advertising managers to Smith's background, tactics, and motives, and urging them to take a strong stand against promoting Holocaust denial by refusing to run his material.

"The First Amendment is not an issue here," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "There is no moral or legal obligation to present anti-Semitic, hateful propaganda. Rejecting these ads does not violate freedom of expression. They deny the reality of the Holocaust and perpetuate blatant lies about the near-extinction of European Jewry. Would a campus newspaper run an ad that denies slavery in America?"

"With this recent activity, ads have appeared in newspapers at the University of Nebraska, Colgate, Cleveland State, Pace, MIT, University of Denver, Farleigh Dickenson, Villanova, Rice, University of New Haven, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Fredonia, and University of Delaware. 'ADL has been in contact with college leadership on each affected campus, providing guidance and exhaustive documentary materials on Holocaust denial. We have been instrumental in urging college presidents to speak out on this issue,' said Jeffrey Ross, ADL Director of Campus Affairs and Higher Education.

"Smith's new tactic is to offer a large monetary incentive to readers. A quarter-page ad offers ($)50,000 to the one individual instrumental in arranging a 90-minute presentation on National Network Television, in prime-time, of the 'Video of the Century,' a video produced by Holocaust deniers. 'The offer is just a hook to draw attention to the information in the ad and lure readers to Smith's Holocaust denial web site,' said Mr. Ross. 'There is also a smaller ad that attempts to attract people to the web site by promising to reveal mis-representations in an exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum,' he added, 'and, an op-ed piece that is a slickly-worded attempt to deny the existence of mass gassing at Nazi death camps by arguing that the doors leading into the gas chambers are really standard-issue doors made for bomb shelters.'

"Smith, who heads the so-called Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), has been attempting to infiltrate campus press for almost 8 years. In 1991, he published a full-page paid advertisement in The Daily Northwestern of Northwestern University. The ad, which looked like a news article, carried the headline, 'The Holocaust Story: How Much is False? The Case for Open Debate.' Since then, Smith has managed to place Holocaust denial ads in papers on nearly 80 campuses."

"As revealed by a November 1990 poll, commissioned by the ADL Braun Center for Holocaust Studies and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the public generally views the Holocaust with concern and understanding, rather than smugness and flippancy. Nonetheless, there remains a movement of hard-core anti-Semites still attempting to sway popular opinion by whitewashing Hitler's regime and denying or trivializing the crimes committed in its name.

"The 1990 survey, conducted by the polling firm Yankelovich Clancy Shulman among 885 individuals across the nation 97.5 percent of whom were non-Jews, indicated that 64 percent of the respondents saw a fair or great amount of relevance in the Holocaust when dealing with current moral issues. . . Seventy-three percent believed it was very important or essential that it be incorporated into American education, and 90 percent felt that everyone, not just Jews, should be concerned about this event. In light of the vigilance which the Jewish community has applied to maintain awareness of the Holocaust, it is reassuring to note that 85 percent of those polled believed in the importance of exposure to the Holocaust to prevent it from ever happening again."

"Considering the overwhelming awareness and compassion with which these Americans view the Holocaust, why is it necessary to focus a report on small groups . . . who seek to malign and deny the enormous reality of this event? The answer lies partly among the survey's 19 percent who felt the Holocaust was something Americans heard too much about, and the 26 percent -- more than one in four -- who thought it was relatively unimportant to incorporate the Holocaust into American education; this is the segment of the population potentially most susceptible to the lies of Holocaust 'revisionism.'

"Moreover, there are substantial numbers of people who apparently are unaware of the event entirely. In a 1985 Yankelovich poll conducted with Time magazine, 22 percent of those questioned admitted not knowing what the Holocaust was, and an additional 10 percent identified the event incorrectly.

"Although the present ADL survey reflects progress in public understanding and sensitivity toward the subject, it also indicates that awareness of the Holocaust diminishes among respondents who never attended college and among respondents between 18 and 30 years of age, regardless of education.

"Furthermore, the results of the poll do not reflect attitudes in other countries, or fluctuations of opinion that have occurred recently in the United States. The German public, for obvious reasons, demonstrates greater ambivalence toward the Holocaust than Americans. A 1992 Der Spiegel poll indicated that 62 percent of the Germans questioned wanted an end to the focus on the Nazi regime. Forty-four percent believed Hitler's leadership had both good and bad traits. And 32 percent felt that Jews were at least partly to blame for the persecution they had experienced.

"A Roper Organization poll conducted after President Ronald Reagan's controversial 1985 visit to the Bitburg cemetery revealed some American attitudes similar to present-day Germany's. At that time, forty percent of those polled wanted Jews to stop calling attention to Nazi atrocities. Forty-nine percent wanted to forgo the search for Nazi war criminals in the U.S."

"Thus, although current American attitudes toward the significance of the Holocaust seem generally sympathetic and well informed, there is no guarantee that they will remain so. As Holocaust 'revisionists' become increasingly sophisticated in their tactics, the relatively small segment of the population indifferent to or ignorant of the Holocaust is increasingly vulnerable to their falsehoods. Becoming informed of the contentions and tactics of the 'revisionists' is therefore vital to limiting and countering their impact.

(...)

When Holocaust 'revisionists' dispute the events of the Nazi regime, such as the genocide policy known as the 'Final Solution' or the presence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, or the documentation supporting these facts, they are attacking what they assert is the Jewish stranglehold on academia, the media, and international politics. As veteran 'revisionist' Bradley Smith has written, 'The primary interest of the author [Smith himself] is not what happened in Europe 45 years ago, but in how history and historic lies affect the lives of individuals living today.' For the Holocaust 'revisionist,' the gas chambers -- as the leader of France's radical right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has said -- are merely 'a point of detail.'

(...)

"Holocaust 'revisionism' has appeared in the United States, Canada, and throughout Europe to deny Germany's atrocities during World War II. Moreover, this propaganda has been used by some Arab figures -- such as Luai Abdo, a PLO magazine editor who has published articles claiming 'Nazi camps were more 'civilized' than Israeli prisons' -- and their fellow travellers to attack and undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Indeed, 'revisionists' have often referred to the Holocaust specifically as Zionist propaganda.

(...)

"Clearly, however, to condemn mass murder is not a 'moralizing judgment.' With their attempts to explain away the death count, and their distortions of the use of Zyklon B gas and other features of the concentration camps, 'revisionists' deliberately seek to erase the fact that millions died in a project of industrialized racial annihilation. Like the Nazis themselves, they efface the humanity of the victims by reducing them to items on a ledger, to be deleted at will.

"In addition to blatant neo-Nazism and outright denial of the Holocaust, however, is a notable trend in legitimate historical scholarship which relativizes the genocide of the Jews. Such scholars as Arno J. Mayer at Princeton and Ernst Nolte at Berlin's Free University have argued, with no apparent anti-Semitic motivation, that though millions of Jews were killed during WWII, there was actually no premeditated policy for this destruction. This theory ignores the blatant hatred Hitler long expressed toward Jews, and implies that the Holocaust ultimately is comparable to other historical events, particularly the Stalinist purges."

"Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt has called these ideas the 'yes but' syndrome: Yes, there was a Holocaust, but it was a by-product of the campaign against the Soviet Union. Yes, there was a Holocaust, but some Jews died of starvation and disease (like German refugees after the war). Lipstadt concludes: 'With enough latitude, the 'yes but' approach robs the Holocaust of its uniqueness and its capacity to offer the world ethical, moral, and political lessons. It reduces the Holocaust to a merely relatively evil.'

"At its most extreme, this kind of relativism obscures the horror of Nazi genocide completely. One telling example of this trend is that of the linguistics professor and political activist Noam Chomsky, who wrote an introduction to a Holocaust-denial book by French 'revisionist' Robert Faurisson. In his essay Chomsky saw concerted opposition to Holocaust 'revisionism' as censorship, arguing that scholars' ideas should not be suppressed no matter how distasteful they may be. For Chomsky, the French author's misrepresentation and historical fraud were merely an exercise in free speech. But to describe legitimate opposition to Faurisson and widespread public condemnation of his views as 'suppression' is to confuse the democratic exercise of free speech with a tyrannical insistence on conformity of thought. Indeed, Alfred Kazin has characterized Chomsky's argument as reflecting an incapability 'of making distinctions between totalitarian and democratic societies, between oppressors and victims.'

"Such distinctions are crucial to recognizing the tactics of extremists who in general are employing greater subtlety and dissimulation to reach wider audiences. As the Institute for Historical Review publishes a journal and holds conventions to mimic the formalities of legitimate scholarship, and as Bradley Smith buys space in college newspapers to promote an 'open debate' on the Holocaust, so other racists and anti-Semites around the world have used sanitized political campaigns and exploited controversial social issues to gain access to national debates and to attempt to influence the general public.

"This report has been issued to expose and counter those who deny and distort the Holocaust, and to illustrate the continuing need for effective education on the subject. For it is crucial to preserve the memory of these events, even as they recede into the past, in order to inform the moral challenges that humankind still faces -- as in the recurrent neo-Nazi violence in Germany, as well as reports of atrocities and 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia -- and to prevent any such horror from occurring ever again."

Thought for the Day:

'Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep."

(William Shakespeare)