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Dream that I’m shot in the head, then the
heart. The hit to the head is accompanied by a
tremendous blast of hot air. I see everything blowing
apart. The shot to the heart is a little high and to my
left. It’s an unnecessary follow up. The dream half
wakens me and I lie under the covers in the dark, the
heart pounding.
The bedroom door clicks, opens slowly and I
sit up in the dark in a frozen blaze of fear. It’s
Alicia. A moment before she must have been in bed beside
me. Now she has her robe on and is in the doorway.
In Spanish I say: “Where are you going?”
“To the sofa,” she says. “Sleeping with you
is like being in a bed full of restless donkeys.”
I’m awake now and I turn on the light. Maybe
I’ll read something. I can’t focus my attention on any
of the titles on the nightstand. There’s been some new
telephone threats, some of them by a repeater who says
he’s going to shoot Marisol and Paloma as well as
myself. He’s upset about one of my ads that’s been
printed in a student newspaper in New York. Threats to
kill me are old hat, but men calling to tell me they are
going to murder the kids too is a new wrinkle.
Reporters want to know how I feel about the
fact that so many professors and so many spokesmen for
the Jewish community publicly condemn me. Scores of
articles, interviews and opinion-pages, more like
hundreds I suppose, have condemned me as a racist, an
anti-Semite and hater. Editorial writers and reporters
for all the top papers, the presidents of universities,
spokespersons for Jewish organizations, and professors
everywhere have indulged themselves with slandering me.
I find the attention interesting and encouraging. A
reporter for the New York Times writes that my
wife has to clean houses to help me make ends meet.
Angry people, some who identify themselves as Jews, call
me and write me letters saying that’s what I deserve, a
wife who’s a cleaning woman. Where’s the connection?
I accept the ridicule, the charges of being a
hater, the contempt. That’s part of what the work is.
Bringing those charges against me publicly is the first
halting step taken in my direction by those who most
need to be in better relationship with me. It’s been
suggested that my sensibilities have been coarsened over
the years by the anger others feel toward me, that
that’s why I am so accepting of being a target for it. I
believe such attacks make me more sensitive toward
others, not less. It isn’t the acceptance of anger that
coarsens sensibilities, but the rejection of it. Any
rejection of relationship is stasis. Acceptance is
action.
A few years ago there were very few in the
Holocaust Industry who felt they had to condemn me
personally for my views. Revisionism didn’t count. Now
revisionism does count, and there’s a contest going on
among the cultural elites to discover who can express
contempt for its spokesmen most effectively. The outrage
expressed over the Campus Project is one sign that the
game is starting to play itself out in the theater of
public life. That the contest is joined. All the forces
of the Industry’s lobby are being brought to bear to
stop the work. The difference between myself and those
who condemn me is that I look forward to the play. I’m
not angry with the other players. I’m pleased that the
curtain is going up at last on this great spectacle. I
await the unfolding of the dramatic line with eager
attention. I don’t much care who wins and loses. With
me, the play itself is the thing.
When I run an advertisement in a college
newspaper I expect to be taken to task (to not put too
fine an edge on it) by the administration, its faculty,
and the special interest organizations on campus. Among
the latter, the Hillel rabbis are the most energetic,
the most persevering. Here and there a university
president, a member of the faculty perhaps, will defend
the ideal of an open press, even if that means printing
something a revisionist has to say. The Hillel rabbis?
Never (well, almost never)! I thought they would be more
understanding, being so close to God and so on. While
they don’t have much influence among Jews at large, on
university campuses they know how to put the fear of the
Almighty into everyone else. Wherever I rear my ugly
revisionist head, the Hillel rabbis are there to crush
it. They think they’re back in the Garden, jousting with
the Serpent.
Hillel is the leading private Jewish policing
agency on college campuses dedicated to serving what it
believes are Jewish goals, mistakenly. The rabbis talk
of hate, without let, never seeming to tire of it. They
almost convince me they think it a gesture of love to
slander those who expresses doubt about any part of the
orthodox Holocaust story. While they appear to have a
broad cultural and political agenda, there is no
evidence they have a spiritual one. The Hillel rabbis
have become the Jimmy Swaggarts of the Holocaust
Industry. Ignorant of what they profess to be experts
in, sweaty with self-righteousness and bad faith, they
are ever ready to argue against intellectual freedom,
and to slander those of us who argue for it.
Sitting on the sofa tonight watching Oliver
Stone’s The Doors. Jim Morrison needed to feel a
passion in his life. He was very young and very talented
and he probably mistook stimulation for passion, which
is what the very young often do. Nevertheless, the film
makes me aware that I have no passion for the work I’m
doing. The work has my attention, it keeps me busy day
and night, it’s worthwhile work, but I have no passion
for it. It’s the contest as much as anything that keeps
me going. The odds. It’s a million to one I won’t be
able to accomplish anything significant. There’s
something about those odds that excites me. There’s
something boyish in that excitement, like there was
something boyish in Morrison’s talk about needing to
risk death. The difference is that Morrison was a boy
when he talked like that and I’m old enough to be his
grandfather.
Doctor Franklyn is here to check Mother’s
vital signs. She’s only half conscious. Her mouth is
open, her eyelids half closed with the eyeballs rolled
up in her head. He gives her a couple injections, then
we step into the kitchen where he says she might die
today.
“She looks like she might,” he says. Then he
adds: “She has no fever though.”
“I gave her three Tylenol. I didn’t think it
was enough so I gave her two tablespoons of liquid
Tylenol too.”
“If you give her too much of that you can
damage her liver.”
“The truth is, I gave her three tablespoons
of liquid Tylenol. I could have blown her liver right
out of there.”
“I’m not sure what you want me to do if
there’s a crisis.”
“Nothing heroic. I’m ready for her to ease on
out of this affair. I’m ready.”
“I’m not suggesting we let her die.”
“No. I understand. Don’t worry.”
“It has to happen some time.”
“Now’s a good time,” I say.
I tell Alicia what Doctor Franklyn said about
how Mother looks like she might die today. Alicia
doesn’t say anything but after a moment tears roll down
her cheeks. Later this morning I see Marisol sitting at
Mother’s bedside holding her hand and crying. Mother is
unconscious. Later Alicia is frowning grotesquely and
crying while she helps Paloma trim the Christmas tree.
Paloma wants to know why her mommy is sad. Alicia
distracts her with a box of decorations, the tears
dripping off her nose. For my part, I feel pretty good
but I need some shut-eye.
It’s 4am and I’m sitting on the toilet with a
bad stomach. I’ve been up with Mother most of the night.
I feel a sudden surge of anxiety. Thought has recalled a
passage from a biography of Gandhi. Gandhi’s father was
sick and Gandhi was nursing him attentively. One
afternoon he began thinking about his wife and after a
while he got up from his father’s bedside and went to
his wife and gave her a tumble and when he returned to
his father the old man was dead. It wasn’t too long
after that that Gandhi gave up sex entirely. I finish in
the bathroom hurriedly and go to Mother’s bedside. She’s
resting comfortably. She’s all right.
All the women in the house
are sick. Marisol has the flu and Paloma and Alicia have
colds while Mother is prostrate. Dante carelessly left
out of his poem that level of Hell where one man is
doomed to live alone with four sick women spanning three
generations.
One morning in the Mekong beneath a dark,
heavy sky I was hiking through the countryside with a
young man from Saigon. We passed mud and brick forts
with little guard towers. Vietnamese boys stood guard in
them with red kerchiefs tied about their throats.
Beau Geste in the tropics. We walked the narrow
roads through the paddies, passed villages, crossed
canals with men sitting on the banks beneath coconut and
banana trees repairing fishing nets. The men greeted us
with loud rough shouts as if they were pissed. That’s
how farmers greet each other in the Mekong.
The sky grew heavier and darker and thunder
began to roll. We asked permission to enter a farmhouse.
Inside, the large room was clean and tidy. The storm
broke with a roar. Three workers came in from the
paddies drenched and laughing. Two women came in from
the lean-to kitchen at the side of the house. We men sat
on a mat and chatted and watched through the one wide
window opening as the water poured down, obliterating
the view of the canal only a few yards away.
Suddenly a wind came up and blew the rain
inside the house. Two of the women went out in the
pouring blowing water to remove the sticks propping up
the woven shutter over the window opening. They laughed
as the wind blew the shutter out of their hands. They
were already drenched. Their drenched clothes clung to
their strong bodies. Their hair blew in strings over
their laughing faces. They looked at me when they
laughed. The rain splashed on their white teeth. Inside
the room, warm and dry, I shivered watching the two
drenched laughing bodies. The men in the room laughed
with me. They were probably the husbands and brothers.
Older people were in the room too. With the
shutter down, closing off the room to the blowing storm,
an older woman set about heating water on a brazier. A
little food appeared. The storm thundered and poured
down on the roof. We chatted about this and that. I
happened to look at the back of the room and for the
first time saw the tiny old woman lying on the mat on
her side, her temple resting on a polished mahogany wood
pillow, watching us silently. She was immaculately
dressed in a simple lavender sheath dress. I could see
the swell of her little hip. They never lose that line.
It’s structural. The old woman was dying, someone told
me. I glanced at her again. Her gray hair was
immaculately combed. Her dress was immaculate. The mat
she lay on and her pillow were immaculate and she was
perfectly still. Our eyes met and I nodded once. Her
eyes didn’t leave mine but there was no recognition in
them. I turned back to the others.
Mother is past 90 now. She has multiple
sclerosis and hasn’t been able to walk for about 25
years. She lost control of her bladder and bowels years
ago. We use a sling with a lift to get her from the bed
to her wheel chair. She hardly eats any more but when
she did still eat there was shit everywhere. She’d soil
her sheets while she was asleep, sometimes two or three
times during a day and night. She’d soil the floor while
we were transferring her from the chair to the bed and
back again. One time, during a transfer, she dumped on
Marisol’s bare foot. Marisol didn’t know what hit her.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “But there
it was. It was hot. It was confusing. What the hell is
that, you know? Afterwards I thought, now I’ve
experienced everything.”
“You think you’ve experienced everything,” I
said. “I don’t think so.”
Sometimes when I’m cleaning Mother I recall
the tiny old Vietnamese woman who was dying so
immaculately in the little thatched house surrounded by
rice paddies in the Mekong Delta during a war that was
out of control and how much care her family must have
been giving her and in that respect how, in their
hearts, they must have been immaculate themselves.
A young man calls from Los Angeles asking
about the scandal I’ve set off at a University in New
York. News travels fast. He thinks it incredulous that
asking for an open debate about an historical
controversy could create such a fuss. Tonight I dream
that when we are at the dinner table the young man
appears at our window and peers in at us. He’s a homely
little Jewish guy. I invite him in, introduce him to
everyone and put a place for him at the table. We talk
about many things but don’t get around to the Holocaust
story. Later he says: “When you invited me in—that was
heavy.”
When I wake, thought recalls the Admiral
Peary advertisement soliciting companions to trek to the
South Pole: “Wanted: A few good men. High risk. Low
pay.” That’s the kind of advertisement I need to place
in college newspapers. Needed: A few good Jews. High
risk. No pay whatever. It’s Jewish students who will be
among the first to give themselves permission to do
what’s necessary about the Holocaust story. They won’t
be alone, but they’ll be among the first.
When Rabbi Meir Mitelman, executive director
of the University of Hofstra Hillel, learned that the
Hofstra Chronicle was going to insert the first
issue of The Revisionist in 5,000 copies of the
paper, he apparently thought to let it go. I don’t know
what he thought, but he did not rush out into the quad
to exterminate the revisionist serpent. The majority of
those on the Chronicle staff, a number of whom
were Jewish, voted to run the ad. Maybe Rabbi Mitelman
thought that the time had come to test the waters, that
maybe it would be good for there to be an open
discussion of an historical controversy on a university
campus. There are many rabbis who believe that
intellectual freedom is more a more important principle
than defending on principle every twist and turn in the
Holocaust story. I believe there are. The rabbis are
pressured to keep their mouths closed, just as priests
and pastors are. It’s no longer a Jewish problem, but a
cultural one.
Maybe it occurred to Rabbi Mitelman that when
The Revisionist appeared on campus, the Hofstra
professors would be able to handle it. Certainly the
professors were better prepared to argue the truth of
the Holocaust story better than some so-called
revisionist with no academic training, no credentials,
no published papers on the Holocaust. No nothing. I’d
like to think that that is more or less how Rabbi
Mitelman thought about the coming distribution of The
Revisionist when it was brought to his attention. A
bother perhaps, something of an uproar perhaps, but at a
university all in a days work.
Then—it hit the fan.
In a public forum called to denounce The
Revisionist, Smith, and revisionist theory, and to
denounce the Hofstra staff and particularly its editor,
for having voted to publish the ad, Hofstra Vice
President for University Relations Michael DeLuise
turned on Rabbi Mitelman and berated him in public for
not informing the university’s administration the moment
he heard about the impending distribution of a
revisionist publication. Hofstra Provost Herman A.
Berliner told the Jewish Chronicle that if he had
been informed of the coming distribution of The
Revisionist, he would have asked the Chronicle
to reconsider. If that didn’t stop the distribution of
TR, he would have taken out an ad in the same issue of
the paper to say that the Chronicle staff had
shown poor judgement. Good judgement, you see, would
have been to suppress The Revisionist.
Now that Rabbi Mitelman was outed publicly
for not having done what he could have done to stop the
distribution of TR to Hofstra students, he was eager to
clear his name. He was caught in the dilemma that
typically Hillel rabbis snare others with. He folded up
like a cheap metal chair. He drafted a written statement
apologizing for “the error in judgement in not taking
more aggressive actions before the paper came out (a tip
of the hat to Stalin if you will).” If he had not
forgotten, even for a moment, that Hillel is
dedicated to the censorship of revisionism, he would
not have made such a clumsy and self-destructive error.
So Rabbi Meir Mitelman reverted to form—the
form that Hillel rabbis have developed over the past
couple decades, have nourished and promoted—he fell back
on that old Holocaust Industry standard—slander.
“However,” Rabbi Meir Mitelman told the
public forum, “it is essential to focus on the real
issue at hand—to make sure we expose the lies and hatred
in Bradley Smith’s ads.” The good rabbi did not mention
which “lies” he was referring to. He did not quote from
any of the text in the magazine to demonstrate where the
“hatred” is. Slanderers do not do that. Slander is a
means and an end in itself. So there you are. Another
good man—and I am sure Rabbi Mitelman is a good man—goes
down.
It’s interesting to watch a Hillel rabbi
squirm under the cultural pressures Hillel rabbis have
helped create for everyone else on campus. When
revisionism raises its satanic head on a college campus,
it won’t do to pause and consider what is actually being
said. It won’t do to put intellectual freedom before
Hillel’s own special agenda. Rabbi Mitelman forgot that
for one moment, then found himself pilloried just as
Hillel rabbis pillory others for expressing doubt about
what they insist everyone believe.
What a disaster these rabbis are for
students. Sex isn’t the Achilles heel of these Holocaust
fundamentalists. Pride is, and a lust to control the
thoughts of others. They’re helping to turn the
Holocaust story into a quasi-religious cult, complete
with an immense crank literature of infallible texts,
crazy miracles, saintly eye-witness tales of miraculous
escapes from nazi devils, all of it protected by taboos
and media witch trials that condemn as heretics those of
us who say we no longer believe what we no longer
believe.
The Hillel rabbis act like they believe
they’re living in a culture foreign to them, pressuring
students and others into the service of a cult committed
to the undermining of American idealism. Rabbis who work
to destroy those who argue for open debate on the
Holocaust stories represent a New Inquisition. These
Jewish Torquemadas have the media rack waiting for all
who disagree with them about the truthfulness and
historical accuracy of their sacred writings.
Revisionist theory is on the Hillel index of forbidden
thought. In 20th century America the rabbis
believe the proper punishment for expressions of doubt
about what the rabbis believe is public disgrace and
financial ruin.
With guys like me, the Hillel rabbis have an
insoluble problem. Disgrace means nothing to me and I
have no money. I’ve been disgraced now for years. As a
man of action, I accept disgrace. As a pragmatist, I
accept poverty. The rabbis, full of their lust for
dominion, don’t understand that inwardly they’re
trapped. They don’t understand yet that I’m here to help
free them, to help point the way to a new freshness of
spirit.
In the old days some Jews
felt in their bones that pride goeth before a fall.
Today’s Hillel rabbis have no sense of that. They’ve put
all their eggs in one basket. Influence means everything
to them, liberty nothing. They’re living in another,
psychologically more primitive era. They remember (never
forget!) the tragedy of the ghettos of Eastern Europe
but haven’t yet opened their eyes to the wonderful
vistas in America of liberty and intellectual freedom.
I’m going to help fix this for them. I’m going straight
ahead working for an open debate on the Holocaust story.
I’ve accepted the responsibility for helping our rabbis,
no matter what their religious background, no matter
what profession they follow, to get a hard look at
American idealism. That’s how men of action put it
together. I’m a door through which the culturally
unassimilated arrive in the real America. Hallelujah!
It’s 2am and I can’t sleep. I’ve been too
busy spreading the good news about Holocaust revisionism
to do much walking and when I don’t exercise I sleep
poorly. I put on my long sleeved padded jacket and lie
on the sofa under a blanket with Andrew Harvey’s The
Hidden Journey. Harvey is an Englishman born in
India who’s become a Hindu religioso. He’s been
spiritually awakened through sitting darshan with
a young Hindu woman called Ma. She’s an interesting
religious phenomenon in that she doesn’t preach and has
no rules. That’s my kind of religion. While you sit, she
takes your face in her hands and peers into your eyes in
silence and if you’re receptive, light and radical
understanding begin to flood your daily life. So Harvey
says.
One night while walking on the beach at
Pondicherry, Harvey heard a voice speak out of the
darkness: “You can not transform what you have not
blessed.” After a moment the voice said: “You can never
transform what first you have not accepted and blessed.”
The words strike a deep note in me. I’m not
sure why. I think once more about how useless it is to
search and how valuable it is to be aware of where you
are and to remain open. Everything is coming to you all
the time. Then thought recalls how Jesus taught that
it’s a virtue to love our enemies and I see the
relationship between that idea and the necessity to
accept and bless what you want to see transformed. I’ve
got to bless the Hillel rabbis and dismiss my contempt
for them. Not them, but their behavior. Turning the
other cheek is not an act of meekness in the face of
societal brutality. It’s an act of courage directed at
the inner life. It’s a concept of radical cooperation.
It’s only a gesture but it stands on rock. The Hillel
rabbis, literally, know not what they’re doing. They
can’t help themselves. There must be exceptions here and
there. Apparently there was an exception at Hofstra
University—for a moment.
When the Hillel rabbis denounce me as their
enemy, sometimes I return the favor with some smart-ass
reply. I have a clever talent for that sort of thing.
Later, I always regret having used it. There’s a time in
life when every one of us is blessed, while those who
age and look for enemies and avoid painful truths and
disseminate falsehoods are already burdened with a
terrible weight. Maybe I can be counted among such
people; certainly the Hillel rabbis can. From this night
on, while I will not accept their bad behavior, I am
going to accept them as men and women (if there are
women among them) and bless them with my good will, my
patience, and my radical cooperation.
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