Smith’s Journal

Wednesday, 1 November

When I clicked onto our Homepage this morning I found a blank screen. I had a small attack of anxiety. The first thing that came to me was that someone, probably from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had leaned on the people at Valleynet and my provider had caved. A few years ago when I was doing radio and TV talk shows that's what the Center would do. Aaron Brietbart was their hit man in those days. But this time I was wrong. One of my own buddies, one of my technical advisors, had made a little error and blasted our Homepage into the cosmos. I don't know when it disappeared, but we got it back up late this afternoon. I ask those whom I accused in my heart to forgive me.

Friday, 3 November

Last month I developed a little advertisement to run in the classified sections of student newspapers. The text of the ad reads:

A couple days ago the ad was rejected by The Flame at the University of Illinois at Chicago with an unsigned scribbled note. It was rejected by the University of Chicago Maroon the same way. There are very few newspaper people who want to take responsibility for such a betrayal of journalistic ideals and ethics. They tell themselves that they have idealistic reasons for rejecting the ads. They don't explain themselves and don't sign their names to their rejections because privately they must feel ashamed

The Diamondback at University of Maryland has been running the 46 Questions ad. Congratulations. Today an ad representative from the paper called to say it would not run it again. He said his name was Michael. He wouldn't state his last name but volunteered he'd had relatives murdered in the gas chambers. The Diamondback has run the ad twice but it's causing too much “suffering” for UM students. There have been protests. Advertisers have threatened to remove their ads from the paper if my ad continues to run. Michael wouldn't tell me who had protested. He wouldn't tell me if the Diamondback has a policy of not publishing skeptical questions about the gas chambers. He did say the questions were “untrue.” When I asked him how a question could be “untrue” he said the gas chambers had been “proven” at the Nuremberg Trials. He said that history is “black and white.” I have no reason to believe Michael has read the questions, or that anyone else at the Diamondback has either.

Sunday, 5 November

Yesterday when a friend asked if I had heard that Yitzhak Rabin had been murdered, the first two things I felt, for it wasn't thinking, it wasn't centered in the brain but in the gut, was that I hoped the bad guy was a Jew not a Moslem because if he was a Moslem it would play into the hands of Jewish fundamentalism, and that the killing no matter who did it will further complicate the issue of open debate on the holocaust story. If I continue to question the gas chamber stories now I will be charged with being insensitive to Jewish suffering, both here and in Israel. But that is always what I am charged with, no matter how well things might be going for Jews here, there or anywhere, so I don't expect to pay much attention to such charges.

Now we are watching Jews on television tell us how horrible it is to think that a Jew would kill a Jew for political reasons. What's so terrible about it? Jews kill Moslems for political reasons. Jews kill Moslems for many other reasons as well. Of course Moslems kill Jews for political reasons, as well as each other. Moslems are like Christians that way. Our own Christian Presidents have killed Moslems and most everyone else you can think of for political reasons. Except Jews. Of course our Presidents have specialized in killing Christians because that's where their hearts have been, but they certainly have been willing to go in new directions when serious killing needed to be done. When the need arose in Kuwait, President Bush put together an expeditionary army that knocked off a few tens of thousands of Moslems without taking a deep breath. The killing of Rabin by a Jew is a tragedy for his family and those who knew him and maybe for Israel, but it has a bright side to it culturally. It goes to remind us, and we need to be reminded, that Jews are just folks. Jews will kill themselves just like the rest of us kill ourselves. When more of us realize that, we will understand our obligation to not treat Jews any longer as if they were not just folks. As more Jews realize it, fewer Jews will ask that we judge historical events concerning Jews by one set of intellectual standards and all other historical events by another. This will be good for everybody.

Wednesday, 8 November

“BY GEORGE! RAW ANTI-SEMITISM!” is the headline for a story in the Village Voice (24 Oct 95, p. 15) written by Nat Hentoff. Always on the lookout for antisemitism, like a fundamentalist preacher searching for sin beneath his neighbor's sheets, he's found it again in the premiere issue of George. John F. Kennedy Jr. is Editor-in-Chief of George so Hentoff is able to experience a high from two sources at one time — nail some juvenile Black antisemitism on the one hand and attack a top Gentile icon on the other. It isn't long however before Hentoff climbs very far down the social ladder to address those “notorious Holocaust revisionist ads sent to [college editors] by a man on the West Coast . . . .” That is, myself.

Ostensibly, the argument in George is over gangsta rap. Some Blacks feel that gangsta rap is being promoted by people who want to “set up” Blacks as “trash that should be exterminated.” Dr. Frances Cress Welsing is quoted as saying that to the “extent that [Jews] are involved in the production of these [gangsta rap] records, the Jews are consciously or subconsciously acting out what happened to them [in Germany] and building up a protection for themselves.”That's what Hentoff is referring to when he writes that “Deep in the glittering first issue of John Kennedy Jr.'s George there was a dose of poisonous bigotry.”

With regard to those notorious holocaust revisionist ads, Hentoff writes that the man who sends them to college newspapers maintains that the holocaust “is a myth spread by — who else? — Jews.” Reading this statement, it's very difficult for me to not charge that Nat Hentoff is a liar. I've always been one of those in revisionist circles to hold that you cannot blame the Jewish tail for wagging the Gentile dog. But Hentoff isn't a liar. He has a psychological sickness with regard to the holocaust controversy. Many holocaust fundamentalists share an unwholesome mental rigidity when faced with skepticism about what they believe. It's not only holocaust fundamentalists of course who appear to suffer from this kind unwholesomeness, but fundamentalists of every stripe.

“Rabbis on campus and historians of the Holocaust [Hentoff writes] have furiously urged that the ads not be run by college editors. My advice was, by all means publish the ad, but make sure that you, the editor, expose the bigotry behind the ad.” That's Hentoff's advice to college editors, but where did this profoundly disturbed man ever do so himself? Hundreds of thousands, perhaps half a million students, faculty and staff and others have read the texts of my advertisements on many of the most prestigious campuses in America. Where is there one article by Nat Hentoff which points to “bigotry” in any of my ads, or that points to one place where I have laid the blame for spreading holocaust — well, bigotry! — on Jews as a people, which is what his charge is?

I have already dealt with Nat Hentoff's double standards with regard to bigotry in a little book I published a couple years ago. I don't want to have to go through it again. I'll post that chapter of the book which deals with Nat on this Website in the future.