Volunteers Are Key in Growing Campus Campaign

Last month’s issue of Smith’s Report underlined the importance of CODOH's recent volunteers in carrying out the ongoing Campus Project: inserting small, simple, devilish ads that challenge the Thought Police and point university newspaper readers—virtually all of whom have easy access to the Internet—directly to CODOH’s revisionist Website, CODOHWeb, where they find a cornucopia of thought-provoking, Hoax-busting articles and graphics.

CODOH volunteers have been busy placing ads and doing follow-up at colleges around the country. One in particular, Pennsylvanian Karl Streidieck, has shown students and faculty at one American university—Penn State—that he won't take no for an answer. Streidieck, who graduated from Penn State in 1966, is a veteran CODOH activist who three years ago arranged for CODOH’s ad challenging the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to run in the Penn State student paper, The Daily Collegian.

The second week in February Streidieck submitted CODOH’s ad offering “46 Unanswered Questions about the World War II ‘Gas Chambers’” to the Daily but was turned down. He then submitted our current ad, “The Revisionist Controversy” (see SR41).

The Daily's business manager, Joanne Charyton, explained: “I didn’t feel the content was appropriate for our paper. Based on the fact that I was here when it ran before, I knew I wasn’t going to run it [this time—ed].” Charyton was referring to the scandal that erupted when Streidieck helped us run my essay-advertisement, “A Revisionist Challenge to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” in the 1993/94 academic year.

In a private conversation Charyton told Streidieck that she had gone to CODOHWeb’s site and perused our materials and found the “theories” proposed there “offensive.” When asked which of those “theories” she found offensive, she terminated the conversation.

CODOH’s man on the spot wasn’t giving up just yet. He fired off a letter to the editor of The Daily Collegian protesting the refusal and setting forth CODOH’s position on the Holocaust story. Editor-in-chief Jason Alt observed: “We never refuse to run a letter because an editor or group of editors disagrees with the point the writer is making.” Of course not. Nevertheless, he didn’t print the letter.

Streidieck was through waiting. He armed himself with a stack of revisionist leaflets, including CODOH’s “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate” [see page 8] and a big, two-color sign lettered “Censorship at PSU: Read what the Collegian censor doesn’t want you to see,” and stationed himself at the entrance to The Daily Collegian offices to call public attention, first, to the paper’s disregard for intellectual freedom and fairness; second, to CODOH and CODOHWeb.

There was something of a hubbub while Streidieck handed out his leaflets, enough so that the timorous editors of The Daily Collegian felt themselves forced to report on the affair. The reporter who was assigned the story, Kelly Ruoff, volunteered that there was a bit of a “tumult” in the paper’s office. Streidieck also learned that the reporter, as a young teen, had been living in Ohio when The Ohio State Lantern ran CODOH’s full page ad and recalled vividly the state-wide controversy which followed. The text of that ad is the body of the leaflet Streidieck was now giving to students on the Penn State campus.

Ruoff's story appeared first in the Digital Collegian, the Internet version of The Daily, then on the front page of its print edition (same date, same story—Feb. 19, 1997). The article was quite fair. In addition, the digital version listed the addresses of sites on the World Wide Web which The Daily suggested its readers follow up. Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) was at the top of the list, followed by the Holocaust Memorial Center; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a couple lesser lights. Students, and faculty, were given the opportunity to do what the suppressed CODOH ad would have done: provide direct access to CODOHWeb where students and faculty could “read the evidence and judge for themselves.” We bet there were plenty who did, and still are. Karl Streidieck’s gutsy persistence pulled it off.

In many ways the alumni and alumnae are the missing men and women of the American academy. They take their courses; they pay their tuition; they graduate and move on, of further interest chiefly for their contributions. It’s rare to find an alumnus tied to the old school by more than the fortunes of the football team or the uses of the old boy network. Which is why it’s gratifying to see one man, linked to his alma mater by bonds of obligation as well as fealty, return to campus and take a public stand for freedom and truth on the touchiest issue there is in today’s America. We at CODOH are proud to have a man like Kart associated with the Campus Project.

The Anti-Defamation League is “concerned” (among so many other things) about the Campus Project. In its latest report, as noted in The Los Angeles Times (17 Feb.), ADL regional director for Southern California David Lehrer is worried that “People who claim the Holocaust never happened took to the World Wide Web with anti-Semitic sites, chat groups and mass e-mails, and some have placed ads espousing their messages in college newspapers [my emphasis].”

“'If kids are looking for information on the Holocaust, we need to make sure they don’t get directed to the home page of a Holocaust denier [sic] and think that’s accurate information’ Lehrer said.”

For eight weeks I have been watching and waiting for mainline Holocaust lobby watchdog groups to begin to make their move in public. It looks like that’s about to happen. They’re in a tough situation. If they remain quiet, tens of thousands of students and faculty across the nation will see our ad announcing access to CODOHWeb and the scores of revisionist articles available there. On the other hand, if the lobby protests the running of these small, unprovocative ads, it will produce a public scandal and turn everyone’s attention to them. I weep at its predicament.

The Signal at Georgia State, which has run our ad going on ten weeks, has been approached at least twice by representatives of Jewish groups demanding that the ad be suppressed. We have learned that the first represented Jewish law students at Georgia State. When that failed to move the paper, our source tells us, a spokesman for an off-campus Jewish organization approached The Signal demanding that it stop running the ad. If not, “pressure” would be applied to all the right places.

Next, The Signal received a letter from Dr. Charles Jaret of the GS Department of Sociology, which it published. The letter used a couple hundred words to note that “Several years ago, in April 1994, The Signal's Editorial Board voted against publishing an ad submitted by Holocaust denier Bradley R. Smith. I think that decision was the proper one to make, and I respect The Signal's reasoning that these ads should not be run because they present materials that are simply false and defamatory… Knowledgeable experts on this subject have demonstrated the errors and gross distortions in these ‘revisionists’ writings many times.”

As is usual with these professors, Jaret does not take the trouble to inform his readers of any specific error or gross distortion in what I have written. This assures the professors that no one will challenge them on the basis of the record.

In the 1993/94 academic year The Signal was about to run my ad challenging the U.S. Holocaust Museum to provide at least one proof that at least one person had been “gassed” in a homicidal gas chamber in a German camp when, at the last moment, the ad was rejected. A source on campus at the time reported to me that the reversal was due to pressure from the ADL.

The same source informed us that in January, 1995, when Professor Deborah Lipstadt appeared at Georgia State to give her talk, “perhaps 20 people attended.” He tells us an ADL representative nonetheless wrote up a beautiful story and submitted it to The Signal for publication. Packed auditorium, standing room only, hunting down the hidden Nazis on campus and so on. The student editors got their collective back up and refused to print it.

If our source is correct, and I believe she is, then what we may have very soon at Georgia State is several Deborah Lipstadt clones appearing on campus to warn the students away from revisionist theory and, in effect, warning The Signal to stop running our ad. Maybe I’m wrong.

In any event, as of this writing, our ad is still running in the Georgia State University Signal. It's a small affair, really, but that won’t stop the David Lehrers from getting very antsy about it.

At Georgia Tech (Atlanta, 21,000 undergraduate students) it’s a different story. There the ad ran in The Technique one time before it was suppressed. Our volunteer fact finder, Albert Doyle, spoke with Technique editor David Skinner. Skinner told Doyle he is “not at liberty to answer” questions about who convinced The Technique to stop running the ad, but that the decision was made by “The Board,” which consists of students only. When Doyle expressed surprise at this turn of events, Skinner said he could not talk about it further because “it would open a whole can of worms” and that there had been trouble of some unstated kind in the past.

Meanwhile, The Red & Black at the University of Georgia (Athens, 24,000 students) is running the ad, as is The Florida Flambeau at Florida State (Tallahassee, 28,000 students), The Daily Texan at the University of Texas (Austin, 40,000 students), The Daily at Iowa State (Ames, 25,000 students); The O'Collegian at Oklahoma State (Stillwater, 18,000 students); and Hofstra University (Hempstead, Long Island, 10,000 students).

Our luck ran out at Northwestern, where Arthur Butz has once again been the source of a scandal because of his site on the Web, and at al talib, the Muslim paper at UCLA. At al talib all we could find out was that the contract for the ad was refused at a “higher level.” Allah? We don’t think so.

Despite these run-of-the-mill setbacks, this latest campaign by the Campus Project continues to pick up steam. It hasn’t yet generated the major media that bright young collegians like Kelly Ruoff remember from 1991 through 1995. On the other hand, there wasn’t all that much that students could do with those ads. The ads that are now being read by tens of thousands of college students and faculty, thanks to the help of our volunteers and your contributions, are leading them to the world’s largest trove of Holocaust revisionist scholarship, accessible 24 hours and day, free for the taking. It's leading them to Butz and Ball and Faurisson and Porter and Rudolf—no wonder the ADL is “concerned”!