A Tale of Two Harvards

This summer the Harvard Law Library began disseminating, on the World Wide Web, something called “The Harvard Law School Library's Guide to Hate Groups on the Internet.” The “Guide” rounds up the usual suspects, including “Skinheads,” “Neo-Nazis,” “White Power,” and the like, and excludes the usual non-suspects, such as the Jewish Defense League, which has its own site on the Web. Not only has the JDL been classified as a terrorist group by the FBI due to its murderous attacks on Americans, but the like-minded political party its founder, Meir Kahane, established was banned in Israel for its anti-Arab racism.

Are you wondering whether Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust made the cut? Are you kidding me? CODOHWeb figures prominently among the “Revisionist” “hate groups” listed. Why? Who runs this “Guide” for the Harvard Law Library? The perpetrator doesn’t want to come in out of the dark. In an article in Chronicle of Higher Education (10 September 96), he is referred to as “a” librarian, “the” librarian, and the librarian “who asked not to be named.”

What, in this context, is this Harvard librarian’s definition of a “hate group?” Hate groups encompass organizations that advocate violence against or separation from the customary victim groups. Since CODOHWeb does neither, he added this helpful coda: “or … an organization that knowingly spreads lies and half-truths in order to demean or incite hatred against these persons or organizations.”

After combing the hundreds of electronic pages of revisionist materials posted on CODOHWeb, the Harvard compiler quoted this nugget of hate speech from CODOH:

CODOH features technical articles on the gas chamber controversy, transcripts and articles questioning the validity of various war crimes trials, documentation of the persecution and censorship of revisionists and other free thinkers, reviews of thought-provoking books and e-mail from you, our readers. CODOH international offers material in German, Italian and French.

Well, thanks for the advertisement. Like the old woman in that hamburger commercial from a few years back, however, you may ask, “Where's the hate”?

The people at Harvard Law who compiled this guide must be hoping to capitalize on the widespread popular image of the Harvard Law School as a precinct sacred to the single-minded contemplation of jurisprudence by weighty-minded professors and knowledge-hungry students, the Harvard Law of “The Paper Chase”—and on the storied jurists who, many decades ago, created the image's substance, now sadly eroded by time and such figures as Alan Dershowitz.

Alan Dershowitz, who agitated ceaselessly for the conviction (and thus the execution) of John Demjanjuk in Israel, and then—when the evidence proved conclusively that Demjanjuk had been framed on the “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka charges—argued that Demjanjuk must have been guilty of other crimes committed in other places. Dershowitz, who deceitfully told the Daily Texan (U. Texas-Austin) at the time I was attempting to insert a Holocaust revisionist full-pager in that paper that:

“Bradley Smith [is] a known anti-semite and an anti-Black racist with phony credentials.” (The Texan neither printed examples of such ill-will on my part or allowed me to respond to the charge.)

Alan Dershowitz, the shifty trial lawyer who drags actual killers to freedom through legal loopholes and pursues innocent refugees from Communism with the zeal of an ambulance chaser; who brands revisionists racists and anti-semites, then uses media to grandstand, as he did with me, with offers to debate whether the earth is flat or black slavery existed. Alan Dershowitz, the new face, the real face of Harvard Law School.

Perhaps, however, not that new at all. A couple of my revisionist friends who went to Harvard remind me that there are really two Harvards—one open, tolerant, and dedicated to the freedom of research and expression basic to the pursuit of knowledge and truth; the other devoted with crabbed fanaticism to the defense of orthodoxy, or the reigning social order, at the expense of fairness and freedom.

In the seventeenth century, Harvard divine Cotton Mather was rooting out witches and wrestling with the devil. Slavetraders—some of them Jewish—and slaveholders attended Harvard in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Almost every form of class, caste, ethnic and religious prejudice has been applied against applicants— except New-England Yankees—to “fair Harvard,” culminating in the notorious Jewish quota in the 1920's.

That's the Harvard they don't make movies or television series about—the one that lives on using malicious and anonymous libels of the kind of thoughtful revisionist scholarship that CODOH brings to men and women thirsting for truth and freedom in countries where such things come at a legal price. The carefully formulated slander produced by Harvard Law was aimed, not only atmyself, but at the men and women who have worked and supported me for years, against formidable odds and often at formidable sacrifice, particularly for our colleagues in Europe.

I decided to submit a small advertisement to the Harvard Crimson headlined “Must We All Believe Alike?,” noting the existence of the Guide to Hate on the Net, and that I am listed there, and giving the address for CODOHWeb so that every Harvard student who has an interest in this subject could judge the site for him/herself.

Will the ad run? Who knows? The Crimson has never run anything I’ve sent them. Maybe they’re still talking it over with Alan Dershowitz. I suspect that Harvard Law’s finest is grinning someplace behind Harvard Law’s nasty little “Guide,” and that the shades of his antecedents from the other Harvard—the mean, bigoted, and stupid Harvard—are grinning with him.