“No subject enrages the Thought Police on campus more than Holocaust revisionism. Students are encouraged to debate every other great historical question as a matter of course, but influential pressure groups with private agendas have made the Jewish Holocaust story and exception. I believe students should be encouraged to investigate the Holocaust controversy the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historical controversy. This isn't a radical point of view. The premises for it were worked out a while back during a little something called the Enlightenment.”
Bradley R. Smith, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist, p. 99
Starting in the late 1980's, Bradley Smith began a campaign to publish advertisements in college newspapers. The intention was to foster open debate on the Holocaust story throughout the country. What follows is a partial list of those advertisements, reactions to them by students, professors, pressure groups and the media, as well as additional information which has been collected over the years. A few of the ads offered financial compensation for promoting the controversy in a national forum. The terms of these ads have expired and are presented here for historical and research purposes only.
What became known as the “Campus Campaign” was discussed in some detail, albeit a very biased account, in a chapter entitled “The Battle for the Campus” in Deborah Lipstadt's highly subjective book Denying the Holocaust. While Smith argued directly for intellectual freedom and open debate on campus, Lipstadt, a professor, took the opposing view — that ideas, especially dissident ideas regarding the Holocaust story, were not worthy of discussion in America's colleges and universities.
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ September 30, 1998
Lexi Baugher, ad manager for The California Tech at California Institute of Technology, called to say The Tech would run the ad. On the 14th we discussed the layout of the ad by telephone and it was set to go on the 18th. I then received an e-mail message from their business manager: Dear Mr….
By Frank Scott, Timothy Lovelace, Susan Mcfadden ∙ September 30, 1998
The ad ran on 16 September [1998] in The Advance Titan [AT] and was followed by a flap that took its staff rather by surprise. On the 23rd the AT printed negative letters by ten professors. There was no objective information for students in any of the letters, though there was a good deal to…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ September 10, 1998
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an article (15 Sept.) headlined: “Ad sparks annual controversy.” The story reports on the first reactions to the ad having run at GSU. Written by Ernie Suggs, it reports that the ad challenges the ADL to a national televised debate “on such issues as whether gas chambers were used to exterminate…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 8, 1998
Details for Entrants The Offer: CODOH will award $250,000 cash to the one individual instrumental in arranging a 90-minute debate on National Network Television, in prime time, between three members of CODOH (Bradley R. Smith, Dir.) and three members of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. One individual: CODOH will award the benefits of the…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 8, 1998
“…the fanatic hides from true debate… He knows how to speak in monologues only, so debate is superfluous to him.”—Elie Wiesel $250,000 Offer Every historical controversy can be debated on national television except one–the Jewish holocaust story. Why? Who benefits? Open debate, nothing else, will expose the facts behind this taboo. To this end Committee…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 1, 1998
When the staff of the Georgetown Voice decided to run the CODOH advertisement titled, “A Revisionist's View of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” it was perfectly aware that the ad would cause controversy and bruise the sensibilities of some. The Voice moved deliberately. After substantial preliminary discussion, it placed the issue before the newspaper's general…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 1, 1998
Details for Entrants The Offer: CODOH will award $100,000 cash to the one individual instrumental in arranging a 90-minute presentation on National Network Television, in prime time, of the Video of the Century, our documentary on Auschwitz, David Cole Interviews Dr. Francizek Piper. One individual: CODOH will award the benefits of the Offer tot he…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 1, 1998
This article does not claim “the Holocaust never happened.” Those who say it does want to muddy the issue. This is what the ad does claim: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum displays no convincing proof whatsoever of homicidal gas chambers, and no proof that even one individual was “gassed” in a German program of “genocide.”…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 20, 1998
The Phoenix reports that President Bloom (“himself Jewish”) states that I wrote my article “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate” to “express [my] personal prejudices,” and that I have an “anti-Semitic agenda,” a small-minded ad hominum assault that I dismiss out of hand. It's the kind of thing you overhear in your local…
By Kenneth Lasson ∙ January 6, 1998
The recent debate at Johns Hopkins University over whether the student newspaper should have published an advertisement denying the existence of Nazi death camps is more than just an academic flap. At stake are profound questions of how a free society learns the lessons of history and, unique to America, the effect of constitutionally protecting…
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