CODOHWeb Defies July 4th Sneak Attack!

As subscribers to this newsletter are aware, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust's Web site was closed down without notice and without explanation (other than a cryptic reference to its “content”) by its Internet server, ProtoSource Network, approximately one minute after midnight on July 4th, 1996.

While the losses CODOH suffered during the two weeks it was off the Internet, and the weeks following when innumerable repairs to the site continued, are not as heavy as those the Institute for Historical Review, suffered on the same date and at the same time twelve years earlier in an arson attack that has never been solved, they are nonetheless serious. CODOH lost not just its Web site, by now a world-wide beacon for revisionists, including those denied access to Holocaust revisionism in countries like Germany and France; we also lost access to the electronic mail service that, thanks to its speed, dependability, and low cost, now accounts for 90 percent of our work-related communications.

Enter Horowitz

At mid-morning of the 4th, after I discovered I was unable to reach CODOHWeb, and unable to use email to report to ProtoSource what had happened, I telephoned the Fresno company and got through to ProtoSource's division manager, Rick Horowitz. At first, Horowitz told me that the site had been shut down because ProtoSource no longer wished to serve it. Just that. I tried to make a connection with him but it was like trying to converse with an automaton who hadn't the ability to have a real thought.

Rick Horowitz was not an entire stranger to me. He has his own Web site, served by ProtoSource, listed under the same index mine was. For nine months we were something of associates. His Homepage displayed a photo of a man perhaps 30 years old, slim, bearded, dressed in a white tuxedo, giving the impression of a man who thinks well of himself. His short bio stated that he was recently returned from Hollywood, where he'd tried his hand at acting and evidently failed, which is no disgrace. I lived in Hollywood 30 years and it was my experience that almost everybody who goes there to be in films fails.

Recently, after his promotion to division manager, he removed the tuxedo photo from his Homepage and dropped the bit about being a failed actor. Horowitz's Web site tells us something about where his mind and soul are now, however, as do all Web sites. One of Horowitz's specialities is providing access to things Jewish: Jewish culture, Jewish history, Israel (ergo, Zionism), Jerusalem, the Hebrew language and Yiddish. His site provides direct “links” to such entities as Yad Vashem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a section on anti-Semitism, Holocaust archives provided by the Shamash and Jerusalem-1 Web sites, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Nizkor (which means never forget, or always remember, or never fail to exploit the story, or something like that) Project, which is “a collection of Holocaust memorial and anti-revisionist projects on the Internet” (my emphasis) and so on and so on and so on.

“Stonewall” Horowitz

As we talked on the telephone, or as I tried to talk to someone who didn't want to talk, I asked Horowitz repeatedly for the specific reason for ProtoSource's drastic, unfair action against me. Since he had access to CODOHWeb I reminded him: “You know there is absolutely nothing on the CODOH site that needs to be removed.” Horowitz said, rather uncertainly it appeared to me: “I'm not so certain of that.” He wouldn't commit himself to an adult exchange – probably because, despite his evident holocaustomania, he understood that anything he said would reveal that what he had done was dishonorable, as there is no way for a man in a free society to censor ideas – and the Internet is the world's newest and most explosive media for ideas – without dishonoring himself.

I have had the identical experience with editors at college newspapers which refused to run a CODOH ad. When the Campus Project began, the editors and their faculty advisers often sought to justify their rejection of the ad on this ground or that, but no matter what the nature of their defense was, it was always a transparent act of censorship. After a while, on the advice and counsel of Jewish “watchdog” groups and of individual obscurantists like Alan Dershowitz and Deborah Lipstadt, student editors began to return my ads with a one-line note reading: “We have decided not to run the ad you submitted to…” No fuss, no muss, just straight-out censorship.

But with regard to ProtoSource Network, why was CODOHWeb suddenly seen to be so dangerous to “someone” that it had to be shut down?

The Reason Why

This is what I think. Last November, when CODOHWeb got off the ground, it introduced something brand new to the Internet and the World Wide Web: a revisionist site that has no real, or perceived, philosophical baggage to carry from either left or right. Because I immediately began publishing parts of an autobiographical manuscript, Break His Bones, as well as other literary work, the nature of which would not permit it to be characterized as crazed by all the bigotries which are out of season for the moment, I could not be dismissed so easily with a little ADL or SWC slander. Any reasonably mature reader, with even a little good will, would be able to see through such slander in a moment.

And then there was the work by others that we began publishing (reprinting, as it were) from major revisionist writers and researchers, which even at the beginning was far more voluminous than what I published of my own. Fritz Berg, David Cole, Robert Faurisson, Jurgen Graf, Roger Garaudy, David Irving, Carlos Porter, Germar Rudolf, Serge Thion. The list is really quite long. And we were posting not only in English but in German. French, Italian, Spanish and other European languages. The pattern was set early on. Then we upped the ante.

We published the introduction to David Irving's Goebbels before St. Martin's Press understood they didn't have the courage to publish David Irving. In France, when the scandal arose over Roger Garaudy's The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, and its author proscribed and the sale of his book suppressed, we printed the entire text in French so that every Frenchman with access to a computer could read it, and even print it out. We announced plans to post an English-language edition of the book as well (we have since done so).

But the turning event may well have been our deliberate publication of Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (Foundations of Contemporary History: A Manual on Debatable Questions of the Twentieth Century), edited by ex-Max Planck Institute chemist Germar Rudolf, for which he was prosecuted, sentenced to jail, and the book ordered burned by a German court, as if it were the work of the Devil. So there we were then, publishing a German-banned and burned revisionist book, probably the most important single revisionist book to be published in recent years, and we were beaming it right back into Germany where every German citizen, despite the betrayal by his government, who is interested in the history of the twentieth century and the honor of his people could discover something of the truth about the Jewish holocaust.

CODOH Rampant

I think that might have been it. Irving, then Garaudy, and then Rudolf. CODOH breaking through the censorship in three nations on two continents and not even out of breath. That was CODOH then, that's CODOH now, and that will be CODOH next year and on into the future. What a terrible test of intellectual freedom CODOH must pose to the proud and powerful who underwrite the Holocaust cult on the one hand, and labor day and night on the other, to prevent revisionism from becoming a normal part of everyday public discourse—CODOH's only mission.

What a terrible test of honor CODOH must pose to those nation-states, like Germany and France, that offer themselves up as model democracies, but criminalize a free press and open debate on the Jewish holocaust controversy. And what a terrible test it certainly is for those supreme hypocrites in America who, valiantly eschewing formal censorship, endorse the private, pressure-group-placating censorship that doomed David Irving's Goebbels at St. Martin's Press and blacked out our Web site at ProtoSource.