Fragments

Hi Gang! Well, I’m back, for the time being anyhow. In the bigger scheme of things of course it’s always for the time being. Eight days ago I received a blood transfusion at the VA. When it was done I felt better. Still do. This week I began working. Getting my affairs in order, thinking about Smith’s Report again. We’ll see what goes down.

*** CODOH’s David Merlin has addressed a sophisticated and very well informed letter to the folk at Cornerstone Films in London. The entire letter is in this issue of Smith’s Report. Cornerstone is promoting the production of a new “Hollywood” film about Deborah Lipstadt which will feature Hillary Swank as Ms. Lipstadt. That’s how we know that it is a “Hollywood” movie even though it is being produced in Britain. Merlin opens with a familiar recounting of the David Irving/Deborah Lipstadt trial that took place in London and where the final decision against Irving was made in the year 2000.

*** Hernandez, my right-hand man here in the office for several years, left for the South two years ago. He still works with me from his home in Jalisco. The Internet/Web miracle. He sends our stuff to our private mailing list, posts on my Facebook page, the Blog, on A Light on Campus, and he has specialty mailing lists that we send to free-press organizations, Hillel (not one of those) and other such. Tony, who lives here in town and is responsible for gathering large numbers of campus e-mails, makes himself available even when I can’t really pay him. You will be surprised as I tell you how much e-mail we are sending. Tonight he is working on academics and student organizations on campuses in New Jersey that have student bodies of at least 15,000.

*** A question from Giuseppe Furioso re. the casting for the new Lipstadt movie:

“Who is going to play Deborah Lipstadt? Ernest Borgnine?”

Here she is:

Hillary Swank will play Deborah Lipstadt in new Hollywood movie.

Much better than the real thing:

Deborah Lipstadt
The Thing itself.

*** I was really sick for weeks these past few months. A couple weeks back when I was given the blood transfusion at the VA it took 5.5 hours. I was exhausted so I slept through most of it. Once I got up, in about thirty minutes, I could feel that it was better. It’s been better since. There is talk of my doing this procedure every 20 days. I’m all in for it. But we’ll see.

*** Shafar Nullifidian writes
from New Hampshire:

*** We’re in the process of doing e-mail sends to campuses in New York and surrounding. In the last few days we have sent the David Merlin article on the Deborah Lipstadt “Hollywood” movie (including the two photos above) to 5,800 folk at Harvard, 4,800 to New York University in Manhattan, and 2,400 to campuses in New Jersey. We are working on the New Jersey total as I write this.

*** Hernandez was here a few days a couple months ago, and before he left, we did a brief video we titled “Should Smith Apologize to Harvard Professor Steven Pinker?” This was a follow-up to my open letter to Pinker, which we sent all over Harvard, questioning why, when he is such a core Free Speech guy, he did not respond to the hysteria that broke out in the Harvard Crimson in 2009 when it ran a small ad I submitted asking why Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his book Crusade in Europe, did not mention the German weapons of mass destruction, the gas chambers? The scandal went all over New England and onto the wire services and CNN. Not a peep from Free Speech advocate Professor Steven Pinker

It later occurred to me that Professor Pinker might not have been on campus at the time. He might have been on vacation, home sick, who knows? So we did this little video, less than four minutes, where I admit publicly I did not check on his whereabouts at the time of the Eisenhower question scandal and offered my apology if it were true he was not there. At the same time, if he was there, I asked again how he could explain his silence with regard to a straight-out Free Speech story on his campus.

In the event with Hernandez, I got sick and we did nothing with the video. Earlier this week however we got it up on A Light on Campus, and on the blog, and are preparing to distribute it widely. You can view Pinker speaking on Free Speech, and Smith’s little video in response here: www.alightoncampus.com

*** On August 10 Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times:

“Germany’s debt to Europe can never be repaid.”

Never? And to Israel?

*** Rebecca Goldstein is the wife of Steven Pinker. As Steven Pinker rarely mentions the Holocaust, and never discusses it so far as I have found out, I wanted to see if his wife did. She does not, so far as I have been able to find out. She touches on this in an interesting way in The Jewish Chronicle Online. There she is interviewed by Ariel Kahn in 2010 (tinyurl.com/q96q257)

Goldstein says that Jewish history bears heavily on her as an author.

“I don’t like to identify myself as a Jewish writer, but it’s hard to be, let’s say, a writer who, occasionally, more than she anticipates, writes about Jewish themes, and not place your characters in a historical narrative.

Rebecca Goldstein (Pinker)

“It’s a great gift to those of us from our heritage, but it can also often feel like a trap, something you have to rebel against. I think it’s a creative tension – to be Jewish is to locate your individual story within a historical narrative, whatever you think of that narrative.

“In America, and I would imagine in England too, what happened in Europe, it looms. I have terrible fights with some of my best friends who write only about the Holocaust, and who want to identify the meaning of Jewish identity in the Holocaust. I just fight against that with every neuron I have. That’s not us – to identify oneself with victimhood is just such a diminishment of this history, which is heroic, moving.”

I buy her sincerity here.

When I first ran into her on the Web, I was drawn to one of her books. It’s titled Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Plato at the Googleplex? In the moment I didn’t care about liking or disliking the book. The title itself was worth the price. Plato at the Googleplex? I don’t really buy books any longer, but I bought this one. That was about the time I got real sick so I have yet to start reading it. I don’t think my getting sick had anything to do with holding her book in my hands, gazing at it.

*** We sent a story from my Personal History of Moral Decay to 4,500 folk at Harvard. “The Daring Young Man Meets William Saroyan.” It tells the story of the moment I decided to become a writer. I was 23 years old. The idea was to interest a few people in the book, perhaps start a couple conversations with students. It didn’t work.

*** International Middle East Media Center news reports:

This from the Israeli Foreign Minister! Makes our own Donald Trump sound like a weak sister.

*** Peter Adams is first to comment on our new video: Should Smith Apologize to Professor Steven Pinker?

*** The Donation Page on CODOH had been infected by “malware” for a while, but it was cleaned up toward the end of August by cleaning out and re-installing the entire site. There are those in America and elsewhere who do not want me or CODOH to receive contributions. Organizations like the USHMM, the ADL, the Wiesenthal Center, Yad Vashem, have budgets of tens of millions of dollars. Today I received one check for ten dollars. Still, there are those who don’t want to risk the possibility that we could receive considerably more.

*** The image to the right is an old cartoon that originated in the Persian contest in 2006. You’ve probably seen it. It revives old memories for me, not of the contest or of the conference there in Teheran where I spoke, but of walking on Hollywood Boulevard in the late afternoons and seeing the sign when it read “Hollywood.”

It was there for years. It is still there. Today I got a check for $300 and a note from Robert in San Diego. He wrote that he is in his eighties as I am and used to walk on Hollywood Boulevard as I did. He as a lawyer, me as a – I can’t quite make it out but at the time much of it had to do with my being down and out on Hollywood Boulevard. I was okay with it. Then suddenly in 1984 there was Revisionism and I had an office at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Up on the third floor. Those were the days. I had started to work for IHR and one day Willis Carto visited me. He wanted to see what they were paying for. I imagine it was smaller and simpler than he could have imagined. There was a desk and two chairs and a window that looked down over the Boulevard. He sat down in the other chair and kind of looked around. Not much to see. He said something to that effect, I don’t recall his words. We chatted for a few minutes and he excused himself. That’s when I was doing my first newsletter: Prima Facie, for IHR.

Smith’s Report No. 25, August 1995

*** It’s August 1995, 20 years ago, and I report in SR #25 that I am going to set up a still somewhat mysterious thing for me called a Web site. That would be on the Internet, a place that I did not have much familiarity with. That was when we were still living in Central California, in Visalia. I explained in SR that a Web page is a “place” on the Internet where individuals and organizations can set up permanent electronic information sites. (Not everybody knew that.) Those who set up the site control it and manage it to their own satisfaction and benefit. Not just anyone can jump in and start throwing bombs around. It’s like a magazine in that way. Those who publish the magazine decide what goes in it and what doesn’t.

*** It’s August 2015 now, I’m here again, and just as I needed your help back then, I need it now. If you still believe this work is worthwhile, please take a moment to contribute. The Donation page will be working fine by the time you have this issue of SR to hand.

Bradley R. Smith