Letters

This morning I received your July issue of SR, which I read with the utmost interest and curiosity. On setting the newsletter aside after spending a half hour reading it, I noticed that my fingertips were all slightly blistered, and my eyes were smarting, the way they do when I am compelled to peel onions for our stews and soups and what not. This isn’t the first time that the content of SR has produced these odd physiological reactions in me. My wife (who is a devout Catholic of Italian extraction) dubs this a form of “mild Revisionist stigmata.” St. Bradley of Visalia? Sounds good!

Orest Slepokura, Ontario

Be careful, of course, but it must be that other guy. I’m in Baja now.

Have you been sending copies of your newsletters to the Saudi Arabian consulates around the country? I would put them all on my mailing list. Also those of Indonesia and other Moslem countries. Mail directly to their prime ministers as well. You might pick up the right person to gain bigger sponsors. Try the leading Arab and Moslem universities. The children of government officials attend them. They can gain the attention of their parents, who most likely will be interested in revisionism.

H.M., California

Odd, I’ve sent special communications and materials to Arabs and other Muslims. I’ve never sent Smith's Report. I don't know why. One of many things I have overlooked. It would seem to be a good idea. I could probably come up with about 500 good addresses. In the end it would cost about two dollars just in printing and postage to send each newsletter.

Keep on with the Arab connection. They are ready to accept the truth [revisionist theory] in this case because it shows Zionists to be deceivers, frauds, and extortionists. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like what Arafat represents any more than I do what Zionism represents. But the Arab world has considerable wealth, as does the world of Zionism. I was going to suggest that you try to get the David Cole video aired on television in Arab countries (in translation, of course), but it occurs to me that if you could inspire one wealthy Arab to invest in a television station here in America and stand against the kind of Zionism that is produced by our entertainment and political institutions and is so prevalent in the public mind, it could effectively put both Arab issues and revisionism on a sounder footing.

John Zimmerman, Texas

We are going to continue to develop Arab connections. We have something cooking right now. It’s very tricky ground for most Americans to navigate, including me. I’ll follow my nose here, which leads me toward those individuals and organizations that are on the side of liberty and away from those which are not—Arabs, Zionists, or others.

I’m a Johnny-come-lately to the revisionist discussion. I have suspected for years that a segment of the Jewish population uses the Holocaust to further its own agenda and keep critics at bay. Now it appears that many of my suspicions are confirmed. The JDL reports that you have all but sunk into oblivion. Apparently not true. Just finished your “Rubadubdub” article. Good stuff. I think that after fifty years it’s about time the truth be shouted from the housetops.

T.M., California

Rubadubdub is a piece I did on my efforts to get a handle on the Jewish soap story a few years ago. Nat Hentoff a writer I was interested in, and who I consider to be generally one of the good guys, was one of the believers. I sent him Rubadubdub as my way to argue that the stories about Jews using the blood of Christian children to make matzo and Germans using Jewish fat to make hand soap are two faces of the same primitive story. Nat didn't respond. I sent the piece to 200 top writers and journalists in New York City—Nat's friends and professional associates. I didn’t hear from any of them. Last year Hentoff published a well-received book titled Speaking Freely: A Memoir (NY: Knopf). On page 253 he writes of his visit some years before to The Museum of the Holocaust (an unassuming competitor of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem). “… it was at this place—seeing the clothes, the books of the forever disappeared—that I felt closer to the dead. I stared at some bars of soap on the shelf, and I turned to the ancient attendant. He nodded. ‘Jews,’ he said. ‘They used to be Jews.’ I learned later there is a dispute—and not only among the so-called Holocaust revisionists—as to whether any Jews actually were made into soap. But the old Jew in the shabby museum believed it. So did I.”

Nat is one of those Jews who find it incredible, and incredibly compromising, that some Christians in Eastern Europe continue to believe the Christian-children-made-into-matzo story. Believing the Jews-made-into-hand-soap story, however, has something to do with being loyal to Jewish tradition. When it comes to teaching old dogs new tricks, information means nothing.

You are unfavorably recognized by Rabbi Daniel Gordis in his Does the World Need the Jews? (1997). In his introduction he states that he does not understand how American Jews can allow Bradley Smith to run revisionist ads in campus newspapers “only 50 years after the gas chambers had ceased burning.” Zyklon-B and fire, together in the gas chambers, is a ludicrous image. Carl Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious is the only good explanation for why these people keep referring to “gas ovens” and their kinsmen’s incineration in conflagrations and infernos.

M.D., California