Lipstadt Unleashed Against CODOH,

Last month's issue of SR reported on the mobilization of Hillel, the national Jewish organization for students, and the Anti-Defamation League, America's most successful censorship organ, against the Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust’s latest campus campaign, which has succeeded in alerting hundreds of thousands of college students and professors to the abundance of Holocaust revisionist materials on CODOH's site on the World Wide Web.

Now Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University (Atlanta, GA), who has the dubious honor of being America’s leading academic expert in the gingerly task of simultaneously refuting the “Holocaust deniers” while denying them their say, has been trundled out of her comparative isolation far below the Mason-Dixon line—for CODOH is on the attack—in New York City!

On April 14 Today, the student newspaper at St. John’s University on Long Island, New York, ran a front-page story headed “History on Trial: Holocaust Gets Revisionist Treatment.” The student reporter, Philip Sean Curran, after smearing Professor Arthur Butz (The Hoax of the Twentieth Century) and bad-mouthing the Institute for Historical Review, went on to report: “Bradley R. Smith is America’s most notorious Holocaust revisionist. From a privately financed California office, he dispatches transmissions on the Internet and advertisements to college newspapers.”

Curran invoked as his authorities—mark well—Professor Lipstadt; Jeffrey Ross, who runs the ADL's national department of campus affairs; Dennis B. Klein, currently an associate professor of history at Kean College and the founding director of the Holocaust Center for the ADL; Dr. Frank Brady, a professor of communications at St. John’s (who actually serves as managing editor of this “student newspaper”); and Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University—each of this impressive line-up of quasi-academic, thought-control gargoyles assuring Curran that revisionist theory is wrong about everything, that all revisionists are closet totalitarians, that they themselves have the real skinny on the Holocaust story and that revisionist theory is not only not needed but very much in the way of a better life for the human species as a whole. Evidently their printed wisdom wasn’t strong enough medicine.

As the April 25 issue of the New York City Jewish Press tells us. Deborah Lipstadt traveled to Queens College, the New York City alma mater of comedian Jerry Seinfeld to warn against the blandishments of intellectual freedom on the Holocaust question as offered by CODOH’s Campus Project ads. The stem-faced Holocaustomaniac yenta-in-chief scolded an all-day conference sponsored by the college, reminding it of a Jewish Queens College newspaper editor who, in 1994, ran CODOH’s ad challenging the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to provide one proof that gassing chambers had been used in one German camp anywhere as part of a program of genocide.

According to the hyper-orthodox Press Lipstadt, a graduate of New York’s famed City College, stated that “a Holocaust denier has no place on the campus of a university. Since students at a university attend classes for a limited time, it is the university’s job to filter out the absolute untruths spewed by [revisionists].” (The Press's resident Talmud experts were doubtless shaking their heads over the less than forceful reasoning here.) Completing her signature shtick, La Lipstadt went on to warn that “at the same time, one must take the threat [revisionists] pose seriously.”

One wonders why revisionist theory, led by a small but doughty band of European and North American researchers and writers, who produce only “absolute untruths,” would need to be taken seriously by academics. The answer is simple: students who “ignore the thought police, read the evidence, and judge for themselves” (to brazenly quote myself in the ad that has run in more than a dozen college newspapers this academic year) may come to conclusions about the Holocaust story that are diametrically opposed to those of the Deborah Lipstadts.

Alas for the efforts of Professor Lipstadt, Hillel, and ADL—at the very time when Deborah was haranguing her Queens College audience, New York University’s Washington Square News was already running CODOH’s advertisement announcing the address of CODOHWeb and inviting NYU students to judge revisionist theory for themselves.

I'm so pleased with having the ad running at NYU that I want to tell you how its student paper is distributed. To begin with, NYU is the largest private university in the United States, with more that 47,000 students attending its 13 schools, colleges and divisions spread through Manhattan. Additionally, there are more than 15,000 faculty and staff at the university. The paper is distributed to more than 80 locations around New York City, including: The Washington Square Center School of Law, the School of Social Work, the College of Arts and Science, the School of Continuing Education, the Graduate School of Arts and Science, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service—among others. At the New York University Medical Center the paper is distributed daily to the School of Medicine, the Leonard N. Stem School of Business and the New York University Midtown Center. And then it goes to residential housing, home away from home for 7,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students.

In a word, the censorship bund's efforts to keep CODOH out of New York is failing; and Debby’s gig as a homecoming queen in Queens was a flop.

Meanwhile, CODOH was carrying the fight to Georgia. As it turns out, Professor Lipstadt came very close to suffering the indignity of seeing our ad run at her place of employment, Emory University in Atlanta. The ad was accepted by the general manager of The Wheel, but the day before it was to run, for the first time, someone on the staff went to the site and the ad was pulled. Why?

CODOH volunteer Albert Doyle talked to Kimberly Freeman, the Wheel editor, and she “explained” that the general manager is from India or some other South Asian land and that when he accepted the ad he thought it was all right because he where he comes from freedom of expression is considered a good. He didn't realize that in America freedom of expression is a sometime thing, thanks to the Deborah Lipstadts. Freeman explained to Doyle that the Wheel has “a policy of not publishing revisionist ads.” When he asked her for the wording of the policy she changed her story and said that the Wheel has a “precedent” for not publishing “Smith’s ads.” The precedent is that a couple years ago the Wheel had refused to print our ad challenging the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Doyle asked her if the Wheel staff had found anything “objectionable” on the site and she said they had not. They had simply followed “precedent.”

Meanwhile, the Georgia State Signal continues to run our advertisement at its Atlanta campus, in Deborah Lipstadt’s own backyard. Maybe this is why she appears to be in such bad humor lately. Signal editor Tom Lassiter informs me that the Signal has run no further letters or articles complaining about the CODOH ad Maybe the censors have decided to wait this one out rather than make a cause celebre over it. That’s one of the differences a strong editor can make.

Meanwhile, during the 50 days previous to Lipstadt’s appearance at Queens College, revisionist documents published on CODOHWeb had been accessed 67,000-plus times! As I reflect on Deborah traveling around the country calling for the suppression of revisionist theory, and getting a hearing (let’s face it) wherever she appears, I tell myself—that's okay. The Lipstadts do what they do, I do what I do, and the men and women all over the world who joined together in accessing CODOHWeb documents 67,000 times over the last seven weeks alone—they do what they do. They're going to continue doing it, they're going to tell their friends and neighbors, and they are all going to understand that they are on the side of intellectual freedom, on the side of light and against darkness.