My Critique of Dr. Loftus’ Behavior

On February 20, 2003, I received an email request from a University of California at Irvine student newspaper reporter, Caroline Song ([email protected]), in which she asked me to comment on Professor Elizabeth Loftus and the John Demjanjuk Trial that took place in Israel during 1987.

Loftus is “Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior, Criminology, Law, and Society” at UCI and can be reached at [email protected] or 2393 Social Ecology II, Irvine, California 92697-7085, and (949) 824-3285, Fax: (949) 824-3002.

My interview with New University reporter Song focused on Loftus’ book Witness for the Defense (New York: St. Martin’s Press) and chapter nine, “Ivan the Terrible: John Demjanjuk,” where she revealed – in my opinion – an amazing disregard for this innocent American citizen of Ukrainian background whose life was about to be snuffed out by a Rache [German for revenge] obsessed Israeli court system with its unhealthy fixation on the Jewish Holocaust Story.

Professor Loftus has been paid enormous sums of money to testify in courts in the USA and to defend all sorts of defendants accused of horrible criminal deeds and she has enjoyed great publicity and wealth from her creating doubts about witnesses for the prosecution – her focus of expertise being that witnesses “remember” events and conversations that simply did not happen.

In chapter nine of the book, Loftus states clearly that the Israeli case against Demjanjuk lacked believable witnesses, that is, that certain Jews who testified about Demjanjuk had either created their stories or had acquired them from other witnesses or from newspaper stories or books. She also wrote that Demjanjuk’s attorney, Mark O’Connor, asked her to help with the defense for Demjanjuk. O’Connor flew out from New York to Seattle, Washington, to meet with Loftus and explained the case up to that point.

Loftus wrote:

Sitting in her living room with O’Connor, “She wanted to say, ‘Yes, of course, I’ll take the case’.” Loftus indicated that she was aware of Israeli police interrogation practices and that these could be “questionable” in terms of fairness and brutality (page 223).

Professor Loftus, in my opinion, has amazingly and honestly demonstrated in what follows that she surrendered her professional ethics and, instead, chose to side with narrow-minded, sectarian Jewish interests and, thereby, to become a collaborator with Israeli Holocaustian fanaticism that would have murdered an innocent man.

For me, as one who has read the Wiernik book and can readily grasp some of the anti-intellectual ravings of his factually unbelievable stories, I knew that Loftus was a Kindergartner in the field of Holocaustology – Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Jankiel Wiernik; some of the most unreliable writers ever to get wealthy (Otto Frank as Anne’s father) from the Holocaust Story! Loftus amazed me that she could be so proficient in her narrow specialized field of witness psychology and yet so profoundly ignorant about the Jewish Holocaust Story.

She told her friend David Sucher:

Dr. Loftus flew to Israel to attend the trial in an old theater – how fitting indeed! – converted into a courtroom and big enough for large numbers of school children bussed in to watch this “Show Trial” drama. When asked there by a friend, Margreet, why she was not testifying for Demjanjuk, she said:

It was all this in mind that I gladly made a small contribution to the UCI New University student journalist article on the famous Jewish expert, Professor Elizabeth Fishman Loftus. If I had it to do all over again, I would have been even more forceful in my criticism of this hypocrite who was willing to collaborate with a Jewish “Show Trial” where an innocent man might have been hanged until he gasped his last breath – all because Loftus had surrendered her professional principles for the unethical, the shameful, and the propagandistic program required by the Jewish Holocaust myth.