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:
“[…] an eyewitness identification, positive or negative, doesn’t actually prove anything. A positive identification only tells us that the person believes that he recognizes a face or that he believes a certain person is guilty of certain crimes. A belief is not absolute proof.” (page 219)
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).
“But in those long hours spent listening to Mark O’Connor talking about the Treblinka death camp and the aging memories of the victims of the Holocaust, something cracked my cool, professional exterior. Inside, like one of those Russian folk toys that pull apart to reveal a slightly smaller version of the same figure, was Beth Loftus, wife of Geoffrey Loftus, best friend of Ilene Bernstein, niece of Uncle Joe Breskin. Beth Loftus’ fear for her friendships, for the personal price that she would pay if she testified for John Demjanjuk. Beth Loftus kept thinking about Uncle Joe, a survivor of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russian and the only relative of her parents’ generation still alive. ‘What would Uncle Joe say if I took this case?’ Beth Loftus asked herself over and over again. ‘What would Geoff say, what would Ilene say?’” (pages 222f.)
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.
“But Beth Fishman couldn’t stop with the file. Thirty years earlier I had turned my back on my Jewish heritage, pretending it didn’t exist, pretending it was just one of those things you’re born with, like a mole or big feet, or blond hair. Pretending it didn’t matter. I had ignored the Holocaust for years, shoving it out of my mind. […] I read Anne Frank again, and Elie Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, Aaron Applefeld. I stalked the library shelves, searching for the answer to one particular question – who was Ivan and what did he do? […] I found some answers. Jankiel Wiernik, a Warsaw building contractor deported to Treblinka on August 23, 1942, wrote […]” (pages 224f.)
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:
“‘If I take the case,’ I explained, having talked this out with myself hundreds of times, ‘I would turn my back on my Jewish heritage. If I don’t take the case, I would turn my back on everything I’ve worked for in the last fifteen years. To be true to my work, I must judge this case as I have judged every case before it. If there are problems with the eyewitness identification, I must testify. It’s the consistent thing to do.” (p. 232)
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:
“As I looked around the audience filled with four generations of Jews – little children, their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents – I tried to explain to Margreet that it was as if these were my relatives, and I, too, had lost someone I loved in the Treblinka death camp. With those kinds of feelings inside me, I couldn’t switch roles and become a professional, an expert.” (page 237)
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.
Bibliographic information about this document: The Revisionist 1(4) (2003), pp. 459f.
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