Notebook

A tear sheet from the Georgia State Signal informs me that our ad drawing attention to the fake gas chamber door at the USHMM had begun its once-a-week run.

Regina Roberts of the Atlanta Journal Constitution calls my upstairs office here in Baja. Outside a wild storm is raging. The electricity goes off, comes on, then goes off for good. My computer shuts down, who knows what I have lost, but the telephone connection holds. A confrontation has developed at Georgia State over the USHMM Door ad running in The Signal. She won’t give me the details, but of course I know the details. Campus Hillel and the ADL and other like organizations are leaning on the Signal staff; slandering and threatening to slander everyone in sight.

The following day Roberts calls me back to ask how much I’m paying to run the ad in the Signal. I ask why she doesn’t get that information from the editor of the Signal. “They won’t return my calls,” she says. There is a hint of an accent to her voice that causes me to imagine she is Black. During the first interview she asks a question I don’t understand. I have to ask her to repeat it twice. Finally I understand she is asking me what “race” I am. I have to think for a moment. I don’t know why. Finally I answer “White.” It’s the first time a reporter has asked what race I am.

Tear sheets keep coming in from campus newspapers that have run the $50,000 Offer: Drexel U, Eastern Michigan, Vassar, West Virginia U, Texas A&I-Kingsville, U Louisville, U Wisconsin-La Crosse, Prince Georges C.C. (in a Washington D.C. suburb), U South Dakota, U Wisconsin-Whitewater, Hofstra U, Fairleigh Dickinson U, Buffalo State College.

An SR reader sends me the 15 January issue of The Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia). An Oregon man is sending the David Cole video to administrators in the Philadelphia Public School District. Barry Morrison, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, is notified immediately. He says as far as he knows this is the first time “deniers” have attempted to reach out to elementary schools—or even to high schools. Morrison tells the Exponent that “'… there is a great danger here' if the videotapes lead those who see it—such as faculty—to doubt the veracity of the Holocaust.”

Certainly! But a great danger to whom?

Students at one eastern college and others at a midwestern college ask for CODOH leaflets to distribute on their campuses. One informs me that the editor of his campus newspaper was contacted by the Anti-Defamation League and warned away from running the ad but ran it anyway. It occurs to me that I can advertise on CODOHWeb for volunteers to distribute CODOH leaflets on campus. Why haven’t I been using the Internet to do this all along? Because sometimes I don’t see what’s in front of my nose.

Interviewed by The Cord at State University of New York at Potsdam, and The Chronicle at Hofstra U on Long Island. The editor of The Mount Holyoke News writes me a hostile letter stating she does not run ads from “hate organizations” but offers to print a letter to the editor if it is “less than 450 words and contains no libelous material.” I send the letter.

The Roger Garaudy trial in France is creating a spectacular level of support from Arab intellectuals, journalists and government officials. It is of such importance we decide we will use the Garaudy story as the lead for SR 51 rather than the Campus Project. A Middle Eastern journalist specializing in foreign relations contacts me (through the offices of Greg Raven at IHR) and offers us much new material.

Still more tear sheets from Campuses that ran the $50m ad: Wilfrid Laurier U (Ontario, Canada), Boise State U, The College of New Jersey (Ewing), Swarthmore, Montgomery County C.C. (Maryland), Portland C.C., U Northern Iowa and U New Hampshire. This is where Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, teaches. What does he think of this? What do his students think?

A tear sheet arrives from U New Haven. I’ve never heard of the University of New Haven. I call one of my know-it-all associates and he has never heard of it either. The bill for running the $50m Offer in the Charger is $300. I search my files and reference books. I don’t have a U New Haven. It’s not on my mailing list. Someone is trying to rip me off. I won’t fall for it. I don’t pay the bill.

An SR reader sends me an 8 January clipping from The Canadian Jewish News. It has a story reprinted from the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. The lead paragraph reads: “New Haven — A controversy has erupted at the University of New Haven after the student newspaper ran an ad from a Holocaust revisionist group.” When challenged by the Connecticut director of the ADL, the Charger Bulletin editor, Allyson Barrett, editorialized that the advertisement “only opens student’s eyes to the fact that some people believe that there is room for debate when discussing Holocaust history. The paper is an advocate of First Amendment rights, and newspapers are public forums for open debate in any form. This advertisement, by these standards, is a perfect example of how this belief can be applied.” If only one metropolitan newspaper editor were to say something half so brave.

Guess I’ll have to send the check.

As we reported in SR 50, the Jewish Defense League put out a “Wanted” ad on the Internet for David Cole’s street address, prefaced with the ugliest rant of libel and incitement to violence I have ever read. On 5 January SR reader Albert Doyle informs me that David has recanted all his revisionist work, including our video on Auschwitz, David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper. When I go to the JDL Website I am stunned by the language of the recantation, which invokes the style and self-humiliation of the Stalinist trials, and reminds me of some Germans during post-WWII war crimes trials.

Cole doesn’t recant one specific assertion of fact he makes in our video on Auschwitz, not one specific assertion of fact in his brilliant essay “44 Questions About the WWII ‘Gas Chambers.’” Probably the pithiest description of Cole’s recantation language has been made by Harvey Taylor, who says it “reads like something dictated by a North Korean rabbi.”

I send student editors at 380 campuses the original JDL rant against David Cole, along with a cover letter suggesting that they try to discover what the ADL is doing in response to the actions of its sister organization, the JDL. The FBI, the Los Angeles police, and the Human Rights Commission in Washington D.C. have also received copies.

On 29 January I mail a package containing the original JDL rant, the full Cole recantation, the JDL gloating response, plus a copy of the $50m Offer together with a cover letter to every writer and editor at the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Three hundred and eighty-three individuals. The cover explains briefly what the three documents and the $50m Offer are. I end it by writing: “Out of gratitude for the intellectual freedom you are guaranteed as a citizen of this country, and with respect for your profession, I must believe you will act.” Do I believe that—really?

The middle of this week, at the very time the package arrives at the NYT and the Tribune, there is a sudden splurge of hundreds of extra hits on CODOHWeb’s HomePage. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence.

I think the JDL/Cole incident is eerily representative of a core story for our century. It illustrates in microcosm how the Jewish holocaust story was birthed and nurtured to become the intellectual and moral monster it is—with slander and violence and the threat of slander and violence.

David did what he felt he had to do, I suppose, to try to make this affair blow over so he and particularly his parents, with whom I believe he was still living when this affair erupted, can live a normal, secure life. For my part, I will do what I feel 1 have to do. One doesn’t put on hold a project that addresses the fete of Western culture, no matter how modest the project might appear to others, because one man is slandered and his life threatened. That would be living life as the brutes direct.

An unknown person faxes me the article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution written by Regina Roberts. It’s a straight ahead story without the usual slander and contempt that most journalists feel they must express with regard to revisionism—if they are not to be slandered in turn. Here are three paragraphs from this sensible 6 February article:

An ad, so small that it might easily be overlooked, has caused a big stir at Georgia State University among students and faculty members because it directs readers to a Web site challenging certain aspects of the Holocaust.(….)

“The perception may be that one or two people made the decision to run the ad and that is not the case,” said [Vickie Suggs, student affairs adviser for The Signal]. The decision was based upon the policy and the students’ desire to approach the issue as journalists. (….)

“When I publish an ad in a student newspaper, this is oftentimes the first news that students have that there’s something wrong with this story,” said Smith, who portrays himself as an independent crusader seeking to correct falsehoods slandering the German people “It’s too late for most of the professors. But students as a class tend to have more open minds than their professors do.”

STOP PRESS—as my old friend David McCalden used to put it. By way of the Internet I learn that students have distributed hundreds of my leaflets titled “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate” at elite Swarthmore College (PA). Jewish students affiliated with something called The Ruach Board have e-mailed an “alert” to “The Swarthmore Jewish Community and all other interested parties.” They quote from a statement placed in the Duke Chronicle by the History Department of Duke U in 1993 in response to the text of “The Case For….” being run in the Chronicle. The “statement” is ludicrous; maybe I’ll have a chance to point that out. I’m going to have to have a fast typewriter. The Ruach people advise students to go to the ADL to find the truth about revisionism, and note that they have invited a “survivor” to speak at Swarthmore in April, on Holocaust Memorial Day.