Notebook

At Swarthmore College the beat goes on (thanks, Sonny). The liberal paper on campus, The L-Word, devotes most of its issue this month to the controversy precipitated by the distribution on campus of our leaflet The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate. First there was the shock of the leaflet itself. Then The Phoenix, the Swarthmore paper which printed the original $50,000 Offer, prints a letter to the editor from myself reprimanding Swarthmore President Joseph Bloom (see SR 52) for the inadequate way he responded to the text of the leaflet A cartoon is printed in The Phoenix which suggests that the editor of the Swarthmore electronic newspaper,

The Gazette, is trying to suppress intellectual freedom at the college. Co-editor-in-chief of The Gazette Brendan Nyhan writes that student government has come dangerously close to being compromised by the scandal following the distribution of the leaflets. The scandal? Infighting among student journalists about what should be allowed to be published and what should be suppressed when it comes to revisionism.

ADL On The Frontline (Jan.-Feb. 1998) reports that its Campus Affairs/Higher Education Department is “taking aim” at the Campus Project and that the $50,000 Offer is my “most ambitious effort since the 1993/94 academic year.” It’s good to learn what our friends at the ADL think about this one. The report notes that the ad disputes “the existence of the Holocaust, claiming ‘another side’ to the ‘gas chamber stories’ other than the ‘Jewish holocaust story.’” I don’t think that is very well worded, but it does get the idea across. But here the ADL shows that it understands exactly what we are doing: “The center piece of the ad is the address of Smith’s World Wide Web site, which contains a massive library of Holocaust denial… and linkages to other hate [sic] sites on the Internet.”

ADL alerted students to Bradley Smith's ad campaign which denies the Holocaust and promotes the blatant anti-Semitism on his World Wide Web site.

What is the ADL response to this unwelcome news? “The Campus Affairs/Higher Education Department learning of Smith’s effort in early October, immediately sent detailed mailings and E-mail messages to all ADL Regional Offices and Hillel Foundations, as to many Jewish students and campus newspapers.” Yes, but we want to know what those “detailed mailings and E-mail messages” actually say. If you have family members who are students in college or know someone who does, maybe you can ask them to get those materials “leaked” to me.

Receive a photocopy of a story about the $50,000 Offer printed in the Hofstra University Chronicle (29 January). It’s a curious mixture of good will and bad reporting, where almost everything written is wrong, or half wrong, or implies something that is wrong. The young reporter calls from Long Island so I think, what the devil, I’ll talk to him. The outcome causes me to recall that I have decided not to do telephone interviews with reporters on or off campus as they seldom get it right—I could say that too often getting it wrong is getting it “right” in the political climate we have today. I will only give interviews by fax and email where there is a precise record of what I have to say.

In the February issue of Blockbuster Features, the newsletter published by the video rental chain, there is an announcement that Susan Sarandon will star in Denial as a Jewish civil-rights attorney brought into a First Amendment case, only to discover that her client is the leader of a group that denies the Holocaust. Sounds like a hell of a plot. Any update on this project will be appreciated. It’s been suggested I offer my services as a consultant.

The Mexican woman I wrote about in SR 52 who thought our video on Auschwitz is very interesting, and to whom I gave a copy of my Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist, has volunteered that she likes it. “I have only one question,” she says. “What’s the significance of that horse drawing on the title page?” I explain that while the drawing resembles a horse it’s actually a 16th century drawing of a whale spouting a geyser from the top of its head by a man who had not seen one. I ran across the drawing at the time I was preparing to self-publish Confessions. I saw it as an illustration of how I was writing, from the inside out Confessions was blowing up out of my interior life just like that geyser was blowing out the top of the “whale’s” head. That whale and me, as the 1940’s novelty tune had it, we were just doin’ what comes naturally.

“Distribution Schedule
* Place Ads in College Papers
* Send Videos to Public Schools”

Jewish Exponent. Philadelphia. January 15, 1998

In SR 51 we reported that The Rice Thresher had apologized to one and all for having run our $50,000 Offer. Wallowing in guilt, the paper donated the money I paid to run the ad to the Houston Holocaust Museum. Now, in a story from the Austin American-Statesman, I discover that Abraham J. Peck, executive director of the Houston Museum, has rejected the donation as “tainted.” Now there’s an honorable man. So who got the money? Who at The Rice Thresher is of such a vulgar nature that he would keep it? They haven’t sent it back to me, that’s for sure. I’m the one who deserves it. Of all the folk associated with Rice, the Thresher and the Houston Holocaust Museum, I must be the only one who is sufficiently rank to take possession of this tainted money without being further harmed by it.

A courageous President Clinton tells survivors (New York Times, 26 March) of the 1994 massacres in Rwanda, “Scholars of these sorts of events say that the killers [in 1994], armed mostly with machetes and clubs, nonetheless did their work five times as fast as the mechanized gas chambers used by the Nazis.” Here’s a man who risks being attacked for belittling the gas chamber stories on the one hand, and on the other suggesting that Black Africans are the most efficient mass murderers in history.