Of Dracula and Chia Pets

A column in the Jewish World (March 27-April 1998) gives a revealing, behind-the-scenes glimpse at how professional censors within the Jewish community think and operate against CODOH and the Campus Project.

Writer Mik Moore edits New Voices, a publication of the Jewish Student Press Service, and is a recent graduate of Vassar. That last bit of biography is why Mik is ticked, you could say, at Bradley Smith and CODOH: this January the Campus Project ran the $50,000 Reward Offer at Vassar. Nor, as Moore fretfully informs his readers, was that the first time CODOH struck at his alma mater. Vassar's campus daily ran a CODOH ad promoting Holocaust revisionism ran more than four years earlier, when Mr. Moore was a Vassar undergraduate. Indeed, he strongly hints that the first advertisement helped propel him down the primrose path of professional censor of ideas deemed offensive to the Jewish community.

It's not as if he's grateful to us, though. Despite Moore's claim that “…the Anti-Defamation League undoubtedly manages to prevent hundreds of [CODOH] ads from being printed [interesting admission, that!], others,” he wails, “continue to slip through.”

Moore's activism in pursuit of sheltering university students, Jewish and non-Jewish, from whatever Moore and his fellow monitors deem unsafe for them to read and hear doubtless involves a variety of activities he doesn't want to make public, even in the Jewish press. He does discuss, however, what happened at a recent workshop put on by Jewish student leaders at a conference organized by a group called Lights In Action. At the workshop the, students were organized into “editorial boards” and confronted with the decision of publishing, or not publishing, a Holocaust revisionist ad. According to Moore, every one of the “papers” at the workshop would have published the ad (see what happens when the dean and the ADL aren't knocking at the door?)!

Moore sees two schools of thought behind what (to him) is this sort of suicidal liberality: one, the “free speech” school (self-explanatory), the second, the “kill Dracula” school, named from the notion that revisionism, exposed to the light of day, will expire quicker than the storied Transylvanian count.

But, as Moore acknowledges, the daylight of hundreds of revisionist campus ads published coast to coast hasn't slain the CODOH Dracula. Nor is it enough that Jewish activism on campus normally flares up following publication of CODOH ads. No, he quavers, instead: “The Jewish community becomes a Chia Pet: Add the water of Holocaust revisionism and watch it grow!”

Since Moore reveals that for him freedom of the press lies chiefly in the right of editors not to publish unpopular opinions or advertising (evidently even at public institutions), and since he evidently regards Dracula versus the Chia Pet as the worst mismatch since Godzilla versus Bambi, this full-time Jewish activist suggests a new solution:

The time has come to end the cycle. Hillels and other Jewish student groups should meet with editorial boards of the school newspapers at the beginning of every year to pre-empt the printing of these ads. Nothing else will work.

Well, Moore doesn't explain exactly how a bunch of Jewish kids are going to get the editorial boards of student newspapers across America to issue a blanket declaration to the effect: “No revisionist ads this year—that's a promise.”

After all, his brand of censorship didn't even work at any of the little “campus papers” formed for his workshop—at which all of the students involved were Jewish.

Just two ads, that simply indicate a dissident point of view on the Holocaust, published over four years apart at one well-known American campus—and one young professional Jewish activist comes undone in print. That may because Mik Moore, and hundreds more like him working behind the scenes to keep revisionism off America's college and university campuses, know that Bradley Smith and the people who work with and support CODOH aren't Dracula after all—and that you can't drive a stake through the heart of hard work, or smother persistence with garlic, or shoot a silver bullet through the truth. And that's very bad news for the censors, new and old, Jewish and otherwise.