Offense or Defense?

One Sunday afternoon in December I was sprawled over the living room sofa channel surfing with our TV changer when I came across a CNN replay of an orientation meeting for the newly elected Republican members of the U.S. Congress. Speakers Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh were sharing the podium.

Bennett got my attention when he repeated the old saw about how politics is like football. If you're not playing offense, you're playing defense. It's one or the other. There's no middle ground. There's no middle ground with what I do either. In the contest being played out between the Holocaust Lobby and myself, I've been on offense for four years now. The Lobby has the money, the influence, the contacts, the professors, the media. It has almost everything. So why is it playing defense?

Easy. I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong about the gas chambers. It's not necessary that the gas chamber story is proven to be the fraud I think it is. I can't say that too often. My subjective life isn't dependent on the non-existence of the gas chambers. That's why I can keep control of the ball against such odds. In a very deep sense, it doesn't matter to me which way the ball bounces. As the Brits used to say (for the benefit of themselves only), it doesn't matter who wins or loses, it's how you play the game.

This game is like football but it isn't football. This is a game being played out between those who hold that intellectual freedom is an absolute necessity for a civilized society and those who say they agree but have a few exceptions they want to make, depending on their politics. The difference between football and the contest over intellectual freedom is that with football one side wins and one side loses. The promise of intellectual freedom is – everybody wins!

The Holocaust Lobby, that is, mainline Jews and the Gentile elites, have committed themselves to a rigid historical stance over the gas chamber controversy rather than to an intellectual process, which is what thought is. The Lobby is playing defense here because it understands but can't admit publicly that intellectual freedom threatens its very being.

The Lobby has spent half a century and hundreds of millions of dollars building itself an intellectual Maginot Line. For four years I've been able to out-flank those guys at every turn. It's been a lot of fun. I don't expect to horse around much longer with flanking maneuvers, however. Without giving away the game plan, I can say I'm about to unveil a secret weapon. From here on out, it's straight up the middle.