Open Letter the “The Beacon”, William Patterson University

The Beacon
Student Center, Room 310
William Patterson University
Wayne New Jersey 07470
Editor in Chief: Ryan L. Caiazzo
Newsroom: 973 720 2248
Email:

28 August 2,000

For Publication

I run advertisements in student newspapers at college and university campuses around the country encouraging an open debate on the Jewish holocaust story. My ads have run some 300 times. On 17 April 2000 I ran one in The Beacon titled “Holocaust Studies: Appointment with Hate?”

President Arnold Speert wrote (24 April) that my ad contains “lies” and that The Beacon should apologize for having run it. I find it rather tacky that a university president would use the position of his office to attack a student newspaper staff for running a controversial text containing “lies” without demonstrating what those “lies” are.

President Speert believes students should simply take his word for it, eh? President Speert writes: “The Holocaust did happen.” He ignores the fact that in my ad I do not write that the Holocaust did not happen. As a matter of fact – that’s what is at issue. What was the Holocaust? The first thing we have to say is that the Jewish holocaust story is a vast collection of war stories. Like every other war story, some of them happened and some of them didn’t. I’m doing what I can to encourage our professors (and their administrators) to separate the wheat from the chaff.

President Speert quotes the “New York Times Manager of Advertising Acceptability” as stating that the Times will not accept advertisements that deny a recognized crime of substantial proportions or vividness.” He suggests that The Beacon’s staff get together with its faculty advisors and legal counsel to devise advertising policies that can be used to suppress revisionist texts. That is, get the lawyers in, make it illegal for student newspapers to allow expressions of skepticism regarding those historical issues about which their professors have declared a consensus. Why not? It worked for Hitler. It worked for Stalin. It still works for Fidel Castro and every other tin pot dictator the world over.

Professors Carol Gruber (History), Neil Kressel (Psychology), Peter Stein (Sociology) and Miryan Wahrman (Biology) expressed their astonishment that a student newspaper would run an advertisement encouraging an open debate on an historical controversy: “It is ironic … that the Beacon saw fit to accept and print this ad a scant week after a British court’s … rejection of David Irving’s libel suit against historian Deborah Lipstadt [Emory University]).” That is, these WPU professors approve of the idea that historical controversies should be decided in courtrooms sanctioned by the State rather than through a free exchange of ideas. Every tyrant past and present would certainly agree with them.

The professors find it “twisted” that I would observe that to ask for proof that “one (one!) Jew was gassed in any German camp as part of a program of ‘genocide’ is hate.” Why is it hateful to ask for proof of a great crime that another is accused of? And then – where is the “one” proof? The professors are dismayed that I would suggest that Democrats and Republicans committed the same “crimes against humanity” that the National Socialists committed. Let’s take a look at this one.

The great “ crime against humanity” that the German National Socialists are accused of committing during WWII is that they intentionally killed civilians – we don’t really care whether the victims were Jews, do we? Why would we care? A human being is a human being. And there, of course, is the rub. The Bi-partisan State policy of Democrats and Republicans during the war included the intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, including tens of thousands of children and babies. These civilians were intentionally blown apart and burned alive in the great firestorms purposely set by US air arms (along with the British, mainly), culminating in the nuclear obliteration of the civilian populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

It is not immoral – to the contrary – to hold Democrats and Republicans to the same moral standards to which we hold German National Socialists. Why would you argue otherwise?

Count the books, the monographs, the essays, articles and fulminations (count them if you can – for they are endless) the professorial class has written about the intentional killing of Jewish civilians, then add up the tiny, tiny number that they have written about the intentional killing of Japanese and German civilians. Who benefits from this immense Holocaust publishing industry? The Japanese? The Germans? Christians? Or is it the folk who invaded and conquered Palestine at the close of WWII, destroyed Palestinian culture, formed a Jewish settler state on Palestinian land, and now receive billions (billions!) of dollars yearly via the US Congress?

The weapons used by Democrats and Republicans to intentionally kill civilians are known to all and denied by none. The gassing chambers allegedly used by the Germans to intentionally kill civilians can not be demonstrated to have existed, and there are men and women in every nation in Europe and North America who are willing to argue in public debate that they never did exist. At the Irving/Lipstadt trial referred to by the WPU professors, the expert on the fabled “gassing chambers,” the Dutch-Canadian professor of architecture Robert van Pelt, was reduced on the witness stand to stating that the presence of gas chambers at Auschwitz is a “moral certainty.”

A “moral” certainty? Really? We have been told for half a century that the murder weapon was an “historical” certainty. What is this? Stand-up comedy?

The Beacon printed a number of letters from students who were offended by the text of my ad. Their letters contain, for the most part, the same accusations and misunderstandings reflected in the letters published by their professors. My work is to encourage a few students to set out on their own, to find out for themselves, what the truth of the matter – the gas-chamber matter – really is. It is not immoral – to the contrary — to argue for the innocence of Germans on those counts where you suspect they might be innocent.

On 24 April The Beacon printed a letter from Matthew G. Helpern, the business manager of The Beacon last semester, and the individual I dealt with in having my ad run. He suggests that reading the text of my ad might “open your mind a little … [so that you can ask yourself] … are the stories we hear 100 percent true? Is there something more to it? … Personally, I do not believe what this advertisement claims… [but] when we ask the questions, rather than yelling out at one another just because something doesn’t sound right, we all benefit from the answers … Open your mind, ask the questions, and listen for the answers. ‘Free your mind and the rest will follow …’”

Bravo! Written by a student who understands what the ideal of the university stands for in Western culture. I ask myself: Who needs to be teaching whom at WPU?

Bradley R. Smith is publisher of The Revisionist