Professor Arthur A. Butz Establishes Own Internet Web Site

On the morning of 6 May a few of us received an e-mail message from Professor Arthur Butz announcing that if poets can do it and plumbers and nurses and monkeys can do it, if cats and fish and birds and even plants can do it, he could do it, and he had. He had established his own Web site on the Internet.

“The distinctive role I contemplate for the Web site will be evident on examination.”

I’ll bet. For years I have pined away, hoping against diminishing hope that Professor Butz would write regularly on revisionist theory. It even crossed my mind that the Web was a new opportunity for him. I didn’t have much hope he would actually do it. But this is a man who plays his cards close to his vest, and now this little dream has come true for me. I suppose the folks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the rest of the gang have been holding their breath for this particular shoe to drop. They’re probably not as happy about this development as I am. For those people it must feel something like terror in a tight place.

It didn’t take long for the new Inquisition to start preparing its rack. On 24 May the Chronicle of Higher Education reported:

“The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human-rights group based in Los Angeles, has asked Northwestern University to remove a World-Wide Web page from the university’s computers because it promotes the idea that the Holocaust never happened.

“‘The Wiesenthal Center urges Northwestern University to take the necessary steps to see to it that Holocaust denial is not promoted via its university server,’ the center said in a letter to Henry S. Bienen, Northwestern's president.”

Mark Weitzman, director of the Wiesenthal Center's Task Force Against Hate, said, “These pages appear to be maintained under the auspices of Northwestern. In effect, he's using the university as a shield for hyping anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.”

A university spokesman, emphasized that “the university planned to take no action on the continued existence of Mr. Butz's Web site,” which discusses what the professor calls “the widespread but erroneous belief in the legend of millions of Jews killed by Germans during World War II.”

For those of you on-line, Professor Butz’s site can be reached at — http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/

The next issue of SR will update this story and describe the almost certainly pivotal role this Web site will begin to play.