Revisionism’s Inroads Shock the Lobby

A syndicated newspaper advice columnist counsels a college couple quarreling over whether CODOlfs $50,000 Reward Offer should have run in the student newspaper they edit and write for.

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith confers a new award on college journalists for opposing “Holocaust denial” on campus and on the Internet.

A top UN human rights official in Geneva, Switzerland takes a public stand against Swiss suppression of Roger Garaudy's revisionist Founding Myths of Israeli Politics and refuses to budge when bullied by a watchdog from the World Jewish Congress.

These recent items in the news are not earth shaking, but they record important achievements and growing opportunities for CODOH and revisionism, as well as setbacks for the enemies of truth and freedom regarding the Holocaust and related historical questions.

One difficulty in waging a long term campaign to bring taboo, and, in many lands, illegal information to the public eye is that it's often tough to measure progress. There is, of course, the frequent feedback from you, the readers of Smith's Report, who form the vital core of support for our revisionist work—yet we understand that even if we were hearing from every convinced revisionist in the world our work would not be done.

David Thomas, Webmaster of CODOHWeb, can tabulate how many times documents (latest count: over six hundred thousand!) have been accessed on our Website, which reaches out over the Internet to revisionists and people interested in revisionism worldwide—but the names and the number of individual visitors to CODOHWeb remain, for the most part, unknown. Then too. of course, we can count the circulations of the scores of college papers where we placed our advertisements last year, but calculating their aggregate effect, at present, cant be done.

CODOH's Campus Project: A Growing Cultural Presence.

Now and then, however, something like Cherie Bennett's column, which ran last March in big-city papers across the nation, serves as something of a milestone for how far CODOH's come. By 1991, Bradley Smith's radio and TV work in taking revisionism to the American people had already won recognition, however grudging, from popular culture by way of such things as the inclusion of call-in “Holocaust deniers” in such movies as Talk Show (with Eric Bogosian) and Betrayal (with Tom Berenger and Debra Winger).

If s not so important that Ms. Bennett (author of a play called Anne Frank and Me) counseled her correspondent and the boyfriend to give CODOH's ads the heave-ho in the future, and recommended Deborah Lipstadt's Holocaust Denial instead. What's more important is that CODOH and the Campus Campaign are now becoming part of the broader cultural landscape: in another recent instance, one Deborah Tannen, in USA Today's weekend magazine (Feb. 27-Mar. 1), made reference to the growing success of “Holocaust deniers” in gaining campus newspaper space. Such signals show, like it or not, that CODOH and its fight for revisionist truth have become a feet of public life.

While “being there” is important, it's not enough, of course. Therefore we’re happy to be able to report tangible advances over the past college year. Once again, scores of CODOH ads ran in campus newspapers, despite the redoubled efforts of the ADL and other censors to prevent that—efforts that included public reprimands to student editors and menacing visits to college administrators.

CODOH ads made big news not only in major university newspapers, but also in big-city, big-circulation papers from coast to coast (see SR's 49 & 50). And why not? Our ads called attention not only to CODOHWeb's vast trove of revisionist knowledge, immediately accessible to nearly all of today's college students, but made a headline-grabbing reward offer that showcased our video on the gas chamber cover-up at Auschwitz—as revealed by the Auschwitz museum's director to Jewish filmmaker David Cole.

For the first time ever, CODOH has been able to report—and to play a role in—sustained revisionist activity on several American campuses: at Washington State University, where a revisionist Website survived an administration attempt to close it down—and where David Irving lectured to a crowd of several hundred; at Swarthmore, where student leafleting of Brad Smith's pamphlet The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate, the running of a CODOH ad, and an op ed piece by Smith had the campus in an uproar, and at Oberlin, where student revisionists showed the Cole video and read and talked revisionism feverishly (see SR's 51, 52, & 54).

In belated response, now ADL has instituted what it calls the Bess Myerson Campus Journalism Awards to student journalists for, in its words, “promoting intergroup understanding through campus newspapers.” In a press release datelined New York, NY, June 10, the Jewish watchdog group announced that it had paid cash prizes to college editors for essays that oppose revisionism, because, says ADL director Abe Foxman. “It was ugly words that preceded the bricks [sic] that built the gas chambers.”

Perhaps this development signals ADL's departure from the ugly threats it's so far used to try to throttle revisionism on campus. Possibly the Anti-Defamation League will now rely on bribes—we mean to say awards—underwritten by the erstwhile Jewish Miss America to stem the rising CODOH campus tide. In any case, we're confident their prizes will be to no avail. In the exact words of a CODOH campus ad the ADL itself ran last year in its booklet High-Tech Hate, our message to the universities remains: “Ignore the Thought Police. Read the Evidence. Judge for Yourself.” Myerson awards or no, we mean to make the coming academic year a rough ride for the Thought Police.

Here Comes the Middle East.

The news about Egyptian diplomat Mahmoud Aboul-Nasr, who heads the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, brings still more evidence of the unchecked spread and growing influence of Roger Garaudy's revisionist Founding Myths of Israeli Politics. For Aboul-Nasr's resistance to attempts to suppress that book we have the word of WJC arm twister in Geneva Michael Colson, who reported that the diplomat both knows and likes Garaudy and is well aware of the Frenchman's popularity in the Muslim world (“Inverted Reality at the U.N.,” Jewish Exponent, [Philadelphia], April 16).

Now, we'll admit up front that, although CODOH is the first (and still the only source) to offer Garaudy's Founding Myths in English, and SR has intensely covered the revisionist saga of Roger Garaudy—his book, his arrest, his trial, his conviction, the storm of support for him in the Arab and Islamic nations, and in consequence the extraordinary diffusion of his and now other Holocaust revisionist works in these lands—CODOH cannot claim chief responsibility for this enormous revisionist breakthrough. The fact is, CODOH can't do all the work. The good news is that we don't have to.

While CODOHWeb carries revisionist material in Arabic and Turkish on its International Pages, more important are our links to the Arabic-language revisionist Websites, like Achmed Rami's Radio Islam, with whom we work in tandem.

Naturally, CODOHWeb is accessible to the increasing numbers of Middle Easterners who read English, from whom we've received our fair share of praise.

Of special importance to such visitors is the ample material CODOHWeb displays on Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and other Middle Easterners. Of course, our Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, Iranian and other readers need no introduction to their problems with Israel—the knowledge they need here is that not only is there a connection between the Holocaust myth and Zionism, but that we recognize this nexus and work to spread it to our fellow Westerners. To this end, the CODOHWeb page “Zionism, Stalinism, and the Holocaust: The Tangled Web” displays a wealth of information on the historical roots and the up-to-the minute consequences of the function that Holocaust propaganda has played in the theft of Palestine. Furthermore, “The Tangled Web” page offers direct Internet links to Mideast Websites of interest, including the Websites of the PLO, the Deir Yasin Remembrance Authority, and many more.

A few days ago an associate just back from Egypt told us that, not all that long after the World Jewish Congress's man Colson was rebuffed in Geneva, the University of Cairo added to its library's collection Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Day? and Barbara Kulaszka's encyclopedic presentation of the evidence gathered in the Zuendel trials that bears the same name.

As we contemplate the fevered efforts of our Zionist friends to stop the avalanche of revisionism in the Islamic world, somehow the title of a bode that SR subscriber Alfred Lilienthal once wrote keeps running through our thoughts: There Goes the Middle East, he called it.

Has the preceding year been a good one for CODOH and revisionism? We'll say just this:

In previous years, we carried revisionism to the colleges. Now we're bringing collegians to revisionism.

In previous years, CODOHWeb was a resource for Americans, and a refuge for Europeans. Now it's part of a tide, of a jihad if you will, that has the power to sweep not only the embattled Middle East, but the entire Muslim world, one billion people strong.

In other words, CODOH's here to stay, a rock of freedom and the truth regarding the most taboo question of the age. But we're no sedentary, mossy boulder: we're a rock that's rolling, with gathering momentum, against the enemies of open inquiry into the Holocaust.

[We'll send copies of the Bennett column, ADL's press release on the Myerson awards, and Michael Colson's column on his Garaudy confrontation with Egypt's U.N. man for any contribution you make for any of the items listed in the Catalog Update. If you'd like to own copies of previous issues of Smith's Report see the catalogue insert with this issue]