CODOH’s Campus Project has blasted back into the headlines, in major media as well as in college newspapers on over thirty campuses from South Carolina to Washington State, from San Diego, California to Toronto, Canada.

This time, the enemies of intellectual freedom at the Anti-Defamation League and other like groups were ready for us—or so they thought.

But they found themselves outflanked, then steamrollered by a triplepronged blitz that placed three different sorts of CODOH messages in dailies at universities as eminent as MIT and Johns Hopkins, as all-American as the University of Nebraska and, well, as Canadian as the University of Toronto.

At some colleges where our ads ran, campus Jewish organizations, aided by representatives of the ADL, were able to wring apologies from student editors who accepted the ads; at others, not even the heavy-handed interventions of university administrators could intimidate the young journalists. At most campuses where the ads have appeared (and new ads are being placed even as I type), the efforts at suppressing them have made CODOH and CODOHWeb campus and area-wide news.

Reward Ad Rewarded

Unquestionably it was the debut of CODOH’s unique $50,000 Offer to the individual instrumental in convincing a national TV network to air our video on Auschwitz, David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, in prime time that raised the most eyebrows and the most hackles. Published as it appeared in SR 48, our announcement has run in three dozen (and climbing) college newspapers, was picked up from the AP wire service by numerous city newspapers, and became the subject of big stories in at least two big-city dailies, the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News and the New York Post (the Post reproduced part of the ad, and under it a caption titled “Chilling”).

And why not? After all, if the offer of a $50,000 reward for convincing a major network to air a video made by a young American Jew, a film roundly endorsed by prominent politicians, foreign heads of state, and two of the biggest fish in the exterminationist tank, and which features the curator of the Auschwitz museum denying the authenticity of the prime “gas chamber” at Auschwitz, isn’t news, then what is? And when that reward offer advertisement directs readers to further details on-line at CODOH’s Internet colossus of revisionist scholarship and commentary, it’s very bad news indeed for the enemies of free inquiry, from the slavish timeservers in the dean’s offices to the slavering watchdogs of the ADL.

Why They’re Scared

The ADL, while fearing and fighting CODOH’s Campus Project for the past seven years, fears CODOH’s Web site even more, as it revealed recently in its pamphlet High-Tech Hate: Extremist Use of the Internet (see SR48). With good reason: CODOHWeb offers millions of American college and university students nearly instant, and almost always free, access to attractively designed, well-documented and cogently written Holocaust revisionist materials, which they can transfer to their own computers and print out (illustrations and all) without further ado.

In previous issues of SR we’ve described at length the quality of this or that article, department, or section of CODOHWeb (an overall quality so high that the independent Internet “search engine” Lycos rated CODOHWeb in the top 5% of all Websites). Recently we turned to David Thomas, CODOHWeb’s Co-Web Master, for estimates on the quantity of revisionist material available on the site.

We were as pleasantly surprised as the enemies of intellectual freedom will be horrified: Thomas tells us that CODOHWeb currently carries about 20 megabytes of text and code, and another 15 megabytes of graphics-translating into some 3.5 million(!) words, more than 8,000 pages, and about a thousand different articles (some of book length) by Butz and Faurisson and Irving and Berg and Rudolf and Mattogno and Weckert and Martin and Porter and Smith and many, many more-making CODOHWeb the Internet equivalent of a revisionist Death Star for the Holocaust cult.

Still More Ads—and an Op-Ed

At the same time that some three dozen student papers were running the reward ad, CODOH was placing its boxed challenge to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s bogus “gas chamber” door (see SR47) in the Daily Aztec at San Diego State and the Georgia State Signal. And at SUNY Binghamton (the honors campus of the State University of New York), student editors elected to run an entire op-ed article by Samuel Crowell, in which the CODOH-associated researcher summarized the (to date unrefuted) evidence that the USHMM’s door casting from Majdanek is of a standard air-raid shelter door, and therefore it is neither proof of homicidal gassing nor a relic from the “Holocaust.”

Just publishing the two ads and the op-ed at least once in each of thirty-odd college papers would have been achievement enough, but then the ADL (at both the regional and the national level) and other national Jewish groups, aided by a fifth column of campus crybabies, jumped in to bewail the “offensiveness” of CODOH’s message. At many colleges and universities, the uproar from programmed-to-be-offended Jewish student organizations (one of which, Hillel, works closely with ADL to blackball the Campus Project [see SR42]) was enough to wring apologies from the student editors who had run the ad.

New York Post, Sunday, November 23, 1997, p. 3 Colleges blitzed with ads denying Holocaust By FREDRIC U. DICKER and GREGG BIRNBAUM Post Correspondents ALBANY—An anti-Jewish hate group is targeting New York college newspapers with paid ads denying the Nazi Holocaust, The Poet has learned. The shadowy Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust claims that widely accepted accounts of Nazi mass murders during World War II are nothing more than a Jewish conspiracy. CODOH has placed its ads and opinion pieces in student newspapers at Colgate University and at state university campuses in New Paltz, Binghamton and Fredonia. After a campus outcry a week ago, Todd Ceisner, editor of the SUNY Fredonia Leader, publicly apologized. “There is no excuse as to why the ad was run, nor should there be.” he said. “This is a time to admit a regrettable mistake and convey our sincere embarrassment.” SUNY Albany’s campus newspaper recently refused to run the ad. But earlier this month, CODOH successfully persuaded SUNY Binghamton’s newspaper, Pipe Dream, to publish a Holocaust-denying op-ed article. Embarrassed college President Lois DeFleur fired oft a letter to the paper saying that while “a firm believer in the rights protected by the first Amendment, I have cause for concern … when expressed views distort and minimize documented historical atrocities.” One CODOH ad purports to offer a $50,000 reward to anyone who can. get a prime-time airing on national TV of its “documentary” on the Auschwitz death camp. CODOH has been bragging about its successes in placing ads in SUNY newspapers by listing the names of the campuses on its Internet web site. “After being quiet for some time, CODOH is making a new push on New York college campuses,” said Jeffrey Ross, the Anti-Defamation League's director of campus affairs. “College newspapers are much more likely to run these ads because of the people who tun them. Student editors tend to be characterized by a unique combination of naivete and idealism, with an impulse to publish everything,” Ross said. The ADL classifies CODOH as an anti-Semitic “hate group” whose “message is that the widespread belief that the Holocaust happened is the result of a Jewish conspiracy.”

At Colgate University (Hamilton, NY), for example, the Maroon News ran an apology after Jewish students complained about CODOH’s reward ad run October 31-but editor Eric Lavasseur told a reporter from University of Toronto Varsity: “For the next week, the issue was at the forefront of discussion on campus, to say the least” (this and following quotations, unless noted otherwise, are from “Holocaust Denier Targets Campus,” in the November 20 Varsity News (University of Toronto).

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), Hant-lin Chuan, chairperson of The Tech, hastily-apologized to “Jewish organizations,” telling them the reward ad was run (November 7) by mistake.

At the University of Toronto, editors at the Varsity unaccountably failed to “scrutinize” the CODOH ad and ran it November 17. Their reward for this lapse was separate visitations from Bernie Farber, executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Talia Klein of the hate crimes division of B’nai B’rith Canada. Evidently Farber won thefoot race, for he promptly relieved the Varsity of the $470 fee CODOH had paid for the (already published) ad, then rushed off to give the money to Toronto’s Holocaust Education and Memorial Center. Perhaps it was spent for sandbags to bolster the sagging facade of this provincial atrocity museum against the sort of blasts from CODOH that have rocked the Auschwitz museum and the USHMM. (We feel certain that the many-times-muzzled but always unflappable Torontonian Erast Zuendel smiled as his persecutors scrambled—too late, alas!—to silence us instead of him.)

At Other Campuses: No Apologies!

At other campuses, however, student editors refused to back down by offering groveling apologies for running our ads, and college administrators, sometimes in open concert with ADL officials, moved in. At SUNY Binghamton, where Crowell’s op-ed exposing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum door hoax ran, President Lois DeFleur fired off a letter blasting the publication of views that “distort and minimize documented historical atrocities.” But to date—no apology!

At the University of Nebraska, Daily-Nebraskan editor Paula LaVigne, who ran the ad on November 5, said “I really don’t think we have anything to answer for,” prompting a pompous, stodgy letter from the university’s self-important chancellor, James Moeser—so far without result.

At the University of Denver, where ADL officials met with university president Daniel Ritchie after our $50,000 Offer ran November 21, Clarion editor Matt Branaugh, a 21-year-old senior, not only justified running the reward ad (“We felt we had a moral responsibility to run it”), but then-well, let’s let ADL regional director Saul Rosenthal, as quoted in the Rocky Mountain News (November 22), say it: “Then he [Branaugh] compounded his mistake by quoting from [CODOH’s] Web site.”

Man Bites Watchdog

There is neither space enough, nor time, in this issue to deal adequately with the courage of student editors and other young undergraduates who are speaking openly in the letters columns of their college papers or on their campus Web sites for free speech and open debate-even of the Holocaust story. As this edition of SR went to press, our ads and op-ed had appeared in close to forty campus papers; the news of CODOH’s latest campaign, including the efforts of ADL to suppress it, has appeared in newspapers that circulate in the millions.

In High-Tech Hate, published just a couple months ago, you can read this sentence: “As he started having a hard time getting his material published on campuses, Smith turned to the Internet.” They thought they had the campuses “under control.” They thought they had us in one box, and America’s and Canada’s brightest young people in another. They were wrong. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, thanks to the unremitting efforts of our Webmasters Richard Widmann and David Thomas, even as you read this, students across North America are, almost all of them for the first time, reading the great revisionists, in their own words.