Smith’s Report no. 10, July 1992

Friend

The Campus Project has been successful beyond anything we have done before. Holocaust revisionism has become a presence on dozens of university campuses. Seventeen student newspapers at major universities have published full page CODOH ads about revisionism. Papers that refuse to run the ads print editorials, interviews and columns explaining why. I have given scores of interviews to reporters representing news services, the mainstream press, the Jewish press and radio and TV, in addition to student reporters.

The downside to all this is that I am behind with even urgent correspondence. Telephone calls have gone unanswered. Several of you who have offered to contribute funds toward sponsoring ads at specific campuses have not heard from me. Don't give up on me. If you've asked me to call and I haven't done it, call me again. If I said I would do something for you and I haven't, remind me of what it was. I'll do my best to take care of it.

Now summer break is upon us, most of the college press has ceased to publish regularly, and the public work of the Project has come to an end until September. Time to clear off the desk, reorganize a little, regroup. Time to work out the new tactics we'll use in the fall. We can't continue to promote the Project next season the same way we promoted it last. The other side is ready for what we have done before. We're going to give them something they aren't at all ready for.

“The Holocaust Controversy:” The Ad

During October last when we first began placing this article as a full-page advertisement in student newspapers we caught the other side off guard. We were able to get into Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Rutgers and Northern Illinois before they knew what hit them. By the first week in December however, the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center had both swung into action, mailing thousands of letters to colleges urging them to not run our ad. I didn't know until a few days ago, when I received a report from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, that the American Jewish Committee had entered the fray at the same time, writing 3,300 college newspapers to reject publication of the ad. The AJC is the bunch that did the huge smear job on me in Talkers: The Newspaper of Talk Media in order to black ball me from radio and TV. (see catalog, “Hate on Talk Radio.”)

I waited out the weeks between early December through 10 January, uncertain how many ads I would be able to place when classes resumed now that the other side was running in full heat. Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Louisiana State all published in the middle of January and Community College of Philadelphia followed shortly. So we were still in business but I could tell by the high percentage of papers that were beginning to reject the ad that the campaign against us was becoming increasingly effective. Six weeks passed without any printings of the ad.

That possibility had occurred to me. The ad was being rejected on the advice of organizations representing the Holocaust Lobby on grounds that it is “a pack of lies” and “anti-Semitic.” I would never be able to counter the “anti-Semitic” accusation but I had an idea about how to take care of the other. I contacted IHR and proposed that the folks there develop a full page ad based on Mark Weber's “The 'Jewish Soap' Holocaust Myth” that had appeared in the Summer 1991 issue of The Journal of Historical Review. I would do an introduction, include some end material directing readers to ask for further

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information, and create a package that would consist of the Human Soap ad, a cover letter, and an off-print of the original article by Weber, including the two and one half pages of source references that Weber had published in the Journal. No newspaper editor and no spokesman for the Holocaust Lobby would be able to say that the Soap ad is a “pack of lies.”

IHR agreed to go along with the idea and more than that to fund this part of the project. Now I had two ads to work with; the first primarily a political document, the second primarily a scholarly one. Weber had a substantial amount of work to do to boil the Human Soap article down into an ad. While the other side has a surplus of hands, we have a shortage. Nevertheless, we all put our two cents in, and by early March the Soap ad was ready to go. I submitted it, together with cashier's checks, to four universities. Responses were very slow. No one agreed to publish it. We were able to get the Holocaust Controversy ad published at the University of Georgia, which was a real coup, but there was a growing sense that I was being closed down. I wasn't dead in the water, but we weren't being published the way we should be, and the funds I had available to publish were tied up in the mail in cashier's checks.

April Holocaust “awareness” month was upon us, then May and the end of classes again. Something had to be done, and quickly. A Michigan supporter came up with the right idea. I would make full-size photocopies of each of the two ads. I would submit the Holocaust Controversy ad to 90 new college papers with a cover letter saying that I would follow up by telephone to make arrangements to send camera-ready copy and a check. This would give the paper a few days to consider whether to run the ad or not, and no funds would be tied up at papers that couldn't make up their minds or were just stonewalling. Those papers that would have no intention whatever of publishing the ad would nevertheless have the text of it, probably the first Holocaust revisionist text they had ever laid eyes on.

I would send full-size photocopies of the Human Soap ad to the 35 student newspapers that had rejected the first ad. The off-print of Weber's article complete with source references would be in the package. A cover letter would point out that the paper could not possibly use the excuse that the ad contained falsehoods as a reason to not publish this ad. Simple. Now, instead of two or three student papers receiving the text of the ads each week, and some weeks no paper receiving it, 125 papers would receive one or the other of the ads all in the same week. My guess was that our friends in the Lobby would start having heart attacks. Plus, the information in the ads would be getting to 125 student editorial staffs all at once. The educational benefits alone would be incalculable.

We got both ad packages in the mail the first week in April, a little late, but acceptable. Our first response was from The Vista at the University of San Diego. No problem. The Vista is the first paper in California–on the entire West Coast — to publish the Holocaust Controversy ad. What I didn't know was that USD is a Catholic university as well, widely known for its law school. So publication there was a first on that count too. The administration had a fit, apologized to our Jewish friends and sent the money I paid for the ad to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Next day the administration sent agents across the USD campus to confiscate every issue of The Vista that could be found and destroy them. When the Catholic hierarchy moves on a censorship project, it doesn't horse around.

In addition to USD, the Holocaust Controversy ad was published at the University of Arizona and the University of Montana. In addition, we got commitments to publish at three other Southern California universities: U.C. Riverside, Cal State University at Fullerton, and U.C. San Bernadino. After the fallout at USD, however, all three of these California schools reversed themselves and none published. Major controversies over the ad erupted at University of Washington and University of California at Davis. And that's just on the West Coast.

The Human Soap ad took a different turn. It too caused substantial controversies at Harvard, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and Duke. Papers at two universities agreed to run the Soap ad, Howard in Washington D.C. and University of Texas at Austin. Remember Texas? The publications board flip-flopped there three or four times last November about publishing the Holocaust Controversy ad, finally refusing to run it. Now I was informed that a professor in communications serving on the Texas publications board had brought the original ad before the Board once again. The Board voted once again to not publish the Holocaust Controversy, but voted to run the Human Soap ad! I was counting my blessings.

I didn't know that, by coincidence, Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt was on the Texas campus to speak. When she heard about the

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Human Soap ad she went to the Texan and told the folks there that if they published she would sue the paper. Her reasoning was that she was quoted in the ad saying the human soap story is not true and that I had no right to quote her in an advertisement that suggested that she might agree with the drift of the text contained in the ad. It wasn't much of a threat, but a threat of a law suit against a business, in the first instance, is as good as a law suit. The ad went before the publications board two more times in one week. A representative of the ADL was flown out from New York to speak against the ad. Lipstadt apparently contacted other scholars quoted in the ad who are still living and had them fax letters of protest and threats to sue to the Texan. Staff there was getting real nervous. Shmuel Krakowski, archives director at Yad Vashem, faxed his threatening letter straight from Jerusalem.

The issue of printing or not printing the ad became so heated that the night of the final vote police had to be in the meeting room to keep order. One professor, voting to run the ad, was physically attacked by an off-campus journalist. When it was time to vote, the mob in the meeting room was so unruly that the Board had to be escorted outside by police so it could vote without individuals risking being beaten up. In the event, the vote was against running the ad. Afterwards, I was told that the Human Soap ad had polarized the Texas campus more than any other issue in the history of the university. What polarization means is that there is a substantial body of individuals at Texas who favor running revisionist materials. I am beginning to sense that this is the case at any number of universities but that sympathizers still have no safe way to commit themselves to action publicly. Our job is to keep the pressure on until we find ways for them to come out of the closet. Once the students start to come out, and maybe a couple professors, the whole affair will blow wide open.

The Soap ad story took its own turn at Tufts University outside Boston. The managing editor there, Patrick Healy, told me that while the Tufts Daily would not run the paid advertisement, the paper would do a series of articles on the subject and would print substantial excerpts from the ad. I didn't know what to expect. When I got the papers I saw that Tufts had run the entire text of Weber's article but had cut my introduction and the end material. The articles by Healy are unusually fair. On balance, it was a good show for us. It is the only publication of either ad that has appeared in New England, so really it's rather a breakthrough.

The Harvard Crimson

The word I got when the Holocaust Controversy ad was put to a vote at The Crimson last November was that it was a very heated affair. This time, with the Soap ad, it was no different, and the result was the same: the new ad would not be run either. However, it was suggested that, if I submitted an opinion piece about Revisionism, it would most likely be published. So I wrote one, sent it to a couple associates for editorial input, rewrote it, titled it “The Gas Chamber Stories: Why I Doubt Them,” and sent it off. I felt rather confident that we would be published at Harvard, but I was wrong.

Meanwhile, Magaly was putting university addresses into the computer for future use. We used two different headers, one that would direct a mailing to the “advertising manager” of the paper, the other to the “opinion page editor.” We had 460 universities entered. Magaly was still following up the ad mailings by telephone. If you send out a 100-piece mailing you might have to make 300 calls before you can contact everyone necessary. For a while, it's a full-time job. There wouldn't be time to send out and follow up on any more ads. But the season was ending and I wanted to make one last strike.

I did a little rewriting on the opinion piece I had written for The Crimson, and we sent it to the opinion page editors of 460 college papers across the country. It went out the fourth week in April. A little late, but it went out. I asked that any paper that published it send me a clipping for my files. So far I have received clippings of the published piece from the University of Washington and University of California at Davis. Other papers have called to confirm that the piece is mine, including MIT and Cincinnati. At the very least, some three hundred college newspaper staffs that received the opinion article have read for the first time a simple, straightforward account of why there are so many of us who no longer believe the gas chamber stories.

So here we are at summer break and we're going out in a blaze of glory. The final returns from the Project are far from in. I'll give more interviews to the press, there will be radio and maybe TV interviews. The opinion piece on the gas chamber stories are still being digested, and there are still hundreds of college newspapers to approach with ads in the fall. A producer for one of the most respected news shows on television has called twice to get

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background on the Project. I'm keeping him up to date. When he called the first time I didn't send him anything on the Soap ad because we hadn't been published and I didn't want to muddy the waters. But last week the producer called again, asking for the text to the Soap ad. Word of it had reached him through other sources. I sent it to him with other updates on the Project. If we do this show we will have our foot in the door with the Washington/New York TV axis for the first time, and at the highest level.

Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist

Second (enlarged) Edition

The first volume of the Second (enlarged) Edition is off the press. It looks terrific. Much better than the first edition looked. As I explained some months ago, I'm going to publish this edition of Confessions in quarterly (really, three times a year) installments. The next installment will appear on 1 September. This first issue has 57 pages of text, the next will have about 90.

I've sent the first issue to the editors of those student papers where there was some unusual controversy over either running the ads or rejecting them. I'll send copies to major electronic media and to some of the commercial press. This first issue is published by Popular Reality, an anarchist publisher in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Popular Reality, directed by David Nestle, is distributing the book for comment and reviews throughout the alternative publishing scene nation-wide. There it will receive a very different reception than revisionism receives in the commercial world. “Alternative” publishers are not terrorized by economic and political threats the way the rest of the publishing world is. There is simply no way for the dreaded Lobby to squash these small, radical publishers.

The ideas behind publishing Confessions serially include:

1. I would rather publish it in installments and get it going now than wait until I've finished the full manuscript. I'm already far behind schedule with it.
2. I'm able to raise the money to print a small book. In fact, this printing of 2,000 copies has been paid for largely by one supporter. Getting funds for printing a book with 500 to 600 pages would be difficult, and then there is the question of additional funds if it were necessary to reprint.
3. Each time I publish a part of the book I have a new public relations opportunity to push the book and to push for open debate on the Holocaust.
4. Media is more receptive to booking an author than a “spokesman.” Serious media always have the problem with me that I challenge the entire profession of establishment historians and question the positions held on the Holocaust story by all the great universities, while I have only a high school education and don't claim any deep knowledge of the issue to hand. This makes media nervous, and oftentimes unwilling to take me seriously.
5. I'm a writer, not a PR man. I'm a literary writer, not a journalist. I've got to publish what I write or no one anywhere will understand where I'm really coming from, and I will be living in other people's worlds, not my own.
6. I have a plan for selling Confessions by subscription, using an 800 number to do it. I can't sell a product profitably that costs $5 or $6 through media, but I can sell one (a subscription to four or more issues) profitably that sells at $30 or so.

Some of you, particularly those who take most seriously the importance of Revisionism, may have reservations about Confessions. The manuscript reveals an urge toward self-revelation that some will view as vulgar, and it contains material that will be used by the other side to denigrate my position as a spokesman for revisionism.

I can't predict the future (another weakness in my character) but my sense of things is that, as the book unfolds issue by issue, its accumulative effect will prove to be increasingly provacative and successful, and that it will take the Holocaust controversy into places in our society where it is totally absent now. We'll see.

Smith's Report

This issue of SR should have gone to the printers the first week in April. There wasn't a chance. I was just too busy. I could easily use a full-time employee. It's not in the cards. There's going to be a major change in format for Smith's Report. It's going to become a much more influential publication with a much wider distribution. The budget for printing it will remain about the same. Sound's like a mystery, eh? You'll find out all about it in September. As usual, I don't want to give the game away to the other side, so I refrain from printing details about the project. In spite of what you may think when you read in Confessions, I still have some of my wits about me.

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The Montel Williams TV Interview

Montel Williams is a Black talk show host who's beginning to make inroads into network television. His show is already being aired on 74 stations across the country. One morning toward the end of March I received a telephone call from his producer asking me to guest on the program. Ideally there would be three “survivors” and three revisionists on the program. She asked me to suggest a couple revisionists other than myself who I thought would make a good show. I gave her the names and numbers of Fritz Berg, Robert Countess, Mark Weber and David Cole. Berg and Countess are in New Jersey and Alabama respectively while Weber and Cole are in Southern California, and in the end she turned to them.

The producer, who is Jewish, had long, sometimes intense talks with Weber and Cole and myself. She had a problem with each of us, but particularly with Cole, who is Jewish. I thought her very difficult. I was very busy and tired and didn't really want to drive down to Los Angeles to tape the broadcast, particularly when I wasn't sure that it would ever be aired. Then I had my brilliant idea for the month.

The producer insisted that I was to be one of the guests and that she wanted David Cole in the audience so that he could ask a question or two. I told her unequivocally that I would not do the show and that Cole should take my place. He would represent CODOH as our southwest regional director. I explained that he's articulate, Jewish, good humored, Jewish, knowledgeable – and Jewish. It would be good for the program. She sulked, but the date for taping the program was upon us; I'd made an offer she couldn't refuse, so while she was very unhappy, she went along with it.

In the event, Mark Weber representing The Institute for Historical Review and David Cole representing CODOH did the interview and it went well. The survivors were the usual, it could be seen that Weber was the most knowledgeable person in the room, and David Cole was very effective in his first major media interview for revisionism. The day it was to air, the show was preempted by coverage of the Los Angeles riots, but I have received a good video copy of the program from Ed Mueller in Chicago and it will be available a couple weeks down the line. This is the most interesting TV exposure for revisionism since Fred Leuchter and I did the Jerry Williams Show in Boston, or since my appearance on the Morton Downey Show.

The A.C.L.U.

Ira Glasser, Executive Director of the ACLU, has written to demand that I remove notice from my ads that CODOH is a member of the ACLU. He wants an apology for having done it in the past and a letter of promise that I won't do it in the future. He writes that while I am a member of the ACLU, CODOH is not, and that it is “both absurd and offensive” to give the impression that the ACLU “somehow subscribes or is linked to your organization's views on the Holocaust….”

I've responded by writing that I used CODOH stationary to apply for membership, paid with a CODOH check, and that my ACLU membership card is made out to “Bradley R. Smith, CODOH.” Maybe there was some way I could have made it clearer.

Life and Money

Last Fall when I solicited funds for buying the full page ads, you responded generously and I have never had to turn down placing an ad because I didn't have the funds to pay for it. I didn't foresee that it would cost as much as it does to solicit publication of the ads. More time, more labor, more postage and so on. Very much higher telephone bills. There were days when Magaly was on the telephone to the universities literally all day.

Nevertheless, we're the ones who are making the difference. No one else is getting the revisionist story in the U.S. like we are. And there's plenty of surprises coming for our friends on the other side beginning the end of August: Magaly. They'll learn again and again what it means to have the Holocaust ball slammed into their court. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Thanks for your support. It's what makes this project function. Without it, I'm a dead duck.

Bradley R. Smith

Below is the text of the opinion piece that, as of this writing, has been published in the California Aggie at the University of California at Davis, and in The Daily at the University of Washington. This particular piece is photocopied from The Aggie, typos and all.