South African Member of Parliament Under Fire for Support of Revisionism

Because he expressed public support for the revisionist cause of truth in history in a letter to the Institute for Historical Review, a South African lawmaker has come under attack from Zionist-Jewish organizations.

South African newspapers have reported on a letter in the November 1992 IHR Newsletter, by Louis F. Stofberg, a senior Conservative party member of the House of Assembly in Cape Town. In the letter he wrote:

I have just received the IHR Newsletter for October with the good news that Zündel has won in Canada’s Supreme Court. Please convey my congratulations and good wishes to Ernst Zündel. Like the IHR itself, he is a hero of the truth unsurpassed in our times.

Our enemies have done everything, and their worst, to stop him. They have failed, and revisionism can go forward with greater confidence than ever before that victory will be ours.

A report on the letter in the Johannesburg Star, the country’s largest-circulation daily paper, was headlined “CP MP defends letter about Holocaust” (May 14).

A lengthier report in The Weekly Mail, also of Johannesburg, was headlined “CP’s Stofberg linked to neo-Nazis” (May 14–20). This sensational article seemed less concerned about the lawmaker’s acclaim for the IHR, than for his praise of “neo-Nazi” Zündel. As Stofberg explained to journalists, though, he praised Zündel as a defender of free speech, not for his political views.

The Weekly Mail article absurdly characterizes the IHR as a group that has “claimed that Auschwitz and other death camps were built by the Allies after the war in an attempt to smear the Nazis.”

An official of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies says of Stofberg: “It is scandalous in today’s world that an MP should deny the Holocaust.” In Holocaust Denial, a new book compiled and published by the American Jewish Committee, AJC official Kenneth Stern criticizes Stofberg for his letter in the IHR Newsletter.

Interestingly, Stofberg has not (yet) been criticized for his letter in the Summer 1992 issue of the Journal (p. 246), which concludes: “It is very gratifying indeed to note how the truth of revisionism is breaking through. Please accept our deepest appreciation for the great job you and your associates are doing.”