The ADL’s “Big Lie” Campaign

The huge success of revisionist outreach via the Internet by CODOHWeb and other on-line revisionists has been recently acknowledged by none other than the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL).

Stung by our breakthroughs, ADL has launched a new on-line smear, titled “Poisoning the Web: Hatred on Line.” This “report” on “hatred” predictably targets various individuals and groups hateful to the ADL, prominent among them Holocaust revisionists. “Poisoning the Web” devotes many words to defaming revisionist Websites in its section “Holocaust Denial: The Big Lie Exposed.”

Revisionists will chuckle at ADL’s subtitle, which appropriates the hoary legend that Adolf Hitler advocated the “Big Lie,” for use against today’s revisionist research as offered on the Internet. Hitler, of course, in his Mein Kampf attributed the “Big Lie” technique to Jews and Marxists (and the tactics of the ADL aren’t making rebutting the Fuehrer any easier).

From its he about the Big Lie, the ADL winds and twists the truth to spew bile at six targets that use the Internet to set the historical record straight. Two of the six attacked are, in fact, manifestations of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. The ADL devotes individual attention to CODOHWeb, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), David Irving, Ernst Zuendel and Ingrid Rimland, Ahmed Rami, and, in what is actually a second thrust at CODOHWeb, David Cole and Roger Garaudy. According to the ADL, CODOHWeb, the IHR Website, and the Zuendelsite of Ingrid Rimland are “still among the most significant manifestations of Holocaust denial on the Web.”

The ADL begins its assault by quoting extensively from longtime American National Socialist activist Harold Covington. Although Covington is considerably less than a major voice of revisionism, has not been published in revisionist journals, and has in fact done no revisionist research, he is tailor-made for ADL’s accusation that, though they “pose as historians and cloak themselves in ersatz scholarship, the deniers claim that the Holocaust is a Jewish fabrication, not the product of Nazi hatred.”

ADL also goes on to lament: “Holocaust deniers’ thousands of pages of propaganda on the Web, presented as academic fact or in the guise of free and open 'debate’, take particular advantage of many Web users’ difficulty distinguishing between reputable and disreputable Web sites.” Of course the group refuses to explain or clarify the highly subjective notion of reputable or disreputable positions. After all, the ADL has shied away from any open debate with revisionists, including, most recently, the debate proposed by CODOH’s campus ads that offered a whopping $250,000 to whoever could lure the ADL into facing CODOH’s scholars on national network television.

A chief, and revealing, feature of the ADL’s report is the organization’s special pique that Bradley Smith, David Irving, and the IHR evince no obvious, blatant hatred or “anti-Semitism” on their Websites. For example, “Poisoning the Web” complains that “Smith presents himself as an intellectually honest gadfly with no ax to grind.”

It goes on to whine, “Smith works hard to create the image of a man who wants to encourage reasonable debate among reasonable people.” What could be more terrible? For the ADL, an organization that has long since earned the image of a group that seeks to stifle reasonable debate, the fact that Smith’s “image” expresses the reality!

The ADL piece discusses the Campus Project in some detail. Its authors are particularly perturbed by what they call Smith’s “misleading slogans” from the 1998 Campus ad campaign, “Ignore the Thought Police” and “Judge for yourself.” No wonder such slogans upset them: what totalitarian wants his subjects to think?

The ADL’s greatest wrath falls on CODOHWeb's recent feature area, “AnswerMan!” (see SR 56), as well as our sections on “War Crimes Trials” and “The Tangled Web: Zionism: Stalinism, and the Holocaust Story.” It seems that AnswerMan!, with its appeal to curious students, is too “stylish” and “hip” for the ADL thought police.

“War Crimes Trials” is troublesome because it attacks what ADL styles the “legal validity of the postwar Nuremberg Trials.” Interestingly, “Poisoning the Web” concedes that it was at Nuremberg that “the basic history of the genocide was first established”—only failing to mention that this was done through deception, fraud and torture. The ADL report takes issue with our extensive “Zionism” section, claiming that “CODOH manages to present Jews as both International Communist conspirators and ultra-nationalist bigots who willingly cooperated with violent anti-Semites.” (For the record, some Jews have been Communists, some are ultra-nationalist bigots: ADL expends much of its time and much of its income denying that either type of Jew exists.)

Finally, the article, in one of its few accurate statements, bewails the fact that “CODOH Web… today contains a vast amount of Holocaust-denial information. Visitors to the site can look for any one of over 1,000 separate documents using one of the site’s eight search tools, such as its index of articles by subject and its chronological list of additions.”

The ADL also takes special aim at a pair that is associated only through CODOH, David Cole and Roger Garaudy. Clearly, what’s eating the ADL is that neither Cole nor Garaudy conforms to the watch dog group’s preferred revisionist stereotype. Furthermore, in dealing with the issue of David Cole’s “defection,” it dodges the question of the Jewish Defense League’s veiled death threat against the Jewish revisionist.

“Stuart Goldman’s Rockower-winning cartoon”

Stuart Goldman was awarded the 18th annual Rockower Award for this most excellent cartoon published in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. He got the haircut wrong but that looks like my stomach.

Rather than condemn the JDL, the ADL instead comments obliquely that the threat “reportedly appeared on the Website of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Jewish extremist group.” Odd tactics for an organization that supposedly specializes in condemning “hate” and extremist groups—particularly when it is recalled that summoning the ADL to account for its stance on the JDL-Cole affair was one question offered for debate in this spring’s CODOH campus ad campaign: “Should the ADL… respond with a ‘suspicious silence’ when a sister organization [the JDL] encourages violence against revisionists?”

Although the events surrounding Cole’s “recantation” have been widely discussed and appear obvious even to semi-objective minds, such as Michael Shermer of The Skeptic, to its shame the ADL maintains the ludicrous position that various revisionists, including Bradley Smith, have been “unable to believe that one of their own would admit that the Holocaust is historical fact.”

The ADL rails no less vehemently against Roger Garaudy and his book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics. The Muslim-revisionist connection is clearly of great concern. The ADL is mightily concerned, for instance, by the Website “Support Garaudy,” complaining: “The site, which was registered in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, is available in Arabic and French as well as English, clearly indicating the deniers’ desire to reach Arab and European readers. It portrays Garaudy as an international French Muslim thinker’ who is ‘standing alone in the face of the Zionist arrogance.’” “Support Garaudy” links to Bradley Smith’s CODOH Web site, where visitors can read the complete text of Garaudy’s book (see SR 51).

When it targeted David Irving and his Focal Point Website in its report, the ADL made a serious mistake, as Irving chose to fight fire with fire. In no time he had reproduced the ADL report word for word on his Website. Those looking for the report could now find it as easily on the Focal Point Website as they could on the ADL site—with a major difference, however: Irving established hyperlinks from all the major items cited in the ADL report to their original source. CODOH was quick to work with Irving to help establish all the links to the pages that the ADL distorted or complained about. Anyone who reads the ADL report on the Focal Point Website now can, at the click of a mouse, read AnswerMan!, CODOH’s campus ads, “Zionism” or any of the other pieces cited in the Defamation report.

David Irving’s site, like CODOHWeb, has prominent links to the ADL Website. Following our slogan “judge for yourself;” so feared by the ADL, we allow our readers direct access to the methods and perspective of the ADL. The ADL, on the contrary, refuses to carry links to CODOHWeb or any other revisionist Website. Instead, they huckster their own “filtering” software, designed to prevent the purchaser from reading any alternative views on-line. They offer their product, called “Hate Filter,” in the name of “freedom of speech”! Maybe someone should send them a copy of 1984. Or maybe not. Americans pride themselves on free speech and fair play. The ADL’s censorship tactics and gimmicks should make it easier for students or anyone else with an objective mind to discover who it is who really uses the “Big Lie”—and who stands and fights for intellectual freedom and open debate.