The Anti-Defamation League/Hillel Compact

Last month I reported the astonishing fact that the Anti-Defamation League with its $50-million dollar annual budget and Hillel, The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, which is organized on 500 campuses around the nation, had formed a compact to shut me down on the American campus. The primary tool of the compact is its publication and distribution to student newspaper editors of a 10,000-plus word booklet titled “Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements: A Manual for Action.”

The Manual states:

“On college campuses, Holocaust denial is most often encountered in the form of advertisements submitted to student newspapers by Bradley Smith and his Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). These ads are an affront to truth and an insult to the memory of those who were murdered by the Nazis. They create a divisive atmosphere for Jews on campus and foster conflict among students, faculty, administrators and the local community.”

So there you have it. The guys who know, the top guys in the Holocaust Marketing Industry, the Abe Foxmans, the Wayne Firestones of Hillel, all the big guys in Holocaust Inc., understand that presenting a couple questions about the Holocaust story, questions that otherwise remain unasked in academia, to student and other university audiences, including administration and faculty, fosters “conflict among students, faculty, administrators and the local community.”

The big guys are right on the money here. Asking a question about the Holocaust story that is not vetted by the big guns in Holocaust Inc. fosters conflict. But that is the exact point of the exercise: to pose questions in public, in the light of day, that foster conflict (read: debate, discussion, argument, a free exchange of ideas, talk that is unafraid) in your community, be it in the press, among neighbors, on the internet or, and especially for us, in the university.

Holocaust Inc. is now represented by some 150 Holocaust centers around the country, including 16 full-fledged museums. The national museum in Washington D.C. has become a global enterprise and has raised some $200 million toward its goal of $400 million. Nevertheless, it’s not all roses for Holocaust Inc. While endowments were once the chief source of support for the Industry, they are no longer entirely dependable. Bernie Madoff syndrome?

I can understand their concern. While funding for CODOH has fallen substantially over the last year—this December was the weakest I can remember—Holocaust Inc. is having its own problems. Of course, those folk are looking for $10 million here, a $100 million there, while I’m looking for a couple thousand extra each month. That’s all I need to get these guys all twisted up in their own shorts (if I am to include the ladies who work with such dedication for Holocaust Inc.; I suppose I will have to find some other way to express this thought) and reveal themselves as the censorious, controlling, greedy folk they are.

When I use the word “greed”; with regard to Holocaust Inc. I am not talking about greed for money. I am talking about its voracious hunger for influence, its ravenous appetite to control public debate, and its insatiable necessity to become the masters, thus the enemies, of language itself.

The fact is that contributions are down here at CODOH, which is the way it works sometimes when the economy goes down, suggests that I will have to be careful in running the advertisements that so exercise the Foxmans and Firestones. I can get them run, but afterwards I will have to pay for them (it’s always something).

But then there is always the brilliant idea that saves the day. Somewhere. As a matter of fact, I may have had one. It’s not entirely new, it’s not exotic, I’m even willing to admit that it may not be entirely brilliant. But it does represent a practical and doable synthesis of all we have been doing this last year and takes it straight ahead for us. I’m already at work on it.

The idea is to address the ADL/Hillel union as they have addressed me. Challenge them as they have challenged me, directly, forthrightly, using their own materials to reveal their true dispositions as they have used mine to pretend to reveal mine.

I will use their own publication, “Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements: A Manual for Action,” to expose their censoriousness, their fear of open debate, and I will take it to precisely those audiences that the “Manual for Action”; is being distributed to. You might think that for me to challenge a union of forces already organized on hundreds of campuses with access to tens of millions of dollars—whether I am short on funding or not—is not realistic.

There was a time not so long ago when such a campaign would have been unthinkable. Before the World Wide Web. Before the Internet. Now it is thinkable. It’s doable. Though it has many parts, it is not complicated. It will take some funding on your part, some organization on my part, a determination to stay focused, and the understanding that I handle the workload as I would any other diversion, having some laughs, and not allowing it to grind me down and wear me out.

I’m not going to give away the tactics, but the strategy will become apparent very quickly. The strategy, as noted above, includes using the ADL/Hillel publication as the core of the campaign. It includes developing email lists that are ten times, perhaps many times, greater than any I have used before. And it will feature, for the first time, those tiny films we call videos that can be distributed just as text messages are distributed.

I reported here last month that in November we produced five videos for You Tube and they had been viewed some 2,400 times in total. In December we did three videos before the holidays.

While there was a lull in viewing over the holidays and during winter break on campus, the eight videos have been viewed now some 5,100 times in all. There is Smith demonstrating on camera that Simon Wiesenthal is a recognized liar (The London Times), that Elie Wiesel is a fool who is working to institute censorship of revisionist arguments in America, that an internationally known American historian is leading people to a Web site that talks seriously about the gas chambers of Buchenwald.

Imagine, if you will, how much work would go into appearing on campus or anywhere else before an audience of 5,000. The planning, the expense, the traveling, the last-minute cancellations, the need to speak at five and maybe more campuses to get that kind of aggregate audience. Again, the expense.

Five thousand views of our You Tube videos is the very beginning. By the end of January I will have produced three or four new videos, dealing with core revisionist issues and linked to topical stories. I think it is safe for me to say that the videos that we will have on line by then will have been viewed 10,000 times! That’s going out on a limb. The one thing that is certain is that because the videos will never go away but remain there online for the whole world to see, the views, the audience, will not stabilize but will grow. And grow. And grow. Because there will always be a new video, which will always lead to all the videos that went before.

Is this brilliant or what?

And then, there I’ll be. Warts and all. A real face, a human face. Making mistakes. Dropping papers. Forgetting where I am. Not an academic, not a scholar, not an intellectual. Nothing to defend. The face of a man who is not an enemy of language.