The Anti-Defamation League, through the medium of a lengthy attack in its latest scare screed, High-Tech Hate, has inadvertently underlined the growing power of the Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust’s site on the World Wide Web, CODOHWeb.

Published just in time for Halloween, its cover a mosaic of strong blacks and oranges and boasting a spooky snake and skull combo, High-Tech Hate: Extremist Use of the Internet, is an 86-page booklet attacking a variety of individuals and groups that a) use the Internet and b) have offended the ADL, at present America’s closest equivalent to the censors of books and ideas that flourished in Europe’s “Old Regime” of church and monarch, as well as the nation’s self-appointed protector of college students, professors, Jews, gentiles, and anyone else who can’t be trusted to make up his or her own mind on issues that concern this “watchdog” organization.

The booklet leaves little question that the attempt to subject the sacrosanct myths and lies of the WWII Jewish holocaust to rational inquiry and open discussion—i.e. Holocaust revisionism—is of the gravest concern to the ADL. Amongst the Walpurgis night phantasmagoria of ADL's enemies—Klansmen and “neo-Nazis,” militia and skinheads—High-Tech Hate identifies Holocaust revisionism as “…the fastest-growing anti-Semitic propaganda line on the Internet,” with the number of “Holocaust denial” Web sites more than tripling in the past eighteen months (p. 37). Of all these sites, the ADL’s High-Tech Hate gives CODOHWeb pride of place: first to be attacked in its section “The Holocaust Deniers: The Big Lie Revisited.”

Under the heading “Bradley Smith: The New College Try,” High-Tech Hate [HTH] devotes nearly five pages to CODOH’s efforts on the Internet. As if to underline the effectiveness of CODOH’s by now well-known campus newspaper ad for CODOHWeb, the fraidy cats at ADL have run an early version of the ad—but with both our World Wide Web and e-mail addresses xxx’ed out!

Censors will be censors, after all, even in their own propaganda (ADL’s Web site may be visited at www.adl.org). The author of HTH, ADL’s David S. Hoffman (dubbed “Research Analyst, Research and Evaluation Department”), nevertheless acknowledges the thoroughness and size of CODOHWeb:

Today it contains a couple of hundred documents, some by Smith and a large number fay other “stalwarts” of the denier group such as British writer David Irving and Robert Fauris-son, a former teacher [sic] of Comparative Literature at the University of Lyon, France. There are also a large number of graphics and photographs. Taken together, these documents provide a thorough tour of the polemics of denial.

As one might expect, HTH takes chief aim at CODOH founder and director Bradley Smith, identifying him as “point man in the deniers’ college outreach program” (p. 38), then specifying his profession: “Smith… is in the business of marketing lies, albeit subtly presented ones [ahh—that diabolical subtlety!] on the World Wide Web” (p. 38).

And from there it’s all downhill for the ADL and its ace researcher/author David Hoffman. Scarcely able to conceal his pique at his failure to unearth believable “anti-Semitism” in Smith or CODOH, David can only squeak that: “Smith’s 'defense’ of free inquiry really masks a profound anti-Semitism, although Smith insists that he is not out to attack Jews” (p. 39). His method of “reductio ad anti-Semitism” proving unfruitful, Hoffman next looks into Smith’s efforts to present the revisionist case on campus, now chiefly through college newspaper ads promoting CODOHWeb. As readers of the lead stories in SR41 and SR42 know, CODOH’s ad campaign has deeply perturbed ADL, and ADL has worked—in attempted secrecy—to coordinate a nationwide-wide effort with campus Hillel and other allied groups to intimidate collegiate newspapers from running CODOH’s ads.

Of course, when you read HTH's description of America’s college students, allegedly mortally threatened by revisionist research and analysis, you begin to understand the fearful censor’s crabbed mindset: “College students are young, idealistic, predisposed toward the underdog and against authority, often willing to challenge received wisdom, struggling to cope with many new, disorienting ideas and, today, frequently without a formed sense of history.” A terrifying menace, then-and one reason it occurs to us that the ADL’s equivalent to Plato’s Lyceum or Newman’s Idea of a University would be that this nation’s university students be treated—on all the issues that count—like kindergarteners, with a Cerberus-sized ADL—an overdog, if you will—policing the halls and playground against those pesky underdogs.

This glossy pamphlet is full of claims that CODOHWeb and Smith are lying in their various criticisms of the official version of the Holocaust (though it supplies no specifics). One CODOHWeb department, however, has passed muster as to the truth of its contents—or else it’s so nettled ADL and Researcher Hoffman that they’ve forgotten their usual accusations of mendacity. That’s “The Tangled Web: Zionism, Stalinism and the Holocaust Story,” which focuses on such uncomfortable matters as the collaboration between the Zionist leadership and Nazi Germany in the 1930’s, the taboo question of disproportionate Jewish involvement in Soviet Communism, and the crimes against humanity, the laws of war, and against the peace that have been part and parcel of the Zionist engagement with the Palestinians in Palestine/Israel (see “The Tangled Web,” SR46, pp. 6-7).

Instead, HTH is content to pronounce that “what fuels his position is an antipathy for Jews rather than his avowed sympathy for the Palestinians” (pp. 41-42). Well, that’s an innuendo that the Good Samaritan would have been hard pressed to beat. Then again, ADL’s monomania, “anti-Semitism”—as opposed to injustice, oppression, and the like—has evidently blinded its basilisk’s eye to the rights and wrongs of conduct by Jews in Russia, Palestine and elsewhere (not denied in its booklet), leaving it to focus only on the putative anti-Semitism of the victims—and their advocates.

The ADL’s latest smear of Smith, CODOH and Holocaust revisionism demonstrates that our achievements and our growing effectiveness leave them increasingly bewildered and insecure. Not just because Smith and CODOH are presenting and promoting new revisionist writers and researchers, but thanks to the exceptional work of our editorial and computer team that maintains and almost daily expands CODOHWeb.

The howling and gnashing of teeth that is almost audible as one reads HTH's labored attempts to evoke Smith’s non-existent anti-Semitism is apt expression for the ADL’s boundless rage at the fact that Smith and CODOH treat sensitive historical questions without anti-Jewish rancor.

Teeth are gnashing at ADL headquarters, too (thanks to the support of CODOH subscribers and donors), over CODOH’S role in the promotion and transmission of revisionist scholarship to growing numbers of people outside the original ambit of revisionism, around the globe.

Truth, effectiveness, acceptance of the humanity of all its opponents—that’s why the gendarmes and censors at ADL fear CODOH and its achievements and its ongoing work more than all the skinheads and neo-Nazis and Klansmen and other flibbertygibbets who cram the pages of its scare propaganda. Revisionism addresses with liberating force and energizing clarify not only the convinced revisionists of today, but the far more numerous revisionists of tomorrow.