Which Brings me to ADL’s Pocket Guide to “Revisionism”

The Power of Prayer! Pope John Paul II prayed for the 4 million dead at Auschwitz and — presto! CODOH has mapped out a whole itinerary for the Holy Father.

The ADL admittedly published its booklet, Holocaust Denial [sic], A Pocket Guide, as a response to CODOH's Campus Project. The booklet is in three parts:

“(1) a 'Q&A' description of the movement, its history, and its leading activists, as well as a review of legal and scholarly responses to this propaganda; (2) a summary of the movement's most common allegations, with brief factual responses; and (3) a selection of quotes by the leading propagandists, demonstrating their anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi agendas.”

Of course I was eager to see what the ADL factotums chose to quote from my own antisemitic and pro-nazi writings, and where they chose to place me in their hierarchy of leading revisionist activists.

They put me in first place! In “Representative Quotes from Holocaust Deniers [sic],” I was quoted before all others! I could hardly believe it. It's little gestures like this that give a man the swell-head. And I would never have been able to guess what the ADL'ers would have chosen to quote from my sketchy writings. It's a passage from the February 1992 issue of the IHR Newsletter.

“Rabbis normally come from a sophisticated urban intellectual background, which encourages a self-righteous contempt for the views and sensibilities of those who don't, hypocritical betrayal of proclaimed ideals to disguise true motives, and a rejection — for self-serving ends — of any kind of good will or even civility toward those with whom they disagree.”

That's it? I'm intrigued. What is it the ADL intends here? The Pocket Guide is being distributed to college administrators, student journalists and others at colleges all over the country. It's almost certainly gone out to radio and TV people and the metropolitan print press. Does ADL intend to present me now as a religious bigot? That would be a new angle.

I suspect the quote is meant to associate me with the old European charge against Jews of “cosmopolitanism.” It's quite a stretch. I don't know how many American students or journalists are going to be able to get from one end of it to the other.

I couldn't recall the context of the quote. I turned to the February '92 issue of the IHR Newsletter, and there it was. The central thrust of the article treated with the conduct of the Hillel rabbis in response to my call for open debate on The Controversy. You get no idea of the complex nature of my article, which deals with the struggle of CODOH to run a revisionist advertisement in The Daily Texan at the University of Texas in Dallas, and the heroic fight there by the Hillel rabbi to suppress it. It focuses on the difficulty Christian students have in overcoming their feelings of shame when they read the language of some of the broadsides sent them by antisemitic Christian radicals and how their shame pushes them into the waiting arms of the Hillel censors.

If you'd like to have the complete IHR Newsletter article from which the ADL quotes so dishonestly, send a buck for postage and handling and we'll send it to you.