- This paper was authored by
- Christopher Cole and Bradley R. Smith.
- One is a revisionist, one is not. Short bios follow the
end notes.
-
-
- Throughout the Western world people are being prosecuted
for writing about World War II and the Holocaust. Historians, researchers,
authors, and publishers are being fined, imprisoned, placed under gag orders,
expelled from their native countries, and denied entry into others. Those
who are prosecuted are routinely prevented from mounting an effective defense,
because witnesses who testify on their behalf often find themselves arrested.
In some cases, even the defense lawyers are prosecuted!
-
- Countries that have laws that limit the scope and substance
of World War II and Holocaust research include France, Germany, Switzerland,
Canada, Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Denmark,
Poland, and Spain.1 These laws make it a crime for anyone, regardless of
their credentials or the factual basis of their views, to question or revise
any aspect of the history of World War II or the Holocaust in a manner
that goes beyond the some-what arbitrary standards established by the governments
of those countries.2
-
- Although there are no laws in the United States that
criminalize Holocaust and World War II history, some of our nation's most
prestigious legal minds have backed a proposed law intended to do just
that.
-
- Why should you, why should any of us, be concerned that
certain areas of historical research have been criminalized?
-
-
-
-
-
- FREE SPEECH
-
-
- Free speech is very much on the minds of young people
today. Many who oppose the Bush Administration's actions since 9/11 claim
that there is now an oppressive "chill" on free speech in America.
Is this "chill" something new? Or has an ill wind that's been
blowing for quite some time finally caught up with people who never expected
to feel it?
-
- Most people on our college campuses today grew up during
the Clinton years. Clinton appealed to young people and reflected many
of their values. These days, however, the same people who grew up feeling
empowered during the Clinton years are now feeling like dissidents, as
they protest post-9/11 U.S. policies of an administration that many see
as hostile to civil liberties, and a news media dominated by conservative
talk radio shows, and networks like Fox.
-
- Suddenly, a lot of people who used to feel empowered
are now feeling marginalized.
-
- The problem is, many of those who are complaining the
loudest right now about the "chill" on free speech are the very
people who laid the groundwork for speech restrictions and muted public
de-bate. This includes the college professors and administrators who, throughout
the 1990s, championed campus "speech codes" that restricted the
expression of views they deemed "insensitive."
-
- No subject has been more vilified on college campuses
over the past decade than historical research that questions various aspects
of Holocaust history. Throughout the 1990s, as dissident Holocaust historians
(often called "revisionists") were being prosecuted and imprisoned
in Europe, Canada, and Australia, college campuses throughout the United
States were practicing their own brand of censorship.
-
- Revisionist speakers were banned from campuses. Re-gardless
of the factual basis for their views, they were derided as insensitive
"hate-mongers." Ads for revisionist books or videos were banned
from school newspapers. If, occasionally, a revisionist ad or op-ed was
published in a campus paper, the resulting out-cry from students and faculty
alike brought waves of condemna-tion and apologies from administrators
and newspaper staff.3
-
- Many of the people who express outrage at the "silencing"
of to-day's war critics are the same people who championed the silenc-ing
of dissident Holocaust historians in the 1990s - just as many of those
who are screaming the loudest about the evils of the Patriot Act are the
same folks who supported the Clinton administration's Omnibus Antiterrorism
Bill of 1995.4
-
- But just as you can't under-stand the Patriot Act without
understanding the way in which the Clinton Omnibus Antiterrorism Bill paved
the way for it, you can't really understand the post-9/11 free speech "chill"
without under-standing the way in which the rationalizations for silencing
dissent (especially on campus) were developed during the past decade in
the campaign to silence revisionist historians.
-
- Take this op-ed from the Cornell University Daily Sun,
November 22, 1991. The author, Doreen Lee, explains why there should be
no free speech allowed for Holocaust revisionists: "Some issues are
not meant to be challenged, provoked, or critically debated. True, political
correctness can limit the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is a great
and fundamental right, but it's also a political construct that should
be ultimately subject to the limits of humanity, sensitivity, and respect."5
-
- Sound familiar? Ms. Lee might as well be a Bush Administration
official warning protesters not to "challenge, provoke, or critically
debate" U.S. policy during times of war. After all, we must show "sensitivity"
and "respect" to the victims of terrorism, and to people in the
military and their families. Ms. Lee's op-ed is one of thousands of similar
op-eds and editorials that appeared in college (and off-campus) newspapers
throughout the '90s, arguing that dissident Holocaust historians have no
right to speak. Those who allowed this cancer of censorship to grow and
flourish during the past decade should not be surprised to now find themselves
the victims of it.
-
- Those who protest the Bush administration's "war
on terrorism" policies want the right to freely voice their opinions
without being censored or dismissed as "unpatriotic" or "pro-terrorist."
However, to paraphrase the Beatles,
-
-
-
- in the end, the free speech you get will be equal to
the free speech you give.
-
-
-
- Once you start censoring and slandering others who are
trying to have their say, you've created exactly the kind of "chilled"
atmos-phere that will, inevitably, end up affecting your right to speak
as well.
-
- As simple as this notion is, it's amazing how many people
just don't seem to get it. Take Robert Berdahl, Chancellor of the University
of California at Berkeley. Back in 1993, when Berdahl was President of
the University of Texas at Austin, he led the charge to ban revisionist
Holocaust views from campus. When the Daily Texan, the UT Austin campus
newspaper, accepted an advertisement for a documentary film in which the
Director of the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland admitted that the building
displayed in the camp as a "gas chamber" is not genuine, Berdahl
angrily argued in an op-ed that revisionist Holocaust views are "patently
unsuitable" for the paper.
-
- Even though the ad said nothing about Jews or any other
racial or religious group, and even though the ad's author made it clear
that he was not denying the Holocaust, Berdahl maintained that the ad had
no place on campus because the university newspaper is "obli-gated
to protect its readers" from anything that might be "a source
of great pain and anguish," or anything that "insults a community's
standards of decency."6
-
- Fast-forward seven years, to the UC Berkeley class of
2000 Com-mencement ceremony. Berdahl (now Chancellor of Berkeley) be-came
furious when a group of students angrily protested the con-vocation address
given by Berkeley senior Fadia Rafeedia, a Pales-tinian who, at that time,
was an editor for a website called the Free Arab Voice, a site that not
only claims that the Holocaust is a "Jewish lie" but also advocates
the outright murder of Jews. Berdahl denounced the protesters, calling
Ms. Rafeedie "insightful," and claiming that "her strong
will and strong opinions make her . . . the essence, the spirit, and the
promise of this institution."7
-
- Even more recently, in March 2003, Berdahl, appearing
on a Berkeley radio show, decried those who would silence campus an-tiwar
protesters, worrying that "a climate of fear" might create "a
lack of dissent."8
-
- What Chancellor Berdahl doesn't seem able or willing
to acknowl-edge is that he bears some responsibility for creating the very
cli-mate he is now denouncing. In advocating the banning of dissident Holocaust
history, he made it clear that, in his view, universities are obligated
to "protect" students from unpleasant or offensive views. Why
should it now surprise him when students who find other things offensive
- like the Free Arab Voice Web site - use the same rationalizations to
try and ban what they find to be "a source of great pain and anguish"?
-
- In 1993, when Chancellor Berdahl argued in favor of banning
revi-sionist Holocaust history from the campus paper, at least one local
commentator saw the potential ramifications of his views. Dallas Morning
News columnist Joe Patrick Bean predicted that Berdahl's actions "may
have set a potentially harmful precedent that will limit discussion of
legitimate but highly controversial or sensitive views."9
-
- In fact, a plan that would indeed "limit discussion
of highly con-troversial or sensitive views" in the name of keeping
the American public safe from dissident World War II and Holocaust history
had already been cooked up only five years earlier at one of America's
most prestigious universities.
-
- In April 1988, Hofstra University in New York sponsored
a three-day conference, at which dozens of the most prestigious and re-spected
legal minds from the worlds of academia, government, and the justice system
gathered with one goal - to find a way to copy the laws by which Canada
and Europe have criminalized Holo-caust and World War II history. A nationwide
contest was held, in which law students were asked to draft a model law
that would limit the free speech of Americans in a way that might not be
ruled unconstitutional.10
-
- As outlined by conference director Monroe H. Freedman,
Professor of Legal Ethics at Hofstra, and Executive Director of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Council (which oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, DC), the winning law would have to be "a statute
that would permit prior re-straint by public officials." First prize
would go to the law that was "as broad as constitutionally permissible,
or, at least, arguably permissible."11
-
- The speakers at the closed-door conference made no attempt
to hide their hostility to free speech. A professor from the University
of Western Ontario expressed displeasure with "the absolutist approach
that characterizes American thinking about freedom of speech." The
solution, he said, was to abandon "abstract notions of individualism."12
A professor from the University of Baltimore argued that the U.S. needs
to restrict certain "fervently held beliefs and political thoughts,
none of which," he added, "the First Amendment was ever intended
to protect."13
-
- At the end of the conference, the participants chose
what they con-sidered to be the best anti-free speech law, and two runners-up,
from among the hundreds of entries submitted by law students from across
the country. The judges who chose the winners in-cluded Abner Mikva, Chief
Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, and Amalya Kearse,
of the U.S. Second Cir-cuit Court of Appeals. The conference attendees
agreed that the law would have to be kept under wraps until a time when
the Supreme Court consists of a majority of justices who are sympathetic
to its aims.14 The conference concluded with a mock trial in which a Holocaust
revisionist was convicted and sentenced to prison un-der the proposed law.15
-
- So what does the Hofstra Law say? The Hofstra Law would
criminalize "any oral, written, or symbolic speech" that "debases,
de-grades, or calls into question the loyalties, abilities, or integrity
of members of an aggregation of people identified by a common race, religion,
national origin, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference." The law
also states that "An agency shall be established that will review
all films and movies," as well as all published or broadcast speech.
Anyone who publishes or broadcasts any type of material before it has been
submitted to, and reviewed by, this agency, "shall have committed
a misdemeanor."
-
- While this law might sound tantalizing to those who crusade
against "hate speech" and other forms of bigotry, the devil,
as they say, is in the details. In order for this law to pass muster with
the Supreme Court, the law states that "all speech that defames a
group will be equally restricted, regardless of the group that is being
defamed." In other words, this law does not just protect minorities
or groups with a history of being oppressed. Under the definitions established
by this law, "Americans" count as a protected group, as do "white
people." Recently, the man who authored the runner-up Hofstra Law
admitted in an interview that under the provisions of his law, a group
like the Ku Klux Klan could successfully take legal action against author
and filmmaker Michael Moore for comments he made in his book, Stupid White
Men!16
-
- The Hofstra Law was endorsed by some of America's most
respected legal minds, who expressed their desire to one day see it enacted
into law. The participants in the Hofstra conference cele-brated their
proposed law's ability to criminalize dissident Holo-caust and World War
II history, and this is most likely how the law would be sold to the public.17
But the truth is, the Hofstra Law would outlaw a whole lot more than dissident
history. By its very wording, it would leave no controversial point of
view safe from prosecution.
-
- Indeed, the threat posed by the Hofstra Law illustrates
the truth of the notion that it's either free speech for all, or free speech
for none.
-
-
-
-
- THE VALUE OF DISSIDENT HISTORY
-
-
-
- Of course, it's possible to agree that revisionist Holocaust
and World War II historians should not be censored or imprisoned, while
still dismissing their views as irrelevant or unimportant. After all, why
should anyone care what revisionist historians have to say about an event
that took place over a half-century ago? The answer to that question probably
helps to explain why so many people want to suppress or outlaw this kind
of research.
-
- World War II and the Holocaust have taken on an iconic
status that people of all political creeds and ideologies exploit for their
own benefit. The repressive laws against Holocaust and World War II research
target historians whose work challenges the myths and misconceptions surrounding
these events, myths that have the abil-ity, even today, to influence political
events. The war in Iraq is a case in point. Both the pro-war right and
the antiwar left exploit these myths in order to justify their positions.
-
- Both sides in the Iraq war debate make use of the perception
that World War II was a "necessary" and "good" war,
in which the Allies acted ethically and with a supreme concern for human
life, a war in which our government didn't lie or manipulate public opinion
in order to create popular support for the war, a war in which there was
clear evidence of crimes against humanity being committed by our enemies,
and a war that concluded with even-handed and compassionate justice meted
out to our vanquished foes.
-
- The pro-war right uses these myths in order to lull the
public into thinking that there can actually be such a thing as a good,
clean, "painless" war. "Iraq will be a 'good' war, like
WWII. There will be no unnecessary deaths, no phony war propaganda. After
the war we'll easily create a democracy in Iraq, just as we did in Germany,
using kindness and positive reinforcement. And you can trust our President's
reasons for going to war. Our government would never knowingly use false
information to entice Americans into supporting a war." Many Americans
backed the war in Iraq because they believed that there was historical
precedent for the right's fanciful vision of how the Iraq war would be
fought and won.
-
- The antiwar left also uses the mythical model of World
War II in order to create a phony standard of what constitutes a "good"
war. A "good" war, like WWII, is one in which no enemy civilians
are intentionally targeted or needlessly killed, no phony propaganda is
used to justify the war, and vanquished foes are treated in a fair and
decent manner. During the Afghan war, once Afghani civilians started dying
in U.S. air raids, the left declared that it was no longer a "good"
war - like WWII.
-
- Many Americans have protested the treatment of captured
Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners on the grounds that these prisoners deserved
a fair and constitutionally sound hearing, "just like at Nuremberg."
Since no real war can ever measure up to the phony standard of a "good
war" generated by the mythical version of World War II, the left can
conveniently oppose any and all military operations on the grounds that
they are not "good wars" like World War II was.
-
- Over the years, dissident historians have accumulated
an impressive array of facts that challenge the myths of World War II.
Documents and testimonies have been found that show that the Allies purposely
targeted German civilians during air attacks,18 that the Allies were ready
and willing to use poison gas against Germany and Japan,19 that England
and France were as responsible as Germany for the initiation of the war,20
that the postwar period between the end of hostilities in Europe in 1945
and the initiation of the progressive Marshall Plan in 1947 was marked
by the organ-ized murder, rape, and starvation of German civilians,21 and
that the postwar trials of captured Germans were tainted by phony evidence
and the systematic torture of the defendants.22
-
- In a bid to silence war dissenters, President Roosevelt
imprisoned American antiwar authors and activists23 (ironically, many of
the books written by these imprisoned authors in the 1940s are now banned
again under the current laws that criminalize World War II and Holocaust
history24). In England, Prime Minister Churchill had antiwar authors, activists,
and even members of Parliament imprisoned in a concentration camp on a
British island.25
-
- There are volumes of evidence suggesting that the Allies
engaged in a massive disinformation campaign after the war in order to
convince the public that the war, and its mind-numbing body count of 50,000,000
people, had been necessary and worthwhile. After all, the initial reason
for the war - to keep Poland free - was no longer usable after Roosevelt
"gave" Poland to Stalin at the close of the war. Therefore, finding
and publicizing evidence of Nazi crimes against humanity became necessary
in order to create a new justification for the war (ironically, most mainstream
historians now believe that Hitler came up with the idea of murdering the
Jews sometime in the summer or autumn of 1941, two years after the war
began, making World War II a war with an ex-post facto reason for being26).
-
- There is no doubt that the Nazis committed many inexcusable
crimes during the war, but the question facing modern historians is this:
did the Allies, in their postwar haste to find evidence of Nazi "crimes
against humanity," take major liberties with the truth? Even the most
respected figures in Holocaust history have admitted the vast extent of
the postwar disinformation campaign conducted by the Allied governments.
The Director of the Auschwitz State Museum admitted in a 1992 documentary
that the building displayed at the camp as a "gas chamber" is
actually a postwar fabrication created by the Soviets and Poles.27 Similar
admissions have been made about the gas chamber on display at Dachau, which
was apparently created by the U.S. Army after the war for propaganda purposes.28
The Dachau Museum in Munich admits that the claims made by the U.S. Army
about people being gassed at Dachau were unfounded.29
-
- Officials of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC, admit that the Soviet Union went to great extremes in
order create false war-crimes evidence, even to the extent of staging phony
footage of "Nazis" gassing children. According to the Director
of the Department of Film and Video at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Soviet
soldiers wearing German uniforms posed as Nazis, and pretended to gas children
while the cameras rolled. This phony "gassing" film was created
for use against the Germans at the Nuremberg Trial.30
-
- Raul Hilberg, perhaps the most respected Holocaust author
in the world, admitted that the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration
camp had been tortured by the British into signing a confession that was
totally false.31 Yehuda Bauer, Chair of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University,
disclosed in 1989 that, after the war, Polish Communists and nationalists,
"for political pur-poses," grossly inflated the number of dead
at Auschwitz, yet "sheer repetition led many Jews to accept the numbers.
It's the historian's task to examine myths," Bauer said, "and,
if necessary, explode them."32
-
- Konrad Heiden, a refugee from Nazi Germany and perhaps
the most important anti-Nazi author of the war years, published a detailed
article in Life magazine immediately after the war, providing step-by-step
details of how the Nuremberg defendants were being tortured by the Allies
into confessing, and contrasting the Soviet methods of torture (psychological)
with the U.S. methods (physical brutality).33
-
- The Campaign to Decriminalize World War II History has
collected over 100 quotes from the world's most respected mainstream Holocaust
historians attesting to just how little is actually known about the central
features of the Holocaust (the gas chambers, the number of Jews killed,
and the existence of a genocide plan).34
-
- In fact, it wasn't until 1989 that anyone even attempted
to scien-tifically prove the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz - in
a book titled Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, published
by the world-renowned Holocaust education or-ganization, the Klarsfeld
Foundation. Before publication, the book was hailed in the New York Times
as a major breakthrough in Holocaust history.35 Unfortunately, the book's
author, Jean-Claude Pressac, concluded that there is "an absence of
any 'direct,' i.e. palpable, indisputable, and evident proof of homicidal
gas chambers" at Auschwitz.36 The book was immediately withdrawn from
circulation.
-
- In light of the paucity of reliable evidence for certain
aspects of Holocaust history, some of our nation's leading Holocaust institutions
have turned to using less-than-credible evidence. The United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum displays a cast of the door to a "gas chamber"
from the Majdanek camp in Poland. The problem is, Jean-Claude Pressac (see
above) wrote in his book that this room at Majdanek was simply a chamber
for delousing clothes.37
-
- Furthermore, Dr. Michael Shermer, who has penned several
books aimed at countering the claims of revisionist Holocaust historians,
has said that he agrees with revisionists that this room was not a gas
chamber used for killing people.38 Amazingly, when Shermer questioned Michael
Berenbaum, Director of the Holocaust Memo-rial Museum,39 about the authenticity
of the Majdanek "gas chamber" door, Berenbaum replied that he
had never actually examined the door, even though it's a central exhibit
in his own museum!40 (According to Shermer, both Berenbaum and world-renowned
Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg are "remarkably ignorant" of the
"anomalous data" that might prove revisionists right.41)
-
- The Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in
Los Angeles offers its visitors "documentary footage" of the
Nazis gassing children in a "gas van" that the Nazis had deceitfully
disguised as an ambulance. In reality, this footage is actually a scene
from a 1962 Polish black-and-white fictional film, The Ambulance, directed
by Janusz Morgenstern. The Wiesenthal Center has removed the opening and
closing credits from the movie, exhibiting the altered film as authentic
"documentary" footage.42
-
- And in 1993, in honor of the opening of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, the U.S. National Archives re-edited a piece of 1945 U.S.
Army Signal Corps footage of a Paris rifle range, removing the soundtrack
and changing the description in the National Ar-chives catalog from "Parisian
firing range" to "Nazi gas chamber." This altered footage
is prominently featured in a guide to National Archives "Holocaust
footage" that is sold in the Holocaust Mu-seum gift shop.43
-
-
- (A warning to the reader: being in possession of the
information contained in the preceding nine paragraphs could well get you
arrested or expelled from most European countries and Canada - so be careful
where you take this information!)
-
-
- The laws that criminalize Holocaust and World War II
history have the net effect of providing legal cover for the myths that
are ex-ploited by people of all political persuasions and ideologies during
times of war and national crisis. By suppressing research that ques-tions
these myths, we deprive ourselves of the information we need in order to
ask our leaders, and ourselves, the kinds of hard questions that are particularly
relevant right now:
-
- Can there be such a thing as a "good" war?
Can a "preemptive" war ever be necessary? If it was right to
declare war against one brutal dictator (Hitler) before he committed the
crimes that would later be used as the very reason for that war, is it
right to preemptively strike other brutal dictators before they become
greater menaces?
-
- Can a war, and can a postwar occupation, be conducted
successfully without resorting to brutality? Is brutality ever warranted?
If it was justifiable to torture captured Nazis after the war in order
to obtain evidence of Nazi war crimes, is it okay to use torture to gain
information from captured Al Qaeda fighters? If it was acceptable to try
Nazis in front of military tribunals in which they had limited rights of
defense, and in which false evidence was used to convict, is it okay to
do the same to Muslim extremists - who have, after all, murdered more U.S.
civilians than the Nazis did?
-
- Is it ever permissible for our government to use deception
in order popularize a war? If it turns out that some of the war crimes
accusations made against the Nazis were unfounded, should we correct the
historical record? Or is it better to keep quiet, lest we risk mak-ing
the Nazis appear less evil to future generations? And if it's okay to continue
using falsehoods against the Nazis, is it okay to use falsehoods against
Al Qaeda, or Saddam Hussein?
-
- Those who advocate an open and unrestrained debate over
our government's case for going to war in Iraq say that allowing such a
debate strengthens our democracy. If that's true, then why shouldn't we
allow an equally open and unrestrained debate over our government's case
for going to war against Germany and Japan?
-
- Finally, if it's okay to suppress "revisionist"
Holocaust views because some people claim that they are insensitive to
Holocaust survivors, should it be okay to suppress views critical of the
war on terrorism, because they're insensitive to the victims of terrorism
and their families?
-
- These questions may not have easy "yes" or
"no" answers, but it is simply wrong to criminalize and suppress
the historical research that prompts us to face these necessary questions.
We don't have to agree with dissident World War II and Holocaust researchers
in order to recognize the value and relevance of the questions their research
raises. When we deprive them of the ability do their work, we are depriving
ourselves of something valuable, as well.
-
- And we should not just be asking ourselves these "hard
questions." Laws that criminalize Holocaust and World War II history
have turned many of our European "allies" into hypocrites.
-
- In Germany, it is legal for Germans and foreign nationals
to belong to Al Qaeda and publicly talk about murdering Americans and Jews,
but German citizens and foreign nationals who violate the German laws that
criminalize Holocaust and World War II history are immediately charged
and prosecuted.44
-
- In France, books claiming that 9/11 was a hoax perpetrated
by the U.S. and Israel have become bestsellers carried by almost every
major French bookstore.45 At the same time, however, authors who write
critically about World War II or Holocaust history are thrown in prison
or fined (France has Europe's most severe anti-revisionist law, prohibiting
people from questioning the version of World War II history that was laid
out immediately after the war by the Allies at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946).
-
- The French government has no problem with wild conspiracy
theories about 9/11, or the American war on terrorism, but it won't allow
its own citizens to critically examine the history of France's last war
- a war through which, it should be noted, France acquired quite a lot
of territory. The French have condemned Israel for, among other things,
acquiring territory through war, but there are no laws in Israel prohibiting
the critical examination of Israel's past wars.46 Why won't the French
government allow its citizens the same right?
-
- In 2002, when the U.S. decided to conduct tighter screening
proce-dures for foreign visitors from countries that sponsor terrorism,
the Canadian government reacted in horror to this "human rights violation,"
even going so far as instructing its residents of Middle Eastern descent
not to visit the U.S. Yet the Canadian government sup-plies its own customs
agency with a veritable laundry list of World War II and Holocaust history
books that are illegal in Canada. These books cannot be imported into Canada
or possessed by Ca-nadians. The Canadian government thinks that the U.S.
should not screen visitors from "high risk" nations who seek
to enter our country, yet the Canadians rigorously screen every book that
is brought into their country.47
-
- Why is the Canadian government afraid to allow its citizens
to read dissident views of World War II and the Holocaust? The criminalization
of Holocaust and World War II history is taken to such extremes in Canada
that, in 1997, a well-known columnist for one of Vancouver's largest newspapers
was prosecuted for writing a negative review of the movie Schindler's List!48
According to the logic of the Canadian government, it is a "human
rights violation" for the U.S. to require foreign visitors from high-risk
nations traveling on guest visas to report changes of address during their
stay, but it's not a human rights violation to prosecute a man for writing
a movie review!
-
-
-
-
- OPEN DEBATE
-
-
-
- Even though there are not yet any laws in the United
States that criminalize Holocaust and World War II research, that doesn't
mean that there is a free and open exchange of ideas regarding these subjects.
There are plenty of ways to suppress free speech in a free country. Apart
from the banning of dissident Holocaust views on college campuses (discussed
earlier), there is also that most reliable method of stifling free speech
- outright intimidation and threats of violence.
-
- Irv Rubin ran a Los Angeles-based organization called
the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a militant, paramilitary-style activist
group. If Mr. Rubin's name sounds familiar, it's because in December 2001,
three months after 9/11, Rubin and his JDL second-in-command, Earl Krugel,
made headlines when they were arrested by the FBI for plotting to blow
up Muslim and Arab targets in L.A. The targets included a West L.A. mosque,
and the offices of Leba-nese-American congressman Darrel Issa. The day
of destruction was apparently planned for December 13, 2001, but fortunately
the FBI was able to intercept the plot before the bombs could be planted.49
Had Rubin's plan been carried out, hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocent
people would have been killed. Rubin committed suicide on November 4, 2002,
while in prison awaiting trial. Soon afterwards, Krugel pleaded guilty
to federal conspiracy and hate-crime charges.
-
- What no one in the press or in law enforcement seemed
eager to discuss in the wake of Rubin's arrest was that, for the past twenty
years, Rubin and the JDL had routinely terrorized dissident Holocaust and
World War II scholars and researchers, and the authori-ties did nothing
about it. In May 1982, the JDL firebombed the Los Angeles home of history
teacher Dr. George Ashley.50 In Decem-ber of that year, Dr. Ashley's home
was ransacked, and a note left behind by the JDL warned Ashley to stop
espousing revisionist Holocaust views.51 Finally, in May 1985, Dr. Ashley's
home was firebombed and burned to the ground.52
-
- In 1982 and 1983, the JDL physically assaulted Cal State
Long Beach professor Reinhard Buchner, who served on the editorial board
of a publishing house that published revisionist books.53 In September
1982, the offices of that publishing house were riddled with bullets and
burned by an arson device.54 On July 4, 1984, that same publishing house
was completely burned to the ground by the JDL, causing over $400,000 in
damage and destroying over 10,000 books.55
-
- In June 1985 the JDL firebombed the offices of a Santa
Monica, CA, German-American organization that had published revisionist
Holocaust views in its newsletter.56 And in April 1985, the JDL trashed
the car of University of Tulsa professor Charles Weber because of his Holocaust
research. A note left on Dr. Weber's wind-shield brazenly identified the
attack as the work of the JDL, and threatened Dr. Weber with further violence
should he continue writing about the Holocaust.57
-
- In February 1989, the JDL threatened the Red Lion hotel
chain with violence unless it cancelled a conference of Holocaust and World
War II revisionists that was scheduled to take place at one of the chain's
Orange County, CA, locations. Red Lion cancelled the event, which was moved
to a nearby Holiday Inn. When the Holiday Inn received similar threats
from the JDL, it, too, cancelled the event.58
-
- The JDL's attacks on dissident Holocaust researchers
reached its peak in 1994, when Irv Rubin, now making use of the information
superhighway, posted a notice in the Internet calling for the murder of
documentary filmmaker and Holocaust researcher David Cole, who had produced
the film in which the Director of the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland
admitted that the "gas chamber" there was a postwar fake. Rubin
had previously assaulted Cole (who, it should be noted, is a Jew) in 1991,
when Cole was invited to speak at UCLA, beating Cole on stage, in front
of hundreds of people, and as cameras for the CBS news program 48 Hours
were rolling.59 The notice that Rubin circulated on the Internet in 1994
was titled Who Is David Cole and Why Must He Die? It referred to Cole as
a "Jewish traitor" who had to be "taken out," and it
featured a photo of Cole.60
-
- In November 1994, three months after Rubin's "death
warrant" for Cole was put on the Internet, Cole was beaten by unknown
assail-ants in his Culver City, CA, neighborhood.61 Several months before
that attack, Rubin and Earl Krugel - Rubin's co-conspirator in the thwarted
2001 bombings - were interviewed by a freelance journalist in L.A. During
the videotaped interview, Krugel unambiguously expressed his desire to
see Cole dead.62 After 1994, Cole went into hiding, prompting Rubin to
offer a "large monetary reward" to anyone who could divulge Cole's
location, adding that he was now ready to take "immediate action"
to "eliminate" Cole.63
-
- In December 1997, Irv Rubin and David Cole reached an
agreement, in which Cole publicly recanted his Holocaust views, and Rubin
removed the death warrant and the "reward" from the JDL website.
After receiving Cole's recantation, Rubin bragged on his website that this
is "evidence of the power of the Jewish Defense League."64 Cole
has not spoken a word publicly since then.
-
- At no time during this twenty-year history of threats
and attacks against revisionist researchers and historians did the local
police, the FBI, or the press express any real interest in the JDL's terrorist
activities. As long as the targets of Mr. Rubin's wrath were dissident
historians and filmmakers, no one seemed to care. It was only when Rubin
tried to mount an attack against other targets that the authorities started
paying attention.
-
- Fortunately, the FBI was able to prevent a massacre in
2001, but it's not unreasonable to suggest that if the JDL's earlier attacks
against dissident historians had been taken seriously, if people had cared
that these beatings, bombings, and threats were taking place, Rubin might
not have been in a position to mount the December 2001 attacks, and hundreds
of innocent Arab and Muslim-Americans wouldn't have come so close to meeting
a violent death.
-
- Of course, it doesn't always take something as extreme
as a fire-bomb or a death warrant to intimidate people. Across the U.S.,
dozens of teachers, at the grade school, high school, and college level,
have been fired, suspended, or reprimanded for voicing alternative viewpoints
regarding the Holocaust and World War II.65 Dissident historians have been
unable to find publishers for their books, or have been unceremoniously
dropped by their publishers.66 Even without formal laws criminalizing Holocaust
and World War II history, the private sector has, in its own way, been
able to stifle free speech through job reprisals. Reprisals such as these
can be just as effective as state-sponsored censorship.
-
- A case in point: In Japan, as in the U.S., there are
not as of yet any laws that criminalize Holocaust and World War II history.
In 1995, the Japanese magazine Marco Polo (a Vanity Fair-type mixture of
pop culture and politics) published an article by a Tokyo neurosur-geon
detailing his trip to Auschwitz, and the questions he came away with concerning
the accuracy of some of the exhibits. Immediately, there was an international
outcry, and Marco Polo's publisher, Japan's powerful Bungei Shunju publishing
house, responded by completely dissolving the magazine and firing its entire
staff, from the editors right down to the receptionists.67 This sent a
message that was just as powerful as any governmental law. In the nine
years since the Marco Polo incident, no other Japanese publication has
dared to revisit the subject.
-
- The fear of losing one's job can be just as strong as
the fear of going to jail, or the fear of violence.
-
- And there are other ways of stifling open debate in a
free country. If the mass media decide not to play fair, and if journalists
abandon all basic standards of journalistic ethics, the public can be kept
in the dark about a controversial issue just as surely as if there were
laws prohibiting discussion of that subject.
-
- Of course, media bias can be a difficult thing to prove.
Advocates for every political and ideological cause claim that some segment
of the media is biased against them, and it's the standard response of
every media outlet, from CNN to Fox, to deny that their coverage is slanted
or biased.
-
- As difficult as it may be to pin down exactly what constitutes
bias, most in the media would certainly agree that it is unethical for
a reporter to invent a quote and falsely attribute it to an interview subject.
-
- Understanding that, let's revisit the case of Jewish
documentary filmmaker and Holocaust researcher David Cole (mentioned above).
Mr. Cole's experiences with the media provide an excellent example of the
manner in which dissident Holocaust and World War II researchers are treated
by the press. Whenever he was interviewed, Cole always went to great lengths
to say that he did not deny the Holocaust. Let's take a look at a few examples
of the media's accuracy when reporting about Cole:
-
- In March 1993, when the Daily Texan, the University of
Texas at Austin campus newspaper, decided to ban an advertisement for one
of David Cole's documentaries (this is the incident mentioned ear-lier
in which UT Austin Chancellor Robert Berdahl argued in favor of the banning),
Cole wrote an op-ed in defense of his film, which the Daily Texan printed.
This caused a major controversy that was covered by the Associated Press
(the world's largest news organi-zation). The March 9 AP dispatch, written
by AP Southwest Bu-reau writer Pauline Arrillaga, quoted Cole's op-ed as
stating that "The Holocaust was a hoax, fabricated to drum up support
for Jew-ish causes."68
-
- The problem was, that quote didn't appear in Cole's op-ed
(or in anything else Cole had ever written), and the sentiments expressed
in the phony quote were actually the complete opposite of Cole's position,
that it was primarily the Allied governments, not Jewish organizations,
that exaggerated war crimes evidence for military and political reasons.
As Cole pointed out, if the Allies had cared about "Jewish causes,"
they would have expressed more concern about the plight of the Jews during
the war.
-
- Cole sent a letter to Ms. Arrillaga asking about the
origin of the phony quote. Ms. Arrillaga replied with this response: "Yes,
the 'hoax' line did not actually appear in your op-ed [emphasis ours].
We mistakenly attributed it to you due to faulty background information."69
Ms. Arrillaga, who did not explain what she meant by "faulty background
information," went on to say that if Cole wanted the false quote corrected,
it would be up to him to contact each one of the hundreds of newspapers
that carried the AP story!
-
- When Cole was interviewed for the Jerusalem Report, Israel's
leading English-language newsmagazine, Cole made certain that the interview
was audiotaped, to ensure accuracy. When the inter-view was published in
October 1993, Cole was quoted as saying that the Holocaust was a "fantasy."70
Once again, this was the ex-act opposite of Cole's position. Cole contacted
Sheldon Teitel-baum, the Jerusalem Report senior reporter who had interviewed
him, and demanded to know where the "fantasy" quote came from,
as Cole had never said it, and it was not on the audiotape of the interview.
-
- Mr. Teitelbaum was brazen enough to send Cole a faxed
response with the following admission:
-
-
- The word "fantasy," I suspect, may have been
cho-sen by a copy editor who interpreted reality in this fashion. The quotation
marks were not intended to signify a quote from you [emphasis ours]. This
offending phrase works as a transgression against Strunk & White, who
warn against using quotation marks to signify sardonic word usage.71
-
-
- In other words, this quote did not represent something
that Cole had actually said, but instead represented a copy editor's "interpre-tation
of reality." This copy editor used the phony quote in a "sardonic"
(defined by Webster's as "a disdainfully or derisively mocking")
way against Cole. When Cole asked the editors of the Jerusalem Report to
print a clarification to let their readers know that he never said that
the Holocaust was a "fantasy," they refused. Reporter Teitelbaum
cynically told Cole that the editors don't have to worry about libel or
slander laws because "they are not in U.S. jurisdiction anyway."72
-
- In July 1994, Cole was interviewed by Dr. Michael Shermer,
a leading critic of Holocaust revisionism. Shermer has penned several books
attacking revisionists, including Denying History and Why People Believe
Weird Things. Shermer's interview with Cole was part of an article about
revisionism that appeared in Shermer's magazine Skeptic,73 and later, in
expanded form, in Why People Believe Weird Things. In the article, Shermer
included Cole's name in a list of revisionist "racists," right
alongside the names of neo-Nazis and skinheads. Shermer provided no evidence
to back up this very serious charge, and when Cole, who strenuously de-nied
that he was in any way racist, asked Shermer to issue a retrac-tion, Shermer
flat-out refused.
-
- However, in February 1995, Shermer was interviewed by
Daniel Berman, a graduate student researching Holocaust revisionism. The
interview was not intended for public distribution, but Shermer allowed
it to be recorded. The following has been transcribed directly from the
tape of the interview:74
-
- BERMAN: "Well, David Cole is not racist, is he?"
-
- SHERMER: "No. And I didn't say that about David.
He's not the least bit racist."
-
- BERMAN: "But in your article you listed a bunch
of."
-
- SHERMER: "Yeah, I'd already listed a bunch of racists,
a bunch of them together, and I threw Cole into that bunch because I was
listing everybody I had interviewed, and that was probably the biggest,
uh, misleading, the most misleading thing I said in my ar-ticle. I should
have left Cole out of that."
-
- Dr. Shermer admitted that he "misled" his readers
regarding Cole being a racist. Nevertheless, to this day, he refuses to
print a retrac-tion in his magazine.
-
- Shermer also made a few candid admissions about Cole's
work:
-
- SHERMER: "Maybe Cole's right. I think the whole
gas chamber story is probably, in terms of physical evidence, the weakest
link in the whole story. To me, it doesn't matter whether the gas chamber
story is completely true or not. Maybe it could be modified, for all I
know."
-
- In January 1994, Cole was asked by veteran CBS newsman
Mike Wallace to be interviewed for 60 Minutes. Cole refused, citing concerns
about how his comments might be reedited in post-production to change their
meaning. 60 Minutes went ahead and profiled Cole anyway. For footage of
Cole, 60 Minutes relied on using clips from other talk shows he had done,
including a clip from Cole's 1992 appearance on The Montel Williams Show.
In the clip of The Montel Williams Show that was used in the 60 Minutes
profile of Cole, Montel looks at the camera and asks if the Holo-caust
is "a myth." The camera then immediately cuts to Cole nod-ding
in agreement. To the millions of 60 Minutes viewers, it clearly looked
as though Cole nodded in agreement after Montel asked if the Holocaust
was a myth. The clip had been altered.
-
- The April 1992 episode of The Montel Williams Show in
which Cole appeared, and the March 1994 episode of 60 Minutes in which
Cole was profiled, are both available from Burrelle's Tran-scripts. A comparison
of the two tapes shows that the producers of 60 Minutes took a "nod"
that David Cole gave at the very begin-ning of the show, as Montel was
reading a list of his credits, and re-edited the nod so that it followed
Montel's question about the Holocaust being a "myth."
-
- Using a real-time counter, the "nod" appears
at exactly 0:00:56 (fifty-six seconds) into the show. Nearly eleven minutes
later, at 0:11:36 into the show, Montel looks at the camera and asks if
the Holocaust is a myth "or is it truth? We'll find out when we come
back." The camera then pans the audience as the show breaks for a
commercial; Cole is not shown nodding or doing anything else. When the
show returns from the break, Montel starts taking ques-tions from the studio
audience; the "myth" question is not put to Cole, or to anyone
else on the panel.
-
- The producers of 60 Minutes took Cole's "nod"
from the beginning of the show and placed it after Montel's "myth"
question, which was truncated to remove the rest of the sentence, in which
Montel throws to commercial break. To 60 Minutes viewers, it appeared as
though Montel asked the "myth" question to Cole, who then nod-ded
in agreement. A total fabrication, courtesy of America's num-ber one prime-time
news program.
-
- In six years of public appearances and lectures, David
Cole, a self-described political liberal, never once denied the Holocaust
or the mass killing of Jews, but that didn't stop major media outlets from
inventing quotes and fabricating footage in order to completely misrepresent
his views. And these are not isolated incidents. Most revisionists have
similar stories to tell.
-
- The problem of media bias regarding dissident Holocaust
and World War II historians has become even harder to deny in the past
few years. The New York Times has, since 2000, sponsored yearly seminars
at the Times building in New York City with the express purpose of convincing
journalists and journalism students to censor revisionist Holocaust and
World War II views.75 At the February 2003 seminar, New York Times publisher
Arthur Sulz-berger Jr. argued against allowing any "intellectual exchange"
with revisionist Holocaust historians, and Emory University journalism
professor (and former NYT reporter) Catherine Manegold said that bias in
this area is not only acceptable but desirable.76
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