41845358-Antisemitism

DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
189
students with little knowledge of the past. Moreover, when a paper rejects
their ad, they try to claim violation of the First Amendment.
While many college newspapers have refused to accept the deniers’ ads,
several have printed them, arguing that even the most hateful views have a
right to be heard. (In 1997 twenty colleges printed the advertisement or a denier
opinion piece; in 1998 the figure was twenty-six.) Some editors, admitting
that they would not print overtly racist or sexist ads, held that Smith’s ads do
not malign Jews. The editor of the Duke Chronicle, which ran the ad, was even
more deluded; the revisionists, she said, were “reinterpreting history” and
their views were part of an ongoing “scholarly debate.” 25 A more fitting evaluation
came from the Harvard Crimson, which rejected the ad, denouncing it as
“vicious propaganda based on utter bullshit that has been discredited time and
time again.” The revisionists’ view was not just “moronic and false,” it was also
a deliberate attempt “to propagate hatred against Jews.” 26
Deniers insist that they are serious researchers engaged in an honored historical
enterprise—marshalling evidence to challenge a traditional view; they
describe themselves as “revisionists” prepared to refute the erroneous and biased
interpretations of “exterminationists” who have dominated the field.
Knowing the right words to use, they say that their revisionism “is a scholarly
process, not a doctrine or an ideology.” 27 Hoping to gain recognition and entrance
into the mainstream of historical discourse, they press for discussion
and debate with academic scholars. But the profession dismisses them as purveyors
of hate. In December 1991 the governing council of the American Historical
Association (AHA) officially condemned the deniers, declaring “No
serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.” 28 And in 1994 an
AHA press release stated that “the Association will not provide a forum for
views that are, at best, a form of academic fraud.” 29 The Organization of
American Historians has taken similar action. When rebuffed by the profession,
deniers protest that their opponents are afraid of the truth. They see
themselves, in the words of Butz, as “a handful of lone individuals of very meager
resources,” 30 braving intimidation and persecution for a noble cause.
In the fifth century B.C.E. Socrates urged his fellow Athenians to think rationally
about the problems of human existence and supplied a method of inquiry,
dialectics or logical discussion, as the avenue to knowledge. But a
precondition for a dialogue is an open mind, a willingness to examine ideas
critically; confront illogical, inconsistent, dogmatic, and imprecise assertions;
and form and alter conclusions on the basis of knowledge. One cannot, for example,
enter into dialogue over the question of time with religious fundamentalists
committed to the belief that the universe was created six to ten thousand