Newsgroups: soc.college Subject: CODOH's paid advertisements: Harvard Summary: Followup-To: alt.revisionism Distribution: world Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac Keywords: CODOH,Harvard Archive/File: orgs/american/codoh/university.response harvard.001 Last-Modified: 1993/10/24 _Holocaust_ Revisionism_: NO OBLIGATION TO PUBLISH LIES Harvard Crimson, Dec 10, 1991 Opinion page, editorial There is a movement growing on the fringes of American and European politics. This movement politely calls itself the school of revisionist Holocaust history (sounds academic doesn't it) setting up such innocuous- sounding things as the Institute for Historical Review, _Holocaust News_, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Claiming to pursue "historical truth", this small insidious group propagates myth after mind-boggling myth: the Holocaust never happened, Anne Frank's _Diary_ is a forgery, far fewer than six million Jews died in Nazi custody, those who did die were stricken by typhoid--not Zyklon B gas. They then argue that the Holocaust is simply an ingenious Jewish invention, designed to attract world sympathy, to oppress Germans and Palestinians, or to further a Jewish conspiracy, or whatever comes to mind. Holocaust 'revisionism' is not simply idiocy on an epic scale; it's not like saying that the French Revolution never happened or that the earth is flat. It is a blatant attempt to stir up anti-Semitism. These monstrous lies are an insult to the memories of all who where murdered in the camps--gays, Poles, gypsies and other social undesirables as well as Jews--but they are aimed at Jews. Behind the bogus footnotes lies a poorly disguised hatred. Unsuprisingly, these Hitler apologists have recently focused their propaganda efforts on college campuses, looking to deceive a new generation that never saw the Third Reich first hand. This fall, college newspapers across the country received a full-page adverstisements--looking suspiciously like a full page advertisement explaing how the PC thought police was preventing academic debate about the Holocaust's non-existence, how the photographs, documents and eyewitness testimony proving the obvious in fact prove nothing, how "Zionists and others in the Jewish community" whose "purpose was to drum up world sympathy and political and financial support for Jewish causes" had led "a conspiracy to suppress the truth." The advertisement closed with an appeal for contribution to the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. "Your contribution to CODOH will be used to diseminate the good news of Holocaust Revisionism," it said. Some college papers, including The Duke Chronical and the Michigan Daily printed the ad. Others, including The Daily Pennsylvania and The Crimson did not. The Crimson has a longstanding policy of defending free speech, even when the content is offsisve. Over the years, many controversial arguments (date rape, homosexuality, Israel) have been made on these pages. We have not always agreed with those argument, but most always we have printed them. At the same time, we are a private newspaper, and as such we reserve the right to impose internal restrictions on what we will and will not print. Content matters. By chosing not to run an ad, or an editorial for that matter, we are not imposing censorship; we are simply refusing to offer our privately-owned assets--our printing press, our circulation network, our readership, our limited number of pages, and the name of The Harvard Crimson, for that matter. We don't reject many advertisements. Then we don't get offered too many blatanly false ads from blatant anti-semites. (According to the Anti-Defamation League, CODOH was co-founded by Bradley R. Smith, the write of the ad, and by a known member of an American Neo-Nazi Party). We're not talking about a controversial argument based on questionable facts. We're talking about vicious propaganda based on utter bullshit that has been discredited time and time again by legitimate scholars of diverse ideological persuasions. CODOH is free to pour their $700 in copying machines. They can print up flyers and hawk around Harvard Square to their heart's content. In fact, the Square is occasionaly grazed by Lyndon LaRouche supporters distributing eye-opeing ideas about Jewish conspiracies, and we don't do anything to stop them. But we see no obligation to run CODOH's hateful nonsense beneath the banner of the Harvard Crimson. We feel that providing CODOH a forum to promulglate malicious falsehoods in the name of "open debate" would represent an abdication of our editorial responsibility. Ultimately, the problem with the ad, like the movement from which it came, is not simply that it is moronic and false. CODOH's rhetoric, unlike equally silly claims that two times two is six, seeks to propagate hatred against Jews; that is why it has to put on the moronic and false charade. We would no more run this ad then we would run ad reading "Niggers die." Let Gnomon Copies [a copy store] handle that one, thank you. The fact that the ad we received chose to veil its message does not make it any more appropriate for our printing press. Simply put: We do not print just anything, and we do not intend to prostitute this newspaper to "disseminate the good news" of lies and hatred. There may be borderline cases for this rule, but his ad was not one of them. =30=
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