SMITH'SREPORT
 
 
 
 
 
America's Only Monthly
Revisionist Newsletter
 
 
 

 
- Number 52 -
March 1998

Contents

• CODOH Cuts a Swath Through Swarthmore College
• Holocaust Museums Come Under Attack from Washington to Berlin
• World Scope
• Simon Wiesenthal Center: Defending the Holocaust Faith
• Roger Garaudy convicted of "revisionism," fined $40,000
• and more!

and now... our front page!

CODOH CUTS A SWATH
THROUGH SWARTHMORE COLLEGE

For much of the past decade, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust has made America's colleges and universities the chief target of its campaign to open minds to the case for Holocaust revisionism. We have run advertisements at more than two hundred campus newspapers; more than a million students, faculty and other staff have read of our Website, of our $50,000 reward offer, and of the revisionist topics covered in our display ads, large and small. While these statistics undeniably reflect substantial achievements in organization and publicity, they also raise legitimate questions: What sort of effects are CODOH's ads having on campus, in the short term as well as the long run? Are they changing any minds? Are the ads worth the effort and the cost?

    As a case very much in point, we'd like to cite recent events at Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded by Quakers in the 1860's, Swarthmore is one of America's elite colleges. Dedicated entirely to under-graduate education in the liberal arts and sciences, Swarthmore boasts gifted and serious students and an accomplished and dedicated faculty. If anything, Swarthmore's Quaker heritage and its large Jewish representation among faculty and students (including the college's president, Al Bloom) make it the kind of school that stereotype would hold as completely inhospitable to CODOH's message.

    Yet in January, when we submitted our $50,000 reward ad to the Swarthmore weekly,The Phoenix,and despite the usual attempt by the Anti-Defamation League to pressure the undergraduate staff not to run the ad, they ran it anyway. Indeed, ADL's meddling had a counter-effect: it so dismayed one Swarthmore student that he contacted CODOH and asked for some of our leaflets. Over a period of five days in early February the lone student (who wishes to remain anonymous) distributed hundreds of copies of Smith's classic pamphletThe Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debateto students, to faculty, and to Swarthmore chaplains. Or, as the headline inThe Phoenix(February 13) put it, "Flyers Challenging the Holocaust Flood Campus."

Hurtful, Hateful, Reprehensible?

    With that, representatives of various on-campus Jewish groups emerged to assail the phantom pamphleteer. Cheryl Cook, director of Hillel, wailed that the distribution ofThe Holocaust Controversywas "clearly an assault on the integrity of the entire Swarthmore community." Jacob Krich, of Ruach (associated with campus Hillel), expressed shock that "such a painful topic" was raised by the anonymous distribution. The editors ofThe Phoenixsought to pigeonholeThe Holocaust Controversyas "hate literature," but were constrained to admit that "Pamphlets like Smith's--which are written in a rational and calm tone--advocating historical revisionism, have always been a headache for Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) because they take advantage of the existing legal loop-holes." President Al Bloom, while conceding CODOH's unseen student hadn't infringed any college regulations, allowed that "I find the questioning presumably of whether or not the Holocaust took place a morally reprehensible line of argument."

    End of story? Not at all.The Phoenixoffered Smith a chance to respond to the attacks on him, his pamphlet and revisionism. In the next issue (20 February), Smith struck

Continued on page four