HOLOCAUST DENIAL AND THOUGHT CONTROL
Deborah Lipstadt at Notre Dame University
E. Michael Jones
“Omnes alios hostile odium” (All strangers they hate as enemies.) Tacitus on the Jews
On March 25, 2009, Notre Dame was embroiled in the biggest controversy to hit the campus since the performance of The Vagina Monologues. A few days earlier, Notre Dame president John Jenkins, CSC had announced that the university planned to give President Barack Obama an honorary doctorate. Within hours of the announcement a storm of protest erupted which showed no sign of dying down any time soon. Citing the statement of the US Catholic Bishops in 2004—“The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions”—the ordinary of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, John M. D’Arcy announced that, for the first time in 25 years, he would not be attending graduation ceremonies at Notre Dame, because “President Obama has recently affirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred.”
By March 25, 2009 over 100,000 people had signed a petition condemning Notre Dame’s actions, and Bishop Thomas J. Olmstead of the Phoenix, Arizona diocese joined with his colleague Bishop D’Arcy in denouncing Jenkins’ decision, calling the decision to honor President Obama a “public act of disobedience” and a “grave mistake.”
Instead of addressing the running sore that is the Catholic identity issue at Notre Dame, the provost of that institution along with the Notre Dame Holocaust Project invited a “renowned historian” to address the issue of “holocaust denial,” a delict which has succeeded patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels. The “renowned historian” in question was Deborah Lipstadt, who, according to the press release sent out weeks in advance, is the director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and is currently on leave of absence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.
The invitation was hastily extended in the wake of what has come to be known as the Williamson Affair. In hosting the affair, Notre Dame could establish its academic bona fides by inviting a Jew in to beat up a Catholic bishop. Needless to say, I wanted to get to the lecture early so that I could get a seat. Expecting a ropes-up crowd, I was disappointed to find a sparsely attended hall. In fact, if it weren’t for a busload of middle-aged Jewish ladies brought in from the south side of town, the hall would have been virtually empty. Lipstadt was introduced by a chubby middle-aged man who looked like a professor (he wasn’t wearing a tie), but it was hard to tell whether he was Catholic or Jewish, a state of affairs also applicable to Notre Dame as an institution. Professor Lipstadt and the man who introduced her kept referring to Bishop Williamson as the “alleged” Bishop Williamson, showing their ignorance of both the English language and Catholic theology. Bishop Williamson was consecrated a bishop in 1988 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. His consecration was valid but not licit because it was done in defiance of Rome. For that act, the six bishops involved were excommunicated latae sententiae. It was Pope Benedict’s lifting of the excommunications which set off what has come to be known as the Williamson affair.
As further evidence of her renown, Professor Lipstadt’s introducer told us that Professor Lipstadt “discussed alleged Bishop Williamson’s holocaust denial on her blog,” and that this blogging “may have helped the Vatican see the light.” After informing the pope that he “must unequivocally distance himself from [alleged Bishop Williamson’s] views, Professor Lipstadt concluded, again on her blog, that “I think [the pope] was willing to tolerate these views in the name of unity.”
Given the nature of Catholic response to the Williamson affair, one would think that Professor Lipstadt would have been pleased, but this was not the case. In one of the most groveling responses to the Williamson affair, Roger Cardinal Mahony, archbishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, barred Bishop Williamson from setting foot in any Catholic building in the archdiocese. Again, one would think that Professor Lipstadt would be pleased by an action like this, but that was not the case. In a comment which, according to her blog, she posted at 4:42 AM [!] March 2, 2009, Lipstadt dismissed Mahony’s gesture as “largely symbolic in that Williamson has not given any sign that LA was on his travel itinerary.” If Cardinal Mahony thought an attack on a fellow Catholic bishop would ingratiate him with the likes of Professor Lipstadt, he obviously had not reckoned with Professor Lipstadt’s high standards. “What I found jarring,” she continued, “was the statement by the spokesman for the archdiocese. ‘The cardinal wished to send a clear signal to the Jewish community that Williamson is not a member or even welcome in the Catholic Church until he renounces his views’.”
“This,” Lipstadt sniffed indignantly, “should not be a message to the Jewish Community but to all people who think truth is important—irrespective of their faith. It would be a message that people who lie about history, distort the truth, express anti-Semitic and racist views, and pervert facts in order to defend one of the most diabolical regimes in history are not welcome in the LA archdiocese. Racists, for example, should be shunned not to send a message to minority communities but because racists spread hatred, instill contempt, and work against communal tranquility.
“I don’t mean to quibble over this strong statement on Cardinal Mahony’s part. But to do this and define it as a message to the ‘victims’ is to miss the point.”
That being said, she was nonetheless pleased with her two-day stay at Notre Dame, which she described as “an institution which takes its Catholic identity seriously.”
Before too long into the introduction, it became clear that Professor Lipstadt established her credentials as a “renowned historian,” by writing “three books,” two of which bear variations on the title “Denying the Holocaust.” Not content with her own unearned laurels, Lipstadt is obsessed with denying the qualifications which others have earned honestly. In a letter on her blog which she sent to the New York Times, Lipstadt takes issue with the Times referring to David Irving, who has written more than three books, as a “historian.” Instead of referring to Irving as a “historian,” the Times should have called him a “denier.”
Her three books notwithstanding, Lipstadt’s real claim to fame came from the fact that she was named as a defendant in a libel suit, something that the Notre Dame press release pointed out. A book on that trial constitutes one-third of all of her book-length writing over the past 23 years. As some indication of the depth of her overall scholarship, Lipstadt assigned the “Holocaust memoir” called Fragments in her classes. When the book was revealed as a threadbare hoax written by a non-Jew who had never been near a concentration camp, Lipstadt opined that, if the allegation turned out to be true (which it did), this “might complicate matters somewhat,” but insisted that it would still be “powerful as a novel.”
Professor Lipstadt was supposed to have been introduced by Rabbi Michael Signer. This is fitting in a way because Signer was also the recipient of an endowed chair, he at Notre Dame, for producing even less intellectual material than Professor Lipstadt. Rabbi Signer could not attend the lecture because he died in January but Professor Lipstadt assured her audience that he is now “up there watching us.”
Even more than being a defendant in a libel suit, Professor Lipstadt’s renown comes from her efforts to prevent the spread of the delict known as “holocaust denial.” The point of her talk at Notre Dame was explaining the full ramifications of this invention. As we have come to expect from speakers like this, Professor Lipstadt feels that another Kristalnacht is right around the corner. “I see things,” she confided to the yentas from the south side, “as bleaker than I used to see them.” Over the past year, there has been “an uptick in anti-Semitism,” something that should be “a source of tremendous concern.”
Of course, given her expansive notion of anti-Semitism—”Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism”; it is “the new anti-Semitism”—“uptick” is hardly the proper term. The Holocaust itself begins to pale in comparison to the threats now on the horizon—not that I am accusing Professor Lipstadt of Holocaust denial. According to Professor Lipstadt’s definition of the term, anyone who says the word apartheid and Israel in the same sentence is guilty of the “new anti-Semitism.” The term “Israel Apartheid” was, of course, a veiled reference to former President Jimmy Carter, who is now routinely dismissed as an anti-Semite. Perhaps “New Anti-Semite” might be a better term, since it corresponds with the “New Anti-Semitism” and reflects, of course, the fact that no Jew dared to level the term when Carter was president.
At this point, Professor Lipstadt was just warming to her topic. Any claim, she continued, that Zionism is a form of racism or anything linking Israel and South Africa also constitutes anti-Semitism. The same goes for UN resolutions condemning Israeli behavior toward Palestinians, something she terms “legalized anti-Semitism.” The same goes for people who refer to Jews as a group, as in what she terms “the so-called Jewish lobby,” which was a veiled reference to Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby. Anti-Semitism has even infected “some parts of Belgium”!
Which brings us to the heart of the “new anti-Semitism,” otherwise known as Holocaust denial. There are two forms of Holocaust denial: Hard core and soft-core. As examples of hard-core holocaust denial, Lipstadt mentioned David Irving and “so-called Bishop Williamson.” Lipstadt also objects to historians who claim that “otherwise David Irving is a good historian,” making it clear that they are guilty of what might be termed second-hand Holocaust denial, a pathogen that is contracted by intellectual proximity in analogous fashion to how lung cancer is supposedly contracted by second-hand smoke.
Then there is soft-core Holocaust denial. As examples thereof, Lipstadt listed things like “cancellation of Holocaust remembrance day celebrations,” something that happened in Barcelona recently, “because of Israeli behavior in Gaza.” As another example of soft-core holocaust denial, Lipstadt mentioned “Eastern European countries governments arguing that Nazis and Communists were equivalent, and that the communists perpetuated genocide.” The fact that a Jewish resistance fighter was indicted by the Lithuanian government for war crimes committed while he was a partisan is an instance of soft-core holocaust denial, according to Professor Lipstadt. Another example of soft-core denial was Mel Gibson’s interview at the time of the release of The Passion of the Christ—which the Jews, according to Professor Lipstadt, made into a blockbuster by their protests.
Mel Gibson became a holocaust denier, in Professor Lipstadt’s eyes, when he mentioned in an interview with Diane Sawyer that “in the Ukraine millions of people were starved to death.” As Norman Finkelstein has pointed out in his book The Holocaust Industry:
To question a survivor’s testimony, to denounce the role of Jewish collaborators, to suggest that Germans suffered during the bombing of Dresden or that any state except Germany committed crimes in World War II—this is all evidence, according to Lipstadt, of Holocaust denial. . . . The most “insidious” forms of Holocaust denial, Lipstadt suggests, are “immoral equivalencies”: that is, denying the uniqueness of The Holocaust.
As conclusive and irrefutable proof that Mel Gibson is a Holocaust denier, Lipstadt mentioned that he said in the same interview that the Jews “died at Auschwitz,” not that they were “murdered,” which is what he should have said if he wanted to avoid the charge of anti-Semitism. Holocaust denial is also something that can be contracted genetically, like the goyische equivalent of Tay-Sachs disease. Professor Lipstadt makes it clear that Mel Gibson contracted it from his father, or better, because he refused to denounce his father, who was a holocaust denier. As further proof of Mel Gibson’s “soft-core holocaust denial,” Professor Lipstadt claimed that Gibson said, “My father never lied to me in his life.” (Does this mean that genetic transmission of holocaust denial causes an amelioration from the hard-core variety manifested by Hutton Gibson into the soft-core variety manifested by his son? If so, what are the prospects for the third generation? Holocaust doubt?) We are left to assume that Gibson should have behaved more like little Pavlik Moroslav, the Ukrainian boy who denounced his father to the Soviet secret police. Little Pavlik was murdered by his outraged relatives, but the Soviets erected statues and schools in his honor.
Having come up with the taxonomy of holocaust denial, Lipstadt then segued into a discussion of her main claim to fame, namely, the fact that David Irving named her as a defendant in a libel suit, a fact she characterized at another point as being taken out of line and shot. It seems that every cloud has a silver lining. So when Professor Lipstadt was sued for libel, it allowed her and a team of researchers to delve into the work of people like David Irving. Since she had already written a book mentioning Irving, this wasn’t especially reassuring, but oblivious to that fact, Lipstadt launched into an analysis of two footnotes. In one instance Irving claimed that Hitler was furious at one of his lieutenants for attacking a Jewish delicatessen at the time of the 1923 beer hall putsch. What Lipstadt uncovered was that Hitler was really furious because said lieutenant didn’t wear his uniform during the attack. According to Lipstadt, this discrepancy proves that David Irving made it all up. In recounting this anecdote, Lipstadt seems oblivious to the fact that she is testifying to Irving’s acumen as a historian and his ability to get to little known facts. Whether what he said is accurate in detail is precisely the role of historical research, an activity she prohibits in anyone who disagrees with her point of view.
In a second instance, Irving claimed in one of his books that Hitler was furious that Nazis were attacking Jewish businesses and ordered them to stop. What Lipstadt and her team of investigators uncovered is that Hitler was only upset by the arson, but even if that is the case, it is not clear why this should be a legal matter, or worse, reason to ruin a man’s livelihood. Don’t people write books to have them discussed? Isn’t this why we have universities and professors? Isn’t this how we learn about the past? Not according to Professor Lipstadt.
Before long it becomes clear that the academy exists, in Lipstadt’s view, not to pursue the truth but to punish malefactors who are guilty of thought crimes. What becomes equally apparent before long is just how blood-thirsty Professor Lipstadt can be when it comes to pursuing her enemies. We are talking about something more than personal animus here. We are talking about racial or ethnic animus of the sort that gets expressed in the later novels of Philip Roth or in the late Richard John Neuhaus’s magazine First Things, where Meir Soloveichik declared that hate is a Jewish virtue.
Lipstadt expressed this hatred by way of anecdote. During her libel trial, Lipstadt was shocked to hear her lawyer tell a BBC interviewer that David Irving wasn’t important. When she pressed him on this after the interview, her lawyer assured her that “David Irving was like the dirt—Lipstadt paused at this point and added parenthetically “he used another word”—“you step into on the street. The dirt’s not important; what’s important is that you remove it from your shoe.” Lipstadt referred to the claim that David Irving was a piece of dog shit as “a wonderful analogy” because it “helped her to understand” how to deal with people like this.
Just to show that Lipstadt doesn’t apply epithets like that to the goyim alone, she also applied the same description verbatim to Norman Finkelstein. In responding to a call when Lipstadt was on a program on National Public Radio, Lipstadt said of Finkelstein: “Think of the dirt you step in on the street and you know what kind of dirt I’m talking about. It has no importance unless you fail to clean it off your shoe before you go into the house.” Lipstadt’s outburst prompted one listener to write in, “If Professor Lipstadt disagrees with Professor Finkelstein, I suggest she debate him on the facts instead of being allowed to launch vulgar personal attacks on NPR with impunity.”
In an interview that was posted on the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website (#11, August 1, 2003) Lipstadt claimed that “as an American,” she was “a staunch believer in free speech,” but went on to say that “the situation in Germany is different and that there might be room there for a law against Holocaust denial.” What comes across here is a strong belief in double standards, which comes down to both praising the academy and then using it as a podium for referring to other people as dog shit. Once again, the academy is instrumentalized into a weapon against holocaust deniers, which is to say, people whom organized Jewry portrays as enemies of the Jewish race, and a place to settle ancestral scores.
Her goal is clear: to get everyone else to view her opponents as dog shit; her quandary, however, is strategic, namely, how to “defeat them and not build them up.” As she put it in her talk, “How do you fight these people without building them up or giving them some merit.” The answer to that question is “dynamic silence,” a theory developed by the AJC in dealing with Gerald L. K. Smith in the ’50s, and recounted in Benjamin Ginzberg’s book Fatal Embrace. Professor Lipstadt, however, got her answer from the lawyer in the Irving libel action.
Lipstadt may or may not have read Fatal Embrace, but her talk and the hatred she spewed onto her enemies is some indication that disinterested pursuit of the truth is not Professor Lipstadt’s goal in life. It’s not enough to disagree, as serious historians can and do, with certain assertions in David Irving’s writings. Professor Lipstadt insists on total denunciation of everything David Irving ever wrote, followed by a concerted attempt to deprive him of his ability to earn a livelihood. On her blog, Lipstadt gloats that Irving has been reduced to selling Nazi memorabilia, as if concerted efforts to blacklist him in the publishing industry had nothing to do with that fact.
Anyone who does not go along with this campaign is suspect and guilty of fraternizing with the enemy, which also calls for reprisals. In this Lipstadt differs from Norman Finkelstein, who writes:
Not all revisionist literature—however scurrilous the politics or motivations of its practitioners—is totally useless. . . . [David] Irving, notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathizer with German national socialism, has nevertheless, as Gordon Craig points out, made an “indispensable” contribution to our knowledge of World War II. Both Arno Mayer, in his important study of the Nazi holocaust, and Raul Hilberg cite Holocaust denial publications. “If these people want to speak, let them,” Hilberg observes, “It only leads those of us who do the research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious” (The Holocaust Industry, p. 71).
Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t want to disagree with David Irving. She wants to first humiliate and then destroy him. “We stripped Irving bare,” Lipstadt told her audience at Notre Dame. “We made him look silly.” Not content to leave it at that, Lipstadt continued that at one point she took out two movies, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks’ The Producers. What she learned from watching these movies is that it’s not enough to defeat your enemies (no one brought up the fact that Lipstadt’s enemies were people who had written books with which she disagreed), “The point was to dress him in a jester’s costume and make him a witness to his own powerlessness.”
In other words, academe is for Lipstadt simply the arena in which she humiliates her foes. This view was expressed repeatedly during the course of her talk. Persuasion is not her strong suit, and that, of course, means that it has no place in academic life. “Trying to convince holocaust deniers,” she said at another point, “is a hopeless task.” It is also a circular argument, to which Professor Lipstadt is as blind as the image of Synagoga on the façade of the cathedral portal in Strassbourg.
Professor Lipstadt credits her researchers with bringing about the victory over David Irving, but in doing so only reinforces the idea that the academy has been weaponized: “The trial was a great tribute to academia; they tracked down that information.” Given all of the resources at her disposal, I began to wonder why Professor Lipstadt hasn’t written the definitive Holocaust narrative. In spite of the resources at her disposal, and the fact that she is now on leave of absence from Emory University spending a year immersing herself in “Advanced Holocaust Studies” at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the only thing she has produced during the last 16 years is an account of the Irving trial. In fact, in the 16 years which have elapsed since she invented the term “holocaust denial,” she has produced not one piece of historical scholarship on the period in question. Instead of laying these issues to rest the way scholars do, i.e., with a piece of competent scholarship, Lipstadt has decided to resolve the issue by force majeure.
Why is this? Well, maybe it’s because Professor Lipstadt’s day job as thought cop keeps her so busy she can’t do anything else. In her professional activity Professor Lipstadt resembles less the scholar and more the political commissars assigned to units of the Soviet Army or the interrogators at the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, positions that were more often than not staffed by Jews, as Jewish historians have noted. In The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, Salo Baron writes:
Perhaps in subconscious retaliation for many years of suffering at the hands of the Russian police, a disproportionate number of Jews joined the new Bolshevik secret service. The impression these facts made upon the ordinary Russian is rightly stressed by Leonard Shapiro: “For the most prominent and colorful figure after Lenin was Trotsky, in Petrograd the dominant and hated figure was Zinoviev, while anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator (p. 203).
Professor Lipstadt is the spiritual descendant of these Jewish investigators. Professor Lipstadt’s job is to shoot anybody in academe or publishing (the current equivalent of the Soviet army) who is not following the party line. Since she can’t very well go out and shoot David Irving literally, she does the next best thing by assassinating his character by claiming that he is not really a historian (certainly not a “renowned historian” like Professor Lipstadt) and depriving him of a livelihood.
Professor David O’Connell, who teaches French at Georgia State University, found this out when he published an article on Elie Wiesel in Culture Wars. O’Connell’s article did what scholarship is supposed to do. It pointed out inconsistencies in the conventional narrative that academe had been cowed into ignoring. It pointed out patent absurdities like the famous picture of Wiesel in Buchenwald; it pointed up the discrepancies in the various accounts Wiesel has given of his liberation from Buchenwald. It brought up the fact that after the release of the PBS documentary The Liberators, which purported to describe how an all-black tank battalion liberated Buchenwald, Wiesel suddenly became aware of memories he never had before, memories of being liberated by black soldiers emerging from Sherman tanks. “I will always remember with love,” Wiesel wrote in 1989, “a big black soldier. He was crying like a child-tears of all the pain in the world and all the rage. Everyone who was there that day will forever feel a sentiment of gratitude to the American soldiers who liberated us.”
It was a truly touching moment. Unfortunately, it never happened.
First of all, Liberators was made up “to increase Black and Jewish mutual understanding in Brooklyn,” and Elie Wiesel wittingly collaborated in that scam. O’Connell’s article not only damaged Elie Wiesel’s reputation, it also called significant segments of the Holocaust narrative, in particular those recounted by Wiesel, into question. Did Professor O’Connell’s Culture Wars article then constitute Holocaust denial? This is where the story gets interesting.
After O’Connell’s article on Wiesel appeared in the October 2004 issue of Culture Wars, Lipstadt wrote to the administration at GSU in an attempt to get him fired. She claimed in her letter that O’Connell had engaged in “fraud in research.” What followed was several pages of single spaced writing in which she questioned O’Connell’s spelling of Yiddish and labored mightily to convict Professor O’Connell of fraud. Unwilling to dismiss Lipstadt’s letter, the administration at GSU appointed a panel of three full professors to look into the matter. After deliberating for almost a year, from December 2005 to October 2006, the professors concluded that there was no fraud, or that if there were, it was the doing of Elie Wiesel and not Professor O’Connell. If Professor O’Connell didn’t get fired, it wasn’t for Professor Lipstadt’s lack of trying. The fault lay not in Professor Lipstadt’s will but in her intellect. In spite of her endowed chair and years immersed in “advanced holocaust studies,” she couldn’t mount a coherent argument. Every claim she raised was ultimately dismissed as baseless. It was as if she felt she could carry the day by sheer force of will, and was upset to learn that academic life still had a remnant of integrity.
There is probably another reason why the attempt to oust Professor O’Connell failed. The administration at GSU knew that if they fired O’Connell on trumped up charges of fraud, he would sue them, and the lawsuit would lead to a discovery process that would have been disastrous for both the university and the system of thought control run by the powerful Jews who were orchestrating the campaign, demanding vengeance.
In a way, it’s a shame this case didn’t go to trial. It would have been interesting to learn how Professor Lipstadt heard about Professor O’Connell’s article in the first place, and it would have provided a nice counterpoint to the Lipstadt-Irving libel trial in London. It would also have exposed the inner workings of Jewish thought police like Deborah Lipstadt and the role she plays as an enforcer of the Jewish hegemony over academe today.
The O’Connell case makes an interesting counterpoint to the Williamson case as well. Unlike Professor O’Connell, Bishop Williamson did no research, published no article or book, and so had no way to fight back when the counterattack came. This is why he was such a tempting target. This is also why the Jewish organizations have stayed away from David O’Connell. They tried to get him fired and failed because O’Connell had all the facts on his side, and there was nothing that organized Jewry could do about it. As a result, Lipstadt et al shifted to the tactic of “dynamic silence,” and there the situation at GSU has remained ever since. Professor O’Connell has challenged Professor Lipstadt to a debate, but, as we learned when we attended her talk, Professor Lipstadt doesn’t debate Holocaust deniers. In this case, that logic isn’t compelling, because she herself had to certify that Professor O’Connell was not a holocaust denier. Unable to prove that O’Connell engaged in fraud, Lipstadt was unable to claim that he was a holocaust denier. Since she comments on every conceivable delict under the sun on her blog, it seems odd that Professor Lipstadt didn’t comment on the challenge to debate the Williamson affair from Professor O’Connell, a man who teaches not far away from where she holds her chair. The logistics of a debate would hardly be insurmountable, or are there other considerations at work here?
I tried to get some idea of the limits of the holocaust narrative in the question and answer period after her talk. What I got instead was more evidence for the circularity of the term. My question concerned the documentary about the 761st Tank Battalion, an all-Negro unit, which allegedly liberated Buchenwald. Was it Holocaust denial to say that it never happened? Lipstadt was forced to admit that the Tank Battalion/Buchenwald story was, as she put it in another context, “pure invention,” but she refused to see any implications in this for the Holocaust narrative as a whole or for Wiesel’s credibility. Wiesel, she claimed, dealing with the latter instance first, was talking about other black soldiers, but since the army wasn’t integrated at that point, that would have to mean other Black units, and there were none in the area at the time. As Professor O’Connell pointed out in the article Lipstadt and presumably her researchers meticulously vetted, “He [Wiesel] made this statement despite the fact that there were no blacks present at the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and the black unit in question was over 50 miles away on that date.”
So the question is: is it holocaust denial to say that the 761st Tank Division didn’t liberate Buchenwald? “No,” snapped Lipstadt, “because it never happened.” This, of course, brings up bigger issues about the status of the holocaust narrative itself. Is it riddled, like AIG’s portfolio, with “toxic assets.” If so, which parts of the holocaust narrative are not true? Would it have been holocaust denial to make this claim when everyone, Elie Wiesel included, was effusively praising the PBS documentary? What about other parts of the holocaust narrative, which have since gone down the memory hole? What about the lampshades made out of Jewish skin? What about the soap made from Jewish fat? What about the source of the term holocaust itself, i.e., the truckloads of Jewish babies who were thrown into burning pits? As soon as one detail becomes patently absurd, Lipstadt is on the scene to purge it from the collective memory, to ensure that no damage gets done to the holocaust narrative as a whole.
Bigger Issue
This brings us to the bigger issue, which is, how do we know what really happened?
The answer to that question is historical research, but that is precisely what the delict “holocaust denial” has been created to prevent. Holocaust denial is another word for Jewish control of discourse, in particular historical discourse, in particular historical discourse about World War II. If a historian publishes something that a powerful Jew, which is to say a Jew with powerful backers, dislikes, that person will be punished. If the person in question lives by writing books, as David Irving once did, the Lipstadt brigade will get him blacklisted in the publishing industry. If the person in question is a professor, the big Jews will try to get him fired, as Deborah Lipstadt herself did in the case of Professor David O’Connell. In this instance, Lipstadt failed, but David O’Connell’s case is not typical in this regard.
More typical is the case of Norman Finkelstein, who was fired from his job at DePaul University in Chicago. The fact that Finkelstein was a Jew himself doesn’t matter. It’s the big Jews, in this case Alan Dershowitz, who decide who is to live and who’s to die in academe and publishing. Finkelstein wrote a devastating critique of Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel, and, as a result, Dershowitz set out to destroy Finkelstein’s career. It was, in many ways, a typically Jewish response, the academic version of “You’ll never work in this town again.”
What followed was equally Jewish. In fact Finkelstein characterized the dispute as a contest over “who was the toughest Jew from Borough Park.” The definitive answer to that question is in: the big Jew from Borough Park is Alan Dershowitz, who got Finkelstein fired with the collaboration of the supine Catholic priest who is president of DePaul University. Among other things, this also shows that a selection process is at work among Jews in academe. Any Jew who goes against the interests of organized Jewry will get destroyed by the ruthless academic enforcer Jews who represent their interests. Most Jews are immune to struggles like this because they fall into the broad, gray middle category of fellow travelers, Jews who go along with the agenda in order to collect big salaries for a cushy job.
But there are larger lessons to be learned here. First of all, when it comes to a choice between money and principle, Catholic universities go for the money. Secondly, the fact that academe has become the site of unseemly brawls like this is largely the result of Jewish influence in academe. As Professor Lipstadt made abundantly clear in her talk, the universityis not the place where the big Jews seek the truth. The university is a place where Jews settle scores. It’s where they punish people who threaten the Jewish hegemony over discourse.
This should not surprise us. The university is not a Jewish creation. It is a Catholic creation of the Catholic Middle Ages, and so it should not come as a surprise that Jews have all of the difficulties which come with functioning in an alien environment when they are admitted to universities. For over 600 years, from roughly the beginning of the13th to the middle of the 19th century, Catholics were involved in the creation and preservation of the university as a place where one engaged in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. This was also the place and period of time during which representational art reached its culmination as well. The link between these phenomena—art and the university as manifestations of the Logos which finds its embodiment in Christ and its cultural expression in Catholicism—is no coincidence. Conversely, the Jewish subversion of academe is similar to the Jewish subversion of the art world, something which occurred during the same period of time and, as Israel Shamir points out in a brilliant article “A Study of Art,” in his book, Caballa of Power, for the same reasons.
Modern art is controlled by Jews. Shamir is sensitive to the sensibilities this claim offends—“’Does it matter that they are Jewish?’ asks the annoyed reader”—but the facts speak for themselves:
The Jewish influence in modern art is well attested. By 1973, some estimated that 75-80 percent of the 2500 core “art market” personnel of the United States—art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art collectors—were Jewish. In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least eight of the “Top Ten” US art collectors were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravits, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.
“Today,” wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, “Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact the contemporary art scene has a strong Jewish flavour. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish Mafia since they command power, prestige, and most of all money.”
In 1996 Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton explained that she went into a career as an art historian in order to be in a field dominated by Jews: “I wanted to be where the Jews were, that is, I wanted a profession that would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company that I kept.” The field of art history was filled with Jews. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (former publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He oversaw an institution in which Jews, said George Goodman, “have enriched every area of the Museum’s collections . . ..”
By the 1980s, four of the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur Foundation “genius awards” were also Jewish; two Jews also sat on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation. The Kaplan Fund also has had an important impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One of J. M. Kaplan’s daughters was the Chairman of the New York State Arts Council. Joan Kaplan Davidson was appointed as chairman of the $34 million New York State Arts Council in 1975 despite the fact that she was “not professionally trained in the arts.” The Getty Museum has consistently had Jews at the economic helm. . . . [former chairman] Harold Williams . . . was “raised in a Labor Zionist home in East Los Angeles.” The new president of the J. Paul Getty trust is another Jewish administrator, Barry Munitz, . . .
After a summary that covers the whole spectrum of modern art, Shamir concludes nonetheless that, “The fact that Jews are so dominating in the art world is very rarely publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden—for anyone, anywhere—to discuss the subject for fear of being branded ‘anti-Semitic.’”
The art world is dominated by Jews, not because they are good at producing art, but because during the course of the 20th century, Jewish ascendancy rose in America and American ascendancy rose in the world and the art world as well. As a result:
“The artist as creator of art disappeared and gave place to the museum curator, the collection owner. It is he who decides what sort of junk will be displayed, whose name will be written under the photo of tinned soup or a dead rat.”
Shamir is basing his verdict in this instance on a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a Jewish creation (both the architect Frank Gehry and the funders, the Guggenheim family, were Jews) which is filled with junk and, inexplicably, an exhibition of Armani suits. In this world of Jewish art, “Only the Armani brand reigns supreme, impervious to the curator’s will.”
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao provides “a good place to contemplate the present decay, nay, demise of European visual art,” which is now made up of “Rotten decomposed pig trunks in formalthehyde,” pornography, and anything else that “became a piece of art by the decision of two Mammonites, the curator and the collector.”
How did this happen? The crucial middle term in both equations (art and the university) is capitalism. The “economic freedom” of capitalism is traceable to the distinction between the Jewish prohibition on taking usury from a fellow Jew, and the permission which allowed it to be taken from “strangers.” This differential first brought about a “complete transformation of commerce and industry,” and then once capitalist principles became the cultural norm, other institutions (including art and academe) as well:
The theory of price in the Talmud and the Codes insofar as it affected trade between Jew and Jew, is exactly parallel to the scholastic doctrine of justum pretium which was prevalent in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. But as between Jew and non-Jew, there was no just price. Price was formed, as it is today, by the “higgling of the market.” . . . The differential treatment of non-Jews in Jewish commercial law resulted in the complete transformation of the idea of commerce and industry in the direction of more freedom. If we have called the Jews the Fathers of Free Trade, and therefore the pioneers of capitalism, let us note here that they were prepared for this role by the free-trading spirit of the commercial and industrial law, which received an enormous impetus towards a policy of laissez-faire by its attitude toward strangers. Clearly, intercourse with strangers could not but loosen the bonds of personal duties and replace them by economic freedom. (Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, pp. 246-7).
The spirit of capitalism brought about a similar transformation of both the art world and academe. Shamir calls this spirit “Mammon,” something which he considers the personification of capitalist Class Interest. A capitalist may wish to sell drinking water, but Mammon wants to poison all water in order to force everybody to buy drinking water. A capitalist may build the mall; but Mammon wants to destroy the world outside the mall, for the outside world interferes with the only meaningful occupation, shopping. Since “Mammon will try to eliminate every distraction to shopping,” the Jewish spirit which created the system of Mammon known as capitalism will “turn every kind of art into Conceptual art” because “For Mammonites, Art is a distraction from the most important occupation, adoration of Mammon. Mammonite reviews of Art concentrate on the price of Art.”
Jews are never content to integrate themselves into existing structures, whether those structures are states, universities, art museums or the military. They feel compelled to infiltrate and subvert the institutions which admit them as members. In the art world, the name this Jewish infiltration and subversion goes by is “conceptual art.” In an article which appeared in The New Statesman, Ivan Massow, then chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, “noticed the damage this causes for the artists who are forced to fit into the Procrustean bed of this anti-art”:
It seems sad that so many talented young artists, clawing to be noticed for their craft, are forced to ditch their talent and reinvent themselves as creators of video installations, or a machine that produces foam in the middle of a room, in order to be recognized as contemporary artists. . .. We need art lovers to tell artists that they’re not obliged to reinvent themselves into creators of piles of crap, or pass their work around like samizdat.
As some indication that Deborah Lipstadt’s affliction is shared by other descendants of the Cheka, shortly after those words appeared in print, Massow got sacked. Massow’s expulsion from the synagogue that the British art establishment had become was, as Shamir points out, led by the Jewish cultural tsar Nicholas Serota, and by the Jewish art collector and advertising magnate, a friend of Pinochet, Thatcher, and Conrad Black, Charles Saatchi. His power is unique, and an art critic, Norman Rosenthal of the British Royal Academy, suggested that “the Saatchis are probably the most important collectors of modern art anywhere in the world.”
Conceptual art isn’t art, but it is Jewish. It signals the culmination of the Jewish take-over of modern art. Conceptual art requires no artistic ability, talent or skill. That’s why Jews gravitate toward it and promote it. It’s an example of Jews defining art as what they do rather than defining art in its relationship to Logos. It’s as if, Shamir says at another point, we all woke up one day and found that only cripples could compete at the Olympics. Or, to give another example, to find out that the high jump had been replaced by a chess match. Jewish domination of the art world was not “due to the great achievements of Jewish artists.” Quite to the contrary, Shamir points out that
The Jews were extremely ill-equipped for their conquest of Olympus. For many generations, Jews never entered churches and hardly ever saw paintings. They were conditioned to reject image as part of their rejection of idols. In the course of a two thousand-year-long selection process, the visual gifts of Jews were not developed, as opposed to the abilities to learn, argue, and convince, honed to perfection in the Talmudic environment.
Shamir goes on to add that “Rejection of Christ,” the Logos incarnate who is the “main fountain of creativity,” was the ultimate reason why Jews could not be artists, because there is no visual art or poetry outside of God; at best the godless person can imitate art. For this reason, Jews are, as a rule, poor painters and sculptors. . . .While their mastery of word and ideology is very high (well above the average of 100 at 130), their average visual ability is only 75, extremely low. One can consider it a scientific proof of “no art without Christ.” Indeed, until recently there were no important Jewish painters or sculptors. The Jewish temple was supposedly built by Phoenecians and Greeks, and it had very few images. Even the Illumination of Jewish manuscripts was usually done by non-Jewish artists, who made very obvious errors trying to copy Jewish letters.
The same thing applies, mutatis mutandis to the university. The people whose defining characteristic is rejection of Logos cannot excel in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. If they are allowed into the university they will subvert the principles of the university and redefine academic achievement—things that Jews do well. If the university were the Olympics, chess would replace basketball. If Jews controlled the Olympics as effectively as they controlled the art world, only cripples could compete.
In order to disguise their total lack of artistic talent, “Visually handicapped Jews created a similar anomaly—that of non-visual ‘conceptual’ art” because “Preparation of these items places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by anybody. Such art is perfectly within Jewish abilities. Moreover, Jews with their good ability to produce ideas and read iconography will surely succeed in it. Jews bend art to fit their abilities, in order for them to succeed in this difficult (for them) occupation.”
The culmination of this trend to conceptualize and thereby redefine art can be found in works of “art,” like “Piss Christ,” an artifact which kills two birds with one stone, combining Jewish subversion of the art world with Jewish hatred of Christ. “Piss Christ” is a work of art because, as Marcel Duchamp once said, it is “in a museum.” “Piss Christ” is a work of art because a museum curator said it was. In this instance, the man responsible was Leonard Lauder, the Jew who runs the Whitney Museum, a man who was, according to Shamir, “a great friend of Ariel Sharon.” Are we talking about a conspiracy? Shamir lays the blame at the feet of Group Interest:
For Jews, their Group interest lays in undermining visual art, for they can’t compete in it. The even deeper Group Interest of Jews is to undermine Christianity, their main enemy. We see this interest satisfied . . . by their relentless attack on Mel Gibson, who dared to produce a film about Christ. . . As sacrality in Europe is unavoidably Christian, profanation of art is certainly within Jewish Group Interests. It does not mean the Jews, or even some Jews, understand that they act in their own group interest.
This is not a new phenomenon. Shamir sees the Saatchis of the world, the Jews responsible for the creation of conceptual art, as the descendants of “The Jews [who] were prominent in the great tragedy of Byzantine art, the iconoclasm. The contemporary writers leave us no doubt: Jews (a powerful community in those days as nowadays) were extremely active in promoting this concept.”
The student of formal causality who attempts to deal with Jewish influence at the university is confronted with a curious philosophical phenomenon. People regularly refer to Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists (for example, when they say ‘Baylor is a Baptist university’), but the minute one refers to Jews, the term is stricken as impermissible. The issue is philosophical. It is based on a philosophical error known as nominalism, which maintained that there was no such thing as “trees,” only individual birches, pines, oaks, etc. This extreme form of nominalism was noticed by Hilaire Belloc in the 1920s in his book on The Jews, when he wrote, “If anyone referred to a swindler as a Jew, he was an anti-Semite,” but exposing the absurdity of the claim did little to stop the tendency.
In order to unravel this error at the bottom of what is in reality a ban on thought, we need to distinguish between essence and existence. If I say that a dog is a four-legged creature with fur, I am referring to essence not existence, and my claim is not refuted when someone says, “Yesterday, I saw a hairless, Mexican dog with three legs.” Similarly, the philosophical validity of the term “Catholic” or “Jew” is not refuted when someone claims “I know a Catholic who is proabortion.” Or “Are you saying my Jewish mother-in-law is a revolutionary?” Both the Catholic and Jew get their identity qua Catholic or Jew from the form. In the case of Catholics, that form is acceptance of Christ the Logos as defined or determined by the Catholic faith, i.e., by scripture, tradition and the Magisterium. In the case of Jews, that form is defined by rejection of Christ and Logos, as determined by rabbinic interpretation of the Talmud.
Catholics are formed by the gospels; Jews are formed by the Talmud. The result is two radically different cultures.
If the culmination of Catholic culture was the creation of the university, the culmination of Jewish culture was capitalism, which, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century in America, gradually devoured the university, by restructuring it according to capitalist, which is to say, Jewish principles, in particular those articulated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, a gang of thugs which rivals Professor Lipstadt in its brutality. The institution of tenure, which was a relic of the Middle Ages, was subverted and then replaced by a system in which Jewish superstar professors like Stanley Fish could earn six figure salaries (While at UIC, Stanley Fish earned more per annum than the Governor of Illinois), while the majority of the teaching was done by wage slave adjuncts.
During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics, physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography, who claimed in his magnum opus that the study of the Talmud led to the moral corruption of the Polish Jews:
To twist a phrase out of its meaning, to use all the tricks of the clever advocate, to play upon words, and to condemn what they did not know . . . such were the characteristics of the Polish Jew.... Honesty and right-thinking he lost as completely as simplicity and truthfulness. He made himself master of all the gymnastics of the Schools and applied them to obtain advantage over any one more cunning than himself. He took delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he could not treat that way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew.
This assertion and what follows are recounted in my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History. The only thing that saved Graetz himself from the fate of Polish Jews was German culture, the German Enlightenment in particular, and role models like Moses Mendelssohn and Salomon Maimun, who saw their own separation from Talmudic culture as a liberation from Jewish bondage.
And yet in spite of that liberation and the rise of the maskilim in the Pale of the Settlement, when the Jews were finally admitted to the university in significant numbers, as happened in Russia in the mid-19th century, they used the university as a staging ground for revolutionary activity. The same thing happened in America. In his memoir Commies, Ronald Radosh desribes how he and other Jews in the Young Communist League were sent from New York to Wisconsin to take over the university there.
The same thing happened in slightly different fashion at Notre Dame. As one has come to expect, the main culprit in this matter was the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC. In addition to being the president who stole Notre Dame from the Catholic Church, Father Hesburgh has the distinction of hiring the first Jew at Notre Dame, Samuel Shapiro, who was brought into the history department. I knew Shapiro for the last 20 some years of his life; he would show up at my house and plunk himself down on the living room sofa periodically. I visited him in the hospital when he was dying, and I wrote his obituary after his death. In the Middle Ages Catholics were told to avoid contact with Jews because, they were told, the only time a Jew wants to talk with a Christian is to subvert his faith or corrupt his morals. For over 20 years Sam Shapiro tried to do just that. He attempted to undermine my faith—largely by trying to convert me to Darwinism—I tried to get him to convert to Catholicism. In the end, neither project was successful. I have written about this elsewhere; the obituary can be read at culturewars.com. For now I’d like to propose the Jewish corollary to the above statement, namely, all too often the only time a goy wants to talk to a Jew is when the goy wants big money. This was true of the princes in Medieval Europe, and it led to misery among the population at large and pogroms against the Jews, who were granted privileges that were invariably economically ruinous for the population at large in exchange for the low interest loans they provided to princes. Needless to say, this deal often included princes of the church.
Hired to get Money
It certainly applied to Father Hesburgh, an unofficially crowned prince of the Church, who hired Sam Shapiro to get money. Sam told me the story of the hiring more than once. He had just been fired from his job, had been jailed in Cuba, and was nervously looking forward to giving a speech to the history department in the hopes that they would hire him. When he got to Notre Dame, he realized that no speech was necessary. Father Hesburgh had passed the word to the department that Shapiro was to be hired no matter what. When he arrived at Notre Dame to begin teaching in the fall, Shapiro hardly had time to get his suitcases unpacked before he was sent to the Ford Foundation to ask for money. The message Hesburgh wanted to send was clear: Notre Dame was liberal enough for Ford money because they hired Jews.
Privately, however, Hesburgh knew that there were risks involved here. As an ardent devotee of everything Harvard did and stood for (the crowning moment in Hesburgh’s career was his being named to the Harvard Board of Overseers), Hesburgh must have been aware that Harvard had strict quotas that limited the number of Jews who got admitted there. There is some indication that Hesburgh not only knew this, but that he also agreed with why Harvard imposed quotas on Jews, because he told Ralph McInerny “if you let the Jews in, they take over.”
For once Father Hesburgh was precient, because this is what has happened in both Notre Dame and academe in general, as the rise of a “renowned historian” like Deborah Lipstadt shows. Over the course of the 40 years after Sam Shapiro was hired, Jews were hired in increasing numbers at Notre Dame. Like Deborah Lipstadt, the Jews at Notre Dame make up for their lack of scholarship by their zeal in thought control. A few instances should make this clear.
I was once invited by the Orestes Brownson group, a conservative Catholic organization on campus, to speak on Jan Zizka and the Hussites. When the date of the talk approached I started getting concerned phone calls from the student who was the organization’s president informing me that the organization had mysteriously run out of money and couldn’t pay me for my talk. After assuring him that the Orestes Brownson society could pay me out of next year’s budget (which they never did), I showed up to give my talk and discovered the real reason for the phone calls, namely, Professor Elliot Barkey, the Jewish professor who was the faculty moderator for this organization.
Why was a Jewish professor the moderator for the conservative Catholic organization on campus? Well, because you can take the Jew out of the Cheka, but you can’t take the Cheka out of the Jew. Barkey had put pressure on the student to have me canceled, and when that failed he decided to show up for my talk. His silence during the talk continued during the question and answer period afterward. Then after everyone had left the room, he dragged the student moderator back into the room and behind closed doors claimed that I had my facts wrong and was an anti-Semite.I was reminded of Joseph Pfefferkorn, zealous Jewish convert in Germany who ran afoul of Reuchlin and the humanists, and his lament, “A fat Jew has sat on my books!” Barkey sat silent during my entire talk and the question and answer period afterward. If he knew of any factual errors in my talk he could have pointed them out, and we could have discussed them in the open forum that academe is supposed to be. But instead the inner Jew triumphed and in the end Barkey reverted to type and attacked me behind closed doors by picking on an undergraduate who knew even less about the Hussites than Barkey himself.
If this were an isolated incident, we could ascribe it to defective personalities, but the pattern is too big to ignore. The main problem is that, ultimately,
the university, like the fine arts academy, is not a Jewish institution, and Jews can only thrive there if they redefine what goes on there to suit their Talmudic proclivities. The converse of this would be money-lending, where Christians, as in the case of the Calvinists in Holland and Geneva, could only succeed by imitating Jews. As a result of this mismatch, academe became a jungle in which the ruthless Jews drove out professors of principle, including other Jews who refused to go along with the agenda of organized Jewry. Jews have been formed by centuries of Talmudic influence to see academe as a place when they can settle ancestral scores. They don’t get mad; they get even. Their attempt to have Professor Kevin MacDonald ousted from his position at California State University at Long Beach is just one more instance of the same tendency to turn academe into an institution where the main point is settling scores, not the disinterested pursuit of the truth.
The best example of this at Notre Dame was the late Rabbi Michael Signer, the man who was “looking down on all of us” during Deborah Lipstadt’s talk. I have already written about Rabbi Signer while he was alive, and so there is no need to go into his all but complete lack of scholarly activity now that he is dead.
He did, however, come to mind when Deborah Lipstadt mentioned the joy Jews take in humiliating those who disagree with them. Signer was subtler than Lipstadt in this regard. He would do things like invite Polish bishops to come to Notre Dame to comment on books like Jan Gross’s book Neighbors, which defamed the Polish nation by fabricating a holocaust narrative out of the incident at Jedwabne. (Again, see Culture Wars, for Iwo Pogonowski’s version of what really happened.) Signer hoped that he could get the bishop to denounce Poles as anti-Semites. That is why Signer invited him. I was there in the room when he expressed his disappointment that that hadn’t happened. It was shortly after that exchange that someone came up to me and shook his fist in my face and said, “Show more respect” because I had asked the bishop about his views on the Jewish attempt to extort reparations payments from the Poles.
Signer’s aggression against the Church came out in the courses he taught on the Gospel of St. John. Students came away from his course convinced that St. John was an anti-Semite, but his main accomplishment always remained his ability to schmoose Catholics under the guise of dialogue. He was a master of reading crowds, something that came out when he organized a symposium on Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, keying up Jesuits or fellow Jews from the film department, depending on how the mood of the crowd was developing.
As a follow-up to my question about the 761st tank battalion, I asked if questioning Elie Wiesel were a form of holocaust denial. At the back of my mind was the following passage in The Holocaust Industry, “And to suggest that Wiesel has profited from the Holocaust Industry, or even to question him, amounts to Holocaust denial” (p. 70). I did not have the book in front of me and remembered the note which followed the passage as referring to Lipstadt’s book. I was wrong. The previous note referred to her book. Instead of viewing the exchange as a way of getting to the truth, Lipstadt and her handler congratulated themselves afterward on having scored another victory over another hapless goy holocaust denier. I know this because a student approached them in the middle of that conversation and relayed the details to me later.
What followed was more interesting. Obviously affected by the Obama invitation and the brouhaha that it was causing on campus, the student then asked Professor Lipstadt whether she thought abortion was a holocaust. The question elicited nothing but scorn. Lipstadt dismissed it as absurd, and went on to claim that abortion was a good thing, and cited the UN’s promotion of it as proof of its goodness. Suddenly UN resolutions weren’t so bad after all.
The student then brought up Professor O’Connell’s article on Elie Wiesel, but before she could get her question out, Lipstadt dismissed O’Connell as “third rate,” and wanted to know how she had come across the article. “My professor assigned it in class,” replied the student. At this point Professor Lipstadt could no longer restrain the inner Cheka interrogator and demanded to know the professor’s name, which the student was smart enough to withhold. One can imagine Professor Lipstadt poring over university course lists until 4:42 in the morning trying to find the offending professor. As in the case of Professor Barkey, you can take the Jew out of the Cheka, but you can’t take the Cheka out of the Jew.
In looking at the pictures of Professor Lipstadt on the web, I couldn’t help but notice that they looked nothing like the lady who spoke at Notre Dame in March. The photos of Professor Lipstadt on the web show a woman with dark straight hair; the woman who spoke at Notre Dame had red curly hair. The discrepancy brought to mind an article I had just read, that day, on Miklos Gruner and his odd relationship with Elie Wiesel (Ralph Forbes, “Shocking Charges are made against Most Infamous Holocaust ‘Survivor,’” American Free Press, March 23, 2009, p. 16). Gruner was a Hungarian Jew who was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in May of 1944. When he got to Auschwitz, Gruner met another Jew by the name of Lazar Wiesel, who had the number A-7713 tattooed on his arm. In 1986, Gruner, who was now living in Australia was contacted by a Swedish journalist who invited him to come to Sweden to meet “an old friend” by the name of Elie Wiesel. Thinking he was going to meet his old friend Lazar, Gruner was shocked when the man who now goes by the name of Elie Wiesel met him at the airport.
“I was stunned to see a man I didn’t recognize at all, who didn’t even speak Hungarian and who was speaking English with a strong French accent so our meeting was over in about ten minutes. As a good-bye gift, the man gave me a book titled Night, of which he claimed to be the author. I told everyone there, that this man was not the person he pretended to be.” When Gruner asked to see the tattoo on Wiesel’s arm, Wiesel refused, claiming that “he didn’t want to exhibit his body.” Once the shock wore off, Gruner resolved that “The world must know that Elie Wiesel is an imposter, and I am going to tell it.” Gruner even “officially reported to the FBI that Elie Wiesel is an imposter but had no answer . . . .”
Perhaps it was the after-effect of reading this story, perhaps it was the light in the room, but after much pondering, I was forced to conclude that the real Professor Lipstadt has been kidnapped by neo-Nazis and is now being held in a basement in Potsdam near Hitler’s bunker. These same neo-Nazis have obviously put an imposter in the place of “the nice Jewish girl” (her description of herself) who grew up in New York and attended City College there. I say this in all seriousness because I can’t imagine why any Jewish organization would fund someone as dull-witted, mean-spirited, vindictive, and hate-filled as Professor Lipstadt to be their emissary. Why would they promote a woman who makes Heinrich Himmler seem warm and sympathetic by comparison?
There is only one cogent answer to the question of cui bono here, and that is that the imposter Professor Lipstadt must have been put in place by Neo-Nazis or skinheads or some other group interested in promoting the spread of anti-Semitism. No one promotes the spread of anti-Semitism better than Professor Lipstadt. I noticed a significant “uptick” the minute she opened her mouth. Professor Lipstadt combines the chutzpah of Alan Dershowitz with the scholarly acumen of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, all in one package.
Professor Lipstadt gives new meaning to the term “toxic asset.” Could Goebbels have come up with a better caricature of the obnoxious Jew? No one, not even Israeli soldiers dropping white phosphorus on Palestinian women and children in Gaza, proves more conclusively that the main source of anti-Semitism in the world today is Jewish behavior.
There is, of course, one other possibility, and that is that Professor Lipstadt is not a commissar at all. She is, in fact, an agent provocateur. The imposter Professor Lipstadt’s job is to provoke anti-Semitism. In this Professor Lipstadt is like the arsonist in the fire department. She gets to rush in and put out the fires which she herself created.
I don’t want to press this issue farther than prudence allows, but there is also evidence linking Deborah Lipstadt and Notre Dame President John Jenkins in this regard. In fact there is every bit as much evidence that the real Johnny Jenkins has been kidnapped as well and that an imposter has been installed as president of Notre Dame. The same arguments apply here as well. Once again, I ask, “cui bono?” Can anyone in his right mind believe that a Holy Cross priest who had a reputation as a conservative Thomist in the philosophy department would, as one of his first acts, approve performances of an obscene piece of agit-prop like The Vagina Monologues in the name of academic freedom? No, the idea is so preposterous it makes all but certain my claim that the real Johnny Jenkins has been kidnapped and some ADL agent put in his place to make the Catholic Church look supine and ridiculous. Still not convinced? Well, as an example of the one play that would get banned at Notre Dame, Jenkins (or, more likely, the Jewish ADL imposter who took his place) listed the Oberammergau Passion Play! Who but a covert agent of the ADL could come up with something more calculated to make Catholics look like idiots?!
Ultimately, there is no mystery about why Notre Dame should be interested in simultaneously inviting both Deborah Lipstadt and Barack Obama to speak at Notre Dame. The Lipstadt redaction of the Holocaust lets every other promoter of murder off the hook. If the Holocaust is sui generis, then Obama’s promotion of the abortion holocaust is no big deal. There is no abortion Holocaust in fact. Her presence allows Father Jenkins to be the converse of the people who talk about dead babies in America and Ukrainians who got starved to death by the Jew Lazar Kaganovich and his henchmen. It allows him to become a holocaust denier in good standing, which is to say in good standing with the Jews, the only people whose opinion matters at Notre Dame.
E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars Magazine.
http://www.culturewars.com/2009/Lipstadt.htm