Not surprisingly, given deniers’ objective of delegitimizing Israel, Arab countries have proven particularly receptive. During the 1970s, when Holocaust denial was first trying to present itself as a credible academic enterprise, Saudi Arabia financed the publication of a number of books accusing Jews of creating the Holocaust hoax in order to win support for Israel. These books were distributed worldwide.{52} Articles denying the genocide against the Jews have appeared in publications of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, an affiliate of the International Red Cross. The latter published an article charging that “the lie concerning the existence of gas chambers enabled the Jews to establish the State of Israel.”{53} Another article in a Palestinian journal chided Jews for complaining about gestapo treatment when they were really “served healthy food” by the Germans.{54} Arabs have long argued that Israel was created by the United Nations because the world felt guilty over Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The deniers’ claims add fuel to these charges. Not only did the world, as Robert Faurisson said to me, displace one people “from its land so another could acquire it,” but Holocaust denial proves that it was deceived into doing so.{55}
The confluence between anti-Israel, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial forces was exemplified by a world anti-Zionist conference scheduled for Sweden in November 1992. Though canceled at the last minute by the Swedish government, scheduled speakers included Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, Faurisson, Irving, and Leuchter. Also scheduled to participate were representatives of a variety of antisemitic and anti-Israel organizations, including the Russian group Pamyat, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, and the fundamentalist Islamic organization Hamas.{56}
Echoes of Holocaust denial have also been heard from individuals who are not associated with extremist or overtly antisemitic groups. In an interview with Esquire magazine in February 1983, Robert Mitchum, who played a leading role in the television production of Herman Wouk’s World War II saga, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, suggested that there was doubt about the Holocaust. Asked about the slaughter of six million Jews, he replied, “so the Jews say.” The interviewer, incredulous, repeated Mitchum’s comment verbatim, “So the Jews say?” and Mitchum responded, “I don’t know. People dispute that.”{57}
The editor of The Progressive, a socialist monthly, recently observed that while he is used to receiving a significant amount of “crackpot mail,” the material he receives from Holocaust deniers is a “more subtly packed, slicker” form of hate propaganda. Despite its restrained and objective tone, he wondered who if anyone might be convinced by such “pernicious rot.” His question was answered when he received a letter from a high school senior who described himself as eager for articles that grappled with difficult ideas. He complimented the editor for the wide variety of topics covered in the magazine but urged that he also address “controversial ideas about the Holocaust” such as the existence of gas chambers. The editor, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, wrote the young student assuring him that if he meant to suggest that there were no gas chambers he was wrong. The student sent back a strongly worded challenge asking the editor to reveal precisely how many gas chambers he had actually seen and how he had managed to survive.{58}
In Illinois, two parents have conducted an extremely focused letter campaign against the state law that mandates teaching of the Holocaust in all schools in the state. Though many of their arguments are the standard charges repeated ad infinitum in denial publications, these parents have added a new element, threatening to withdraw their children from classes that taught the history of the Holocaust to protect them from “this highly questionable and vulgar hate material.”{59} Their letter, sent to thousands of people including elected officials, educators, academicians, and parents, asked recipients to ponder how it was that a small minority was able to use the school systems and to “manipulate our children for their political and national purposes.”{60}
The inroads deniers have been able to make into the American educational establishment are most disconcerting. Defenders—Noam Chomsky probably the best known among them—have turned up in a variety of quarters. The MIT professor of linguistics wrote the introduction to a book by Faurisson. Faurisson, whom the New York Times described as having “no particular prominence on the French intellectual or academic scene,” has argued that one of the reasons he does not believe that homicidal gas chambers existed is that no death-camp victim has given eyewitness testimony of actual gassings.{61} This argument contradicts accepted standards of evidence. It is as if a jury refused to convict a serial killer until one of his victims came back to say, “Yes, he is the one who killed me.” Such reasoning is so soft that it makes one wonder who could possibly take him seriously. Moreover, it ignores the extensive testimony of the Sonderkommandos who dragged the bodies from the gas chambers.
Chomsky contended that, based on what he had read of Faurisson’s work, he saw “no proof” that would lead him to conclude that the Frenchman was an antisemite.{62} According to Chomsky, not even Faurisson’s claims that the Holocaust is a “Zionist lie” are proof of his antisemitism. “Is it antisemitic to speak of Zionist lies? Is Zionism the first nationalist movement in history not to have concocted lies in its own interest?”{63} That students editing a college newspaper or television producers interested in winning viewers should prove unable to make such distinctions is disturbing. That someone of Chomsky’s stature should confuse the issue is appalling. Indeed, it was this kind of reasoning that led Alfred Kazin to describe Chomsky as a “dupe of intellectual pride so overweening that he is incapable of making distinctions between totalitarian and democratic societies, between oppressors and victims.”{64} Though Chomsky is his own unique case, his spirited defense of the deniers shocked many people including those who thought they were inured to his antics.
In his essay Chomsky argued that scholars’ ideas cannot be censored irrespective of how distasteful they may be.[4] Throughout this imbroglio Chomsky claimed that his interest was Faurisson’s civil rights and freedom to make his views known.{65} During the past few years, as deniers have intensified their efforts to insinuate themselves into the university world by placing ads denying the Holocaust in campus newspapers, echoes of Chomsky’s arguments have been voiced by students, professors, and even university presidents. (See chapter 10 for additional information about denial on campus.) In response to student and faculty protests about the decision of the Duke Chronicle to run an ad denying the Holocaust, the president of Duke University, Keith Brodie, said that to have done otherwise would have “violated our commitment to free speech and contradicted Duke’s long tradition of supporting First Amendment rights.”{66} Brodie failed to note that the paper had recently rejected an ad it deemed offensive to women. No one had complained about possible violations of the First Amendment.
4
It is ironic that this internationally known professor should have become such a defender of Faurisson’s right to speak when he would have denied those same rights to proponents of America’s involvement in Vietnam. In