The Targum’s decision to print the ad as a column and surround it with dissenting opinion won it the editorial praise of the New York Times: “The editors thus transformed revulsion into education.”{100} Nevertheless there is reason to question that decision. First of all it saved Smith the approximately five hundred dollars it would have cost to purvey his extremist arguments. The paper proudly proclaimed that it had “not accepted any payment” from him, as if the acceptance of money made them accomplices. In fact it was Smith, Rolnick acknowledged, who had “encouraged” him to run it as an op-ed piece. Smith may well have recognized that, the dissenting articles notwithstanding, the full text of his ad was likely to win converts to his cause even as it mobilized some people against him. Given the space the Daily Targum devoted to the topic, a lengthy analytical piece quoting heavily from the ad and demolishing it point by point would have served the same purpose and given Smith less of a chance to lay out his “argument.” Some wonder what was the danger of allowing Smith his say, particularly when surrounded by articles that firmly and swiftly refuted him. But the Daily Targum had given Smith just what he wanted: They made him the other side of a debate. Although it may not have been evenly balanced, although more room may have been given to the articles that surrounded his, and although editorials may have condemned him, he had nonetheless been rendered a point of view.{101} Smith seems to be acutely cognizant of the efficacy of even bad publicity. That may well be why, when a rally at Rutgers denounced Holocaust revisionism and his ad, he declared himself “grateful and delighted” that the rally was held.{102}
In the spring of 1992 Smith began to circulate a second ad that was essentially a reprint of an article from the Journal of Historical Review by Mark Weber. The article, entitled “Jewish Soap,” blamed the postwar spread of the rumor that the Nazis made Jews into soap on Simon Wiesenthal and Stephen Wise—a claim that has no relationship to reality. Echoing the first ad, it charged that historians of the Holocaust have “officially abandon[ed] the soap story” in order to “save what’s left of the sinking Holocaust ship by throwing overboard the most obvious falsehoods.”{103} The point of this second effort, Smith acknowledged, was to submit a piece that was thoroughly “referenced.”{104} The ad was submitted with a cover letter that claimed that the original ad had been rejected by a number of papers because it was not “sourced.” In contrast, every “significant claim” in the second ad was backed up by sources.{105} Entitled “Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus [False in one thing, false in all]… The ‘Human Soap’ Holocaust Myth,” the essay on soap was preceded by a statement citing Roman law: If a witness could not be “believed in one thing, he should not be believed in anything.”{106}
Most universities that received the second ad, including those who had accepted the first, rejected it out of hand. When it was submitted to the Ohio State Lantern, the editor immediately refused it, observing that “the only news value in this is that Bradley Smith is approaching schools again.” Having been burned once, the editor seemed far more cognizant of Smith’s motives. “The fact that it is Holocaust Remembrance Week indicates that he’s in to ruffle some feathers and stir up trouble again.”{107} The arguments about the First Amendment and censorship no longer seemed to apply.[5]
At the University of Texas the deliberations about the second ad were directly linked to what had occurred with the first ad. The editor of the Daily Texan, Matthew Connally, had wanted to run the first.{108} However, after familiarizing himself with the “group behind the ad,” he reversed his decision. “They were not only showing a disregard for the truth but they were doing it with malicious intent.”{109} The Texas Student Publication Board (TSPB), which has ultimate authority over the paper’s advertising and financial affairs, supported Connally and voted to reject the ad. After hearing Connally’s arguments, TSPB member Professor John Murphy, who initially voted in favor of running the ad, decided to oppose it.
But that was not the end of the story at Texas. In April the paper received Smith’s second ad. Though the Daily Texan’s editorial board was firmly against running it, they quickly discovered that the decision was not in their hands: They were told by the TSPB that they must run it. “We do not want to do this. But we’re being told we must follow orders,” a member of the editorial board told me sadly.{110} This time Professor Murphy emerged as the ad’s most vociferous supporter. According to the Houston Chronicle, Murphy, joined by other faculty members on the TSPB, argued that the paper needed to publish “divergent and unpopular opinion.”{111} Facing a situation in which it would be forced to publish something it “detested,” the editorial board considered leaving all the pages blank except for the ad. (They were told that since this would affect advertising revenues, they did not have the authority to do so.)
The ad was scheduled to run on Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom HaShoah, 1992. Students opposed to the ad discovered that the internal regulations of the TSPB prohibited the newspaper from printing opinion ads unless all persons cited in those ads had granted permission to be quoted. I was among the scholars quoted in the ad. Fortuitously, I was scheduled to visit the campus to deliver a lecture on Holocaust denial the day before the ad’s scheduled publication. When I indicated my opposition to being cited in the ad, an emergency meeting of the TSPB board was called to discuss the matter. I informed the board that I had not given my permission to be quoted in the ad and was opposed to being associated with it. I pointed out that the ad specifically violated their own regulations.[6] Despite my objections and my announcement that I would explore the possibility of legal remedies should the ad be published, the TSPB voted to run it, postponing publication for a few days so that my name could be dropped and a rebuttal prepared. Two days later the university’s legal counsel suggested that because individuals quoted in the ad had protested—by this time other professors mentioned in the ad had joined the protest—the ad should be dropped.{112} The TSPB then voted to reject the ad. But the story did not end here. In February 1993 the TSPB compelled the paper to accept an ad promoting a video exposé of the gas chambers by a CODOH member claiming to be a Jew. Based on advertisements and articles by this young man, the video apparently contains the same recycled arguments deniers have been making for years. Though the editorial board and the university president opposed the ad because it was “deceptively rigged,” the TSPB ran the ad. The TSPB’s three faculty members, two working professionals, and five of its six students voted for the ad.
During this period students were not the deniers’ only campus targets. For more than two years—not for the first time—deniers had tried to insinuate themselves into the scholarly arena by finding ways to place Holocaust denial on the agenda of organizations of professional historians. They sought to force these groups to treat denial as a legitimate enterprise. In the spring of 1980 all members of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) received a complimentary copy of the first issue of the Journal of Historical Review. It was quickly revealed that the IHR had purchased the OAH’s twelve thousand member mailing list. Some OAH members protested the sale of the list to this neo-Nazi group. Others argued that to deny anyone the right to purchase the list would be to abridge intellectual freedom. The executive secretary of the OAH proposed to resolve the issue by inviting a panel of “well-qualified historians” to analyze the Journal and evaluate it based on the “credentials of the contributors and the use of evidence.” He would then transmit this evaluation to the OAH executive board so it could decide how to treat the matter.
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At the meeting one of the editors of the paper, an African American, stood up and said that while he could not personally know what it felt like to lose so many of one’s coreligionists in the Holocaust, he “knew” the pain of slavery. He would fight anyone’s attempt to deny that. Consequently he felt obligated to fight this attempt at denial.
He also turned to Murphy and said that he understood that one of Murphy’s objections was that it was infantilizing to prevent the students from deciding on the contents of the ad themselves. He wondered if it was not equally infantilizing to tell an entire editorial board to publish something whose publication it uniformly opposed.