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“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 that
is also applicable to Notre Dame as an institution. Both 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
Bishops 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 suggest, 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 then 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 that she debate him on the
facts instead of being allowed to launch vulgar personal attacks on NPR with
impunity.” In an interview
which 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 if they fired O’Connell on trumped up charges of fraud, that he
would then 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. But 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 that 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, of course, 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 if 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 university 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 rather 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 in so far 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 same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the university;
however, I see the cause of this convergence in the form, which is to say,
formal causality. 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 (As
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--and 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 went on to cite 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 how
she had come across the article. “My professor assigned 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 (or the
Neo-Nazi-funded imposter who is now going around using her name) 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
very 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 both 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. This article was published in the May 2009 issue of Culture Wars. |
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