Culture of Death Watch

Holocaust Fundamentalists

by David O’Connell

I would like to make a few comments with respect to Dr. Jones’s enlightening article in Culture Wars (May 2009) on Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s visit to Notre Dame.

Prof. Lipstadt is not a scholar, but a militant Jewish ethnocentrist. She does not weigh evidence, come to conclusions based on that evidence, and then express a finely crafted point of view. On the contrary, like a good Stalinist, she tells us with regard to “the Holocaust.” what the official line is, what we are supposed to believe, and what we are allowed to say.

If I may borrow a tired cliché, her stance is opposed to “what America stands for:” free enquiry and free speech. Ironically, Holocaust Fundamentalists like Lipstadt, who are forever telling non-Jews that they need to “teach tolerance,” are in fact extremely intolerant people.

Through her writing and her public speaking (as Dr. Jones noted), Lipstadt engages in a vicious form of intellectual terror aimed at suppressing the free speech of those who, for whatever reason, question the official version of “the Holocaust” as concocted by the Holocaust Fundamentalists.

Readers will recall that at the center of my November 2004 CW article were the “true lies” of Elie Wiesel in his supposed “autobiography” La Nuit (Night). I made the point that such “true lies” are an integral part of the thousands of Jewish narratives collectively referred to as “the Holocaust.” They include exaggerations, distortions of fact, and blatant falsehoods, like the one I documented with regard to Wiesel. I also coined the term “Jewish Ordeal of World War II,” or “JOW,” to describe what, in my opinion, actually happened to the Jews. The JOW included persecution, deprivation of civil rights, and resettlement outside of Germany. Pope Pius XII never doubted that the JOW was taking place during the war years and devoted much effort to minimizing its effects of Europe’s Jews.

When, however, the Allied prosecutors claimed at Nuremberg that 4 to 4.5 million Jews were 1) “exterminated” at Auschwitz in “gas chambers” as a result of 2) a specific German government policy organized on an industrial scale, Pius XII was dubious. Never, ever, until his death in 1958, did he ever give the slightest hint that he believed such claims. In fact, in 1953 he did just the opposite, for he had the courage to directly attack the Nuremberg trials, both in their conception and in their unjust conclusions. Addressing a group of distinguished international jurists at an official public audience, he stated: “He who is not directly involved in the dispute feels uneasy when, at the cessation of hostilities, he sees the victor judge the vanquished for war crimes, while this same victor had been guilty of committing similar acts against the vanquished.” [“Discours au Ve Congrès de droit pénal,” Documents Pontificaux, 1953, p. 472. “Celui qui n’est pas impliqué dans le differend ressent un malaise lorsqu’après la fin des hostilités, il voit le vainqueur juger le vaincu pour des crimes de guerre, alors que ce vainqueur s’est rendu coupable envers le vaincu de faits analogues.” ]

Although the Pontiff spoke in diplomatic terms, his statement nonetheless allows us to quickly grasp that he was criticizing much more than what he explicitly alluded to. In a word, Pope Pius XII never, ever believed in either the “gas chambers” or in a specific German plan to wipe out all the Jews of Europe. Sadly, the Beloved Pontiff’s would-be Catholic “defenders,” who are all too ready to make concessions to the Jewish side instead of pressing them to prove their allegations, seem to be unaware of these words and behave as if Pius XII accepted all the accusations made at Nuremberg. You cannot do so if you hope to win the argument with the Holocaust Fundamentalists. Conversely, Pius’s words seem to be quite well known to his Jewish adversaries. His explicit rejection of the validity of Nuremberg also helps to explain why they hate him so much, and have been trying to settle scores with him ever since.

I might also add in passing that while various holocaust museums do a fair to adequate job of documenting the JOW, they fail miserably in their attempts to document “the Holocaust.”

For this reason, Lipstadt’s views are especially insulting to Catholics. After all, the Holocaust Fundamentalists have scripted Pius XII as one of the arch villains, along with Hitler, of the self-referential and narcissistic Jewish folk tale known as “the Holocaust.” In attacking me, and in seeking to have me fired from my job, and my family put out on the street, Lipstadt was sending a clear message. I had to be punished for not toeing the line with respect to holocaust fraudster Elie Wiesel. She realized all too well that the stakes were – and remain – very high. After all, if the “pope” of “the Holocaust,” (who claimed in his supposed autobiography, Night, that he saw huge open pits full of truckloads of Jewish babies being burned alive at Auschwitz) has actually been lying to us all these years, (as the Allied aerial photography, declassified since 1979, makes clear), then he is reduced to being just another Jewish charlatan, like Freud before him, and like Madoff and so many others today. It follows then that those who, like Lipstadt, belong to that core group of Holocaust Fundamentalists who vigorously promote and defend Wiesel despite his clear record of mendacity, are equally guilty of deception.

As Dr. Jones points out in his article, Lipstadt likes to boast about her bizarre libel trial against David Irving. But she played virtually no role in that trial. The fact that her lawyers never allowed her to take the witness stand and be questioned under oath makes it quite clear that they took a dim view of the intellectual abilities of this “chaired” professor at Emory University! After the trial, the Jewish writer D. D. Guttenplan wrote a book on the event and the people involved in it. He points out that Lipstadt was turned down for tenure in Jewish Studies at UCLA. She then somehow got a teaching appointment at a small liberal arts institution, Occidental College. From there, she came to Emory, where, incredibly, she was given an endowed chair. How does one explain this meteoric rise from denial of tenure at a respected research university like UCLA to a full professorship and chair at another renowned research university? It was quite a remarkable accomplishment, especially in light of the absence of anything resembling a serious record of scholarly accomplishment.

In this respect, Lipstadt’s experience strangely parallels Elie Wiesel’s own rapid rise in academe. He quickly rose from part timer to full professor at a branch of the City University of New York and then was awarded a Mellon Chair at Boston University. All this happened rather quickly and in spite of the fact that he lacked scholarly publications in his supposed field. This is bad enough, but we must also recall that he does not even possess a high school diploma! Wiesel is forever telling the media that he has published, let’s count them, - 30, then 40, and now 50 - books. But who reads them? What influence have they had on contemporary thought? Close to zero, if not just plain zero. The fact that he has published so many books that only a few people care to read is, if anything, yet another indictment of the Zionist-dominated publishing industry in this country. Its commitment to the propaganda effort on behalf of a foreign power is one reason why so many unread – and indeed unreadable – books by Wiesel have been published.

To return to Lipstadt, Guttenplan explains her rise to financial security at Emory University, in part at least, by the fact that a Jewish group called the Dorot Foundation funds her chair. He also informs us that this foundation is a strong supporter of Israel and Zionism, as well as of the U. S. Jewish Community at the grass roots level. In other words, her appointment at Emory has a strong political dimension to it. Guttenplan points out that some people believe this fact has contributed to Lipstadt’s poor reputation as a scholar. He writes: “This coziness has prompted some academics to patronizingly dismiss Lipstadt’s work as a ‘JCC [Jewish Community Center] version of history.’ The implication is that while Lipstadt’s books may make Jews feel better, or give them an opportunity to vent their anger, they have little do with the hard work of presenting evidence, criticizing sources, and weighing interpretations that give history its analytical rigor and epistemological dignity.” Dr. Jones, to his credit, detected Lipstadt’s scholarly imposture rather quickly! (D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial. (New York, Norton, 2002), 65.

Lipstadt apparently felt entitled to attempt to strip me of my job, but was careful to do it behind closed doors, where there could be no open debate. To my knowledge, Lipstadt has never mentioned me or my work on her blog, nor has she ever attacked me as a “denier” in the local newspaper, the AJC. She engages in this “dynamic silence” because she knows that she cannot refute my arguments, as the results of the “investigation” at GSU made clear.

Dr. Jones, in his article, clearly perceives the racist double standards that are at the heart of Lipstadt’s thinking. Likewise, Guttenplan, in his book, remarked on the presence of the same double standard at the Irving / Lipstadt trial. While Judge Gray regularly took note of Irving’s racist views, he conveniently ignored those of Lipstadt. Guttenplan writes: "Even so, it was hard not to feel queasy listening to [attorney] Rampton quiz Irving about his attitude to 'intermarriage between the races'--on behalf of a defendant [Lipstadt] who has written, 'We know what we fight against: anti-Semitism, and assimilation [of Jews with non-Jews], intermarriage [between Jews and non-Jews] and Israel-bashing, but who uttered not one word of public protest when her American publisher issued Charles Murray’s neo-eugenicist tract The Bell Curve."(209)

Guttenplan, as a Jew, was embarrassed by Lipstadt’s unabashed Jewish racism, as well he should be.

At the beginning of the letter that she wrote in an effort to deprive me of my livelihood, Lipstadt boasted about her work, stating that she is an expert in what she calls “holocaust denial,” and that she is the author of a book entitled Denying the Holocaust (1993). But this book was hardly a “scholarly” work that treats its subject in an objective manner. On the contrary, it was commissioned and published by The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This institution is a major center for the production of pro-Zionist propaganda materials. The polemical ethnocentricity of Prof. Lipstadt’s book is clearly revealed in the list of groups she credits in her preface: the ADL, the AJC, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for Jewish Affairs in London, and the Canadian Jewish Congress. These groups are all integral to what Prof. Norman Finkelstein rightly calls the “Holocaust Industry.”

The people who were behind the publication of this book are not interested in any point of view that wavers from their official, media-enforced and government-supported, propaganda line. Lipstadt’s role is to supply an academic veneer to the propaganda offerings of the Holocaust Fundamentalists.

Appallingly, Emory University appears to have granted her tenure and a chair on the basis of such “work,” and remains fully committed to supporting only this one-sided view of “the Holocaust.” How can that institution be fully committed to “academic freedom” and “freedom of enquiry” while at the same time giving its full support to Lipstadt’s Stalinist approach to study of “the Holocaust?” It will be interesting to see if Lipstadt’s Emory University-financed sabbatical leave, during which she claims to be immersed in “advanced holocaust studies,” results in a publication worthy of a “chaired” professor.

In conclusion, Lipstadt and the other Holocaust Fundamentalists, whose support for Israel is unwavering, seek to forestall any free and open discussion of “the Holocaust.” They do so in part because “the Holocaust” has now become one of the principal justifications for Israel’s appalling (to put it mildly) human rights record. For this reason, any person, like me, who . even indirectly asks legitimate questions about “the Holocaust,” or is critical of its sacred cow, Elie Wiesel, must be viciously attacked, silenced and destroyed.

Thank you again, Dr. Jones, for taking the time to attend the Lipstadt event at Notre Dame and for offering your incisive comments on it.

David O'Connell is a professor of French at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

This piece was published as a letter to the editor in the July/August, 2009 issue of Culture Wars.

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Is Notre Dame Still Catholic? by E. Michael Jones. Revised Second Edition. In March 2009, Notre Dame was embroiled in the biggest controversy to hit campus since the performance of The Vagina Monologues. Its president, John Jenkins, CSC, had announced that the university planned to give Pres. Barack Obama an honorary doctorate. Within hours, a storm of protest erupted. By April, over 250,000 people had signed a petition condemning Notre Dame’s action, and Bishop Thomas J. Olmstead of Phoenix joined his colleague Bishop D’Arcy in denouncing Jenkins’ decision to honor Pres. Obama, calling it a “public act of disobedience” and a “grave mistake.” But this story didn’t begin in 2009. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Fidelity (and more recently, Culture Wars) published a series on Notre Dame that rocked the Catholic world. This newly updated and expanded book collects 25 years of investigative journalism. An extensive dossier of what went wrong at Notre Dame, this book chronicles the demise of Catholic education in America and explains the demise of Catholic culture and Catholic political power. $27 + S&H, Paperback. Read More Order

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