U. of Wisconsin student newspaper censors holocaust-revisionist ad
The story is on Bradley Smith's "One Person With Proof" blog.
The newspaper's board of directors' reaction is political correctness run amok. The board had a golden opportunity to support freedom of expression, and blew it. The board members should be ashamed of themselves.
The ad made no incitement to anti-Semitism and Bradley Smith is not responsible for threatening or hateful anti-Semitic comments that were made in response to the ad.
It is obvious that the biggest purpose of condemning holocaust denial/revisionism as anti-Semitic is to attempt to suppress debate on the subject.
My own view of the holocaust is that whereas there was persecution of Jews and atrocities were committed against Jews, a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impractical because the Nazis had no objective and reliable way(s) of identifying Jews and non-Jews. What is anti-Semitic about that viewpoint?
If the newspaper receives financial support from the university, which is a public university, then I think that Bradley Smith has grounds for a lawsuit over the board's declaration of refusal to publish the ad in the future.
The newspaper's board of directors' reaction is political correctness run amok. The board had a golden opportunity to support freedom of expression, and blew it. The board members should be ashamed of themselves.
The ad made no incitement to anti-Semitism and Bradley Smith is not responsible for threatening or hateful anti-Semitic comments that were made in response to the ad.
It is obvious that the biggest purpose of condemning holocaust denial/revisionism as anti-Semitic is to attempt to suppress debate on the subject.
My own view of the holocaust is that whereas there was persecution of Jews and atrocities were committed against Jews, a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impractical because the Nazis had no objective and reliable way(s) of identifying Jews and non-Jews. What is anti-Semitic about that viewpoint?
If the newspaper receives financial support from the university, which is a public university, then I think that Bradley Smith has grounds for a lawsuit over the board's declaration of refusal to publish the ad in the future.
Labels: Holocaust revisionism (new #1)
posted by Larry Fafarman | 3/19/2010 11:08:00 AM
10 Comments:
"the Nazis had no objective and reliable way(s) of identifying Jews and non-Jews."
What about the various ways that have already been enumerated on this blog?
The ways certainly would be objective if not 100% reliable. Many methods of catagorization are not 100% reliable. An example is classifying moths and butterflies as to whether they have a cocoon or a crysalis.
If you had Jewish ancestors the Nazis would have classified you as a Jew whether or not your practiced the religion. It would certainly be possible to identify such people to a very high degree of accuracy. Identifying those who practiced the Jewish religion would be more difficult.
Systematic does not mean flawless.
>>>>>>> If you had Jewish ancestors the Nazis would have classified you as a Jew whether or not your practiced the religion. <<<<<<
A lot of people don't even know whether or not their own ancestors are Jewish, so how could the Nazis know? It would be especially hard for the Nazis to make such determinations outside of Germany, where the Nazis had limited access to records. And what about people of mixed ancestry? What is objective about deciding the minimum amount of Jewish blood justifying sending someone to a death camp?
The Nazis mostly just rounded up people en masse -- there was no attempt to do an individual genealogical study on most people who were rounded up.
You falsely assume that just describing something means that it is easy to do. Imagine actually going to a strange foreign country and trying to determine who is and who is not Jewish.
In the book "IBM and the Holocaust," Edwin Black claimed the Nazis identified all of the Jews of Europe by means of IBM Hollerith card processing machines. Even if all the necesary data had been available, it is obvious that those machines, which could just read, sort, and merge a few cards at a time, had no such data-processing capability.
>>>>> Systematic does not mean flawless. <<<<<<
If a systematic Jewish holocaust is not flawless, then we would be getting a lot of complaints from people who believed that they were mistakenly identified as Jews. AFAIK, there were not a lot of such complaints.
"If a systematic Jewish holocaust is not flawless, then we would be getting a lot of complaints from people who believed that they were mistakenly identified as Jews. AFAIK, there were not a lot of such complaints."
The dead rarely complain.
>>>>>> The dead rarely complain. <<<<<
Survivors complain, though. So do the relatives and friends of the dead.
The relatives seem to have gone up the chimney also.
"the Nazis had no objective and reliable way(s) of identifying Jews and non-Jews"
then how were they able to round up most of the Jews and put them in ghettos and camps?
Larry, you're a real piece of work, aren't you? I would put effort into refuting your holocaust revisionism, except that it so wonderfully discredits your antievolutionism and drags down the creationist side, why should I bother?
That said, despite the astonishing fact that you are blogging confidently that this is some big mystery, there are a lot of obvious ways the Nazis could figure out who the Jews were with a significant degree of accuracy.
1. Raid synagogues. Get membership list.
2. Consult government records. See who self-identifies as Jewish (remember, much of this would have been going on decades before it was clear the Nazis would come to power and try to kill them all).
3. Get citizens to rat on other citizens. This happened a lot in territories that Germany occupied.
4. Target common Jewish names for further investigation. I.e. raid house, look for Jewish religious paraphernalia etc.
5. Target Jewish ghettos. Another huge method in occupied Eastern Europe.
The fact that you, Larry, haven't even bothered to do the most basic reading on the Holocaust to figure out these basics is really shocking. This by itself proves that you don't deserve to be taken seriously on this or any other scholarly topic.
>>>Survivors complain, though. So do the relatives and friends of the dead<<<<
Yes, and none of them are saying the Holocaust didn't happen. In fact quite a lot of them commented on how good those Dang Nazi's were at identifying and rounding up Jews.
Sorry to disturb your musings, gentlemen, but identification of individuals as jews was really rather easy.
When in doubt, it wasn’t the state which had to prove that a person was a jew, it was the obligation of said person to prove that he wasn’t.
This was done by the so called "Ariernachweis" (Aryan certificate) or by "Ahnennachweis" ("ancestry passport").
"You could get almost every jew that way back then", my grandfather used to say.
I still have the documents of nearly every member of my family of those days.
Johann Ehlers, Germany
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