Does American Holocaust Denial Continue?

Haven’t Jews been apologized to enough for the holocaust over 60-years ago? Isn’t holocaust denial just mad mutterings by that guy in Iran, and a nutty author from England, that all knowledgeable people reject?

Apparently not. The anti-American Left in the U.S. and abroad have adopted the anti-Israel anti-Semitism of the Arabs, and have infected our campuses. Products of this propaganda graduate into journalism. They frequently display historical ignorance, moral relativism, and outright slant favoring anti-Israel and anti-Semitic charges without professional balance of facts.

Professor Mitchell Langbert of Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., wrote the below post of his email to a leader of the American Association of University Professors to clarify whether it is inviting holocaust deniers to a conference, the AAUP claiming this as a free speech issue. The AAUP did not respond.

As The American Thinker revealed:

The organization is co-sponsoring a meeting at the prestigious Bellagio Conference Center on the banks of Lake Como, to discuss an academic boycott of Israeli universities….
More than a third of the participants publicly support boycotts of Israeli universities out of opposition to the Jewish state, according to the New York Sun….
It seems that AAUP is not eager to have debates on other questions – Intelligent Design, or boycotting the United Nations, for instance. AAUP won’t have a Bellagio meeitings with David Horowitz, or with other critics of Political Correctness on campus. AAUP will never debate the pros and cons of radical feminism.
Those are not real academic questions, you see.
But boycotting Israel is open to debate.
When you agree to debate a question, you legitimize the issue. This is a standard tactic of campus radicals around the US, who hold positions of power in AAUP….
Our universities are bastions of intolerance in a sea of freedom. But AAUP hasn’t done anything to protect free speech on campus. It doesn’t seem eager to try.
Maybe AAUP’s own radicals are just trying to export campus intolerance to the State of Israel.

Just as Mitch’s post came online, I was debating with myself whether to post about some old despicable anti-Semitic history from the 1930’s involving leaders of journalism. My first reaction was, how many apologies do Jews need about the holocaust?

My second reaction, in answer, is that it’s not about apologies to Jews, but rather about educating today about the consequences of intolerance and cowardice, not just for Jews but for all those who are slaughtered across the globe for religious, racial, tribal excuses, and whose fate is sealed in Western avoidance of confrontation with their evil murderers.

It is about those in academia and journalism whose Leftist inclinations allow and promote purposeful historical blindness to occur today. When Israel is directly threatened by Iranian nuclear missiles, as is much of Europe, the consequences of allowing this ignorance or political anti-Western activism to stand unchallenged could be a repeat of the 1930’s and 1940’s mass bloodshed and genocide.

Over 70 leading journalists and journalism professors sent a letter to the Newspaper Association of America for the top journalism association to “publicly acknowledge” the profession “was wrong to turn its back on Jewish refugee journalists fleeing Hitler.”

Signatories come from across the political spectrum, from Left to Right, including Marvin Kalb, Martin Peretz, Ben Wattenberg, Jeff Jacoby, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Todd Gitlin, Debbie Schlussel, editors at leading journals like Foreign Affairs, academic journalism leaders at Columbia, Rutgers, Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas, Indiana, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and leading journalists at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and PBS.

The letter and the full list is here. The New York Times coverage is here.

At a panel on “America and the Holocaust: New Research” the author, Laurel Leff, of the book Buried by the Times about the New York Times’ purposeful failure to highlight the holocaust although it was aware, presented additional findings about the failure of American journalism to stand up to Hitler’s depravities even when it involved their own professional colleagues. Laurel Leff is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and currently a professor at Northeastern University.

-- While other university departments and disciplines added Jewish refugees to their faculties to help them escape Hitler, none of America's approximately forty journalism schools and departments took in Jewish refugee journalists, and no major newspaper hired refugee journalists.

-- In 1939, refugee advocates Prof. David Reisman (later a famous Harvard sociologist) and Prof. Carl Friedrich requested ten minutes to speak at the convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association about the plight of Jewish refugee journalists. Their request was rejected.

-- Refusals to aid Jewish refugee journalists were often laced with antisemitic comments. For example, Lawrence Murphy, dean of the University of Illinois School of Journalism and one of the leading figures in journalism education, opposed aiding the refugees and rationalized it on the grounds that it was for their own good. "The minute that Jews show up in numbers they become a threat to the others ... they would occupy all the jobs there are (and) are quite likely to work together in filling the jobs," Murphy wrote. "We must hurt them to help them. We must keep them from becoming too prominent and assertive..."

Prof. Stephen Norwood, of the University of Oklahoma, said in his remarks at the conference:

-- Despite book-burnings and anti-Jewish violence in Nazi Germany, the leaders of elite American universities such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins refused to speak out against the Hitler regime during 1933-1937. Columbia president Nicholas Butler expelled a student for leading an anti-Hitler rally on campus. Harvard president James Conant warmly welcomed Ernst Hanfstangl, a Harvard alumnus who was Hitler's foreign press secretary, when he visited the campus in 1934. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a visit by Nazi Germany's ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther.

-- Even though German universities fired their Jewish professors and adopted a Nazi curriculum, prominent American universities continued to maintain relations with them. They exchanged students with German universities, and sent representatives to a celebration at the University of Heidelberg in 1936 (Williams College was one of the few that refused to participate). Harvard Law School dean Roscoe Pound accepted a honorary degree from the University of Berlin in 1934. Johns Hopkins president Isaiah Bowman, a famed geographer, accepted an honor from a Nazi geographical society.

-- Antisemitic comments that Prof. Norwood found in the private correspondence of some prominent American university officials suggest that bigotry was at least part of the motive for their positions regarding Hitler and German Jewry. Harvard president Conant urged the DuPont Corporation not to hire the famous German Jewish chemist Max Bergmann, because he was "very definitely of the Jewish type." Yale president James Rowland Angell asked his deans to examine whether Jewish students were engaged in cheating and financial wrongdoing. Johns Hopkins president Isaiah Bowman refused to sign a petition against anti- Jewish discrimination in Polish universities in 1937, and claimed the protest was the result of "pressure from Jews in New York."

Unless the history of anti-Semitism is made clear, and its current practitioners in academia and the media exposed today, 6-million Jews and tens of millions of non-Jews died for nothing, and today’s perpetrators of anti-Western hate will be all the more encouraged to proceed with their program of massive violence.