“Everyone was doing it.” And, still are.

Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley responded to Inside Higher Ed, regarding coziness by the then Columbia president between 1933-1937 to Nazi speakers and universities, that:

If the events that Professor Norwood describes are examples of “collaboration,” then the collaborators include many thousands of leaders and citizens of the United States, Britain, and many other nations.

Brinkley has been roundly criticized, not for this statement of fact but for Columbia’s failure to apologize for its particular acts.

However, there’s a broader and more contemporary issue at stake: What responsibility do today’s universities have to avoid repeating such acts?

A professorial critic replies:

That kind of everyone-was-doing-it attitude is appalling. Is that the kind of message that one of the most prominent universities in America wants to send to its students – that if many people are doing something, it can’t be so bad…?

Anne Applebaum addresses today’s historical revisionism in her Washington Post column, as it emanates from a Jimmy Carter, from Arabist and Palestinian apologists, or from Iran’s current exercise in holocaust denial:

Of course, Holocaust denial also has broader roots and many more adherents in the Middle East, which may be part of the point, too: Questioning the reality of the Holocaust has long been another means of questioning the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which was indeed created by the United Nations in response to the Holocaust, and which has indeed incorporated Holocaust history into its national identity. If the Shiite Iranians are looking for friends, particularly among Sunni Arabs, Holocaust denial isn't a bad way to find them….

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this particular brand of historical revisionism is no joke, and we shouldn't be tempted to treat it that way. Yes, we think we know this story already; we think we've institutionalized this memory; we think this particular European horror has been put to rest, and it is time to move on. I've sometimes thought that myself: There is so much other history to learn, after all. The 20th century was not lacking in tragedy.

And yet -- the near-destruction of the European Jews, in a very brief span of time, by a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available was, it seems, an event that requires constant reexplanation, not least because it really did shape subsequent European and world history in untold ways. For that reason alone it seems the archives, the photographs and the endless rebuttals will go on being necessary, long beyond the lifetime of the last survivor.

Lisa Beyer, in Time magazine, writes about “The Big Lie About the Middle East.”

No sensible person is against peacemaking in the Holy Land. Applause and hopefulness would seem the reasonable reaction to the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that the Bush Administration "act boldly" and "as soon as possible" to resolve the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. But as a front-row observer of similar efforts over the past 15 years, I could muster neither response. In lumping the Iraq mess in with the Palestinian problem--and suggesting the first could not be fixed unless the second was too--the Baker-Hamilton commission lent credibility to a corrosive myth: that the fundamental problem in the Arab world is the plight of the Palestinians.

It is a falsehood perpetuated not just by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who came late to the slogan after their actual beefs--Saddam with his neighbors; bin Laden with the Saudi royals--gained insufficient traction in the Arab world. The mantra is also repeated like an axiom in the U.S.--in parts of the State Department, in various think tanks, by editorial writers and Sunday talk-show hosts….

To promote the canard that the troubles of the Arab world are rooted in the Palestinians' misfortune does great harm. It encourages the Arabs to continue to avoid addressing their colossal societal and political ills by hiding behind their Great Excuse: it's all Israel's fault….

Yet, this unhistorical cabal of past and current revisionism is widely tolerated on U.S. campuses, and by James Baker's attitude toward Israel.

We treasure our free speech. No ifs, ands or buts. That free speech, however, is abused by our enemies. No ifs, ands or buts. It provides a false plausability to such as the ISG's sacrificial stance toward Israel, as if that would really matter to our foes.

The appropriate response is not to interfere with free speech. The appropriate response is to loudly and clearly hold accountable the boards and administrators of our universities for their selections of faculty or speakers whose scholarship is shoddily one-sided or who allow small numbers of radicals to squelch pro-Israel or anti-terrorist students. It shouldn’t take another holocaust, or 9/11, to get them to take their responsibilities more seriously than Columbia in the 1930’s or today. The ISG is a product of such miseducation.