Hofstra Student Newspaper Publishes Denial of Holocaust

A twenty-seven-page advertisement that questions the historical truth of the Holocaust appeared in the October 28 issue of The Chronicle, the undergraduate newspaper of Hofstra University. The ad's publication has sparked angry debate across the nation and more specifically at Hofstra University, where editors of the student newspaper were confronted at a crowded forum last Tuesday by outraged students, faculty members and leaders of campus Jewish organizations.

The ad, entitled "The Revisionist: A Journal of Independent Thought" contends that the Holocaust is an apparition concocted by Jews who yearn to gain sympathy from the masses. The ad's creator, Bradley R. Smith, a Californian who has long maintained and lobbied this point, has offered the advertising insert to student newspapers across the country, including The Commentator. However, it is believed that The Chronicle is the only college newspaper to have published it, placing the 27-page insert into 5,000 copies of their paper.

Since 1991, Mr. Smith has submitted full and half-page advertisements for his organization, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, to college newspapers, accusing "Zionists" of stifling debate about the Holocaust's existence to "drum up world sympathy."

Smith's views raised similarly heated debates in 1993 when student newspapers at Brandeis, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Duke, Cornell and Northwestern published an ad by Mr. Smith titled, "A Revisionist's View of the U.S. Holocaust Museum." Smith has publicly contended that Germany never, "pursued a plan to kill all Jews or used homicidal 'gassing chambers' for mass murder."

"I don't share his views at all," said Shawna VanNess, a Hofstra junior and Editor-In-Chief of The Chronicle. "We feel if you can't beat him here on a university campus, where we have experts from all sorts of fields, you can't beat him anywhere," continued VanNess.

But Rabbi Shalom Carmy, Professor of Bible at Yeshiva College vehemently disagreed with VanNess' views, saying, "Controversy for the sake of controversy is not education, but show business, and not even show business of the highest order."

Phyllis Barell, the Long Island regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that her group's complaints about previous Smith ads placed in The Chronicle in the last few years went unheeded. "We feel it is important that a school of higher learning not assist a Bradley Smith, whose work is unscholarly," she said. "Historically, we know that the Holocaust existed. They [Chronicle editors] probably would not have acted as agents for any group that proposed the world is flat, or that there was no slavery in the United States, or that American Indians were never massacred on this soil."

VanNess said the newspaper's fifteen-member editorial board "nearly unanimously" decided to accept the insert from Smith and his group, "The Committee for Open Discussion of the Holocaust Story." She said the editors defend their decision on freedom-of-press grounds. "If we start drawing the line, who knows where it will end? It's not what we're here to do," she said.

Many faculty members at Yeshiva angrily argue that the rejection of advertisements does not restrict speech, further maintaining that the Holocaust's existence is not and should not be open for debate. "In the final analysis, human beings, and that includes intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals and student editors, cannot disavow responsibility for what they do, and what they encourage. This should have been a lesson of the twentieth century - apparently it has not yet been learned," stated Rabbi Carmy.