Denial on the Campuses; Demonstrably False Ideas Should Not Necessarily Be Protected by Bill of Rights; Holocaust Revisionism

Abstract

At Hopkins and elsewhere, the issue of granting historical revisionists equal access to curricula and classrooms is difficult enough, but it is complicated acutely when student editors become entangled in the black and nefarious thickets of Holocaust denial masquerading as scholarship. The Johns Hopkins News-Letter is only the most recent university paper to succumb to the blandishments of a group calling itself the Committee for Open Debate on the which promulgates claims that a plan to systematically rid Germany or Europe of Jews never existed, that no gas chambers ever operated and that the number of Jewish victims has always been grossly distorted by Zionist propagandists. During the past few years, similar {See Holocaust, 6f} such briefs have appeared at universities as notable as Brandeis, Duke, Miami, Michigan and Ohio State, where student editors have defended their decisions to publish on First Amendment grounds. In so doing, they broadly invoke the freedoms of speech and press and are quick to note specifically their aversion to censorship. But other student newspapers such as those at Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania and Texas have been able to recognize that Holocaust denial reflects less scholarship and intellectual freedom than sham and nonsense. Perhaps better than some of their politically correct professors, they understand that such historical revisionism is designed to take advantage of both the dwindling number of survivors and the inevitable ignorance of future generations.