Institute for Historical Review
Encyclopedia
The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), founded in 1978, is an American organization that describes itself as a "public-interest educational, research and publishing center dedicated to promoting greater public awareness of history." Critics have accused it of being an antisemitic "pseudo-scholarly body" with links to neo-Nazi
organizations, and assert that its primary purpose is to disseminate views denying key facts of Nazism
and the genocide of Jews
and others. It has been described as the "world's leading Holocaust denial
organization." The Institute published the non-peer-reviewed Journal of Historical Review
until 2002, but now disseminates its materials through its website and via email.
The Institute is affiliated with the Legion for the Survival of Freedom and Noontide Press
.
(also known as Lewis Brandon), a former member of the British National Front
, and Willis Carto
, the head of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby
. Liberty Lobby was an antisemitic organization best known for publishing The Spotlight
, now reorganized as the American Free Press
. Dave McCalden left the IHR in 1981. Tom Marcellus became its director, and Carto lost control of it in 1993, in an internal power struggle. Since 1995, the director of the IHR has been Mark Weber, who previously worked with the white supremacist National Alliance. Since taking over, Weber has continued to publish writing on the Holocaust and on World War II and has pushed to broaden the institute's mandate. He has been editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review for nine years. Publication of the Journal ceased in 2002 due to lack of funds, and its main form of spreading its message is through its website IHR Update and e-mail list. The website that Weber has built features such articles as "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution" and "Israel at 60: A Grim Balance Sheet."
At the IHR's first conference in 1979, IHR publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chamber
s for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." This money (and an additional $40,000) was eventually paid in 1985 to Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein
, who sued the IHR for breach of contract
for initially ignoring his evidence (a signed testimony
of his experiences
in Auschwitz). On October 9, 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for summary judgment
in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County
took "judicial notice
of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944." On August 5, 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke entered a judgment
based upon the Stipulation
for Entry of Judgment agreed upon by the parties on July 22, 1985. The judgment required IHR and other defendants to pay $90,000 to Mermelstein and to issue a letter of apology to "Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz" for "pain, anguish and suffering" caused to them.
David Irving
, Robert Faurisson
, Ernst Zündel
, Fred Leuchter, Arthur Butz
, Joseph Sobran
, Pete McCloskey
, Bradley R. Smith, Carlo Mattogno
, Jürgen Graf
, Doug Collins
and Radio Islam
founder Ahmed Rami have attended conferences and/or contributed to publications of the IHR.
In 1996, IHR won a $6,430,000 judgment in a lawsuit against Carto in which IHR alleged that Carto embezzled $7.5 million that had been left to IHR from the estate of Jean Edison Farrel.
In January 2009, Weber, the IHR's director, released an essay titled, "How Relevant Is Holocaust Revisionism?" In it he noted that Holocaust denial had attracted little support over the years: "It’s gotten some support in Iran, or places like that, but as far as I know, there is no history department supporting writing by these folks." Accordingly, he recommended that emphasis be placed instead on opposing "Jewish-Zionist power", which some commentators claim is a shift to a directly antisemitic position.
. Critics have accused the Institute of antisemitism and having links to neo-Nazi
organizations, and assert that its primary focus is denying key facts of Nazism
and the genocide of Jews
and others.
The United Kingdom
's Channel 4
describes the IHR as a "pseudo-academic body based in the United States which is dedicated to denying that the Holocaust happened," while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
called the IHR a "blatantly anti-Semitic assortment of pseudo-scholars". The Daily Star
, the leading English language paper in Lebanon, in response to a planned IHR meeting in the country called the IHR "loathsome pseudo-historians" and an "international hate group," and reported "as one former PLO official has put it, 'with friends like that, we don't need enemies'."
The IHR has insisted that they do not deny the Holocaust, claiming that, "The Institute does not 'deny the Holocaust.' Every responsible scholar of twentieth century history acknowledges the great catastrophe that befell European Jewry during World War II. All the same, the IHR has over the years published detailed books and numerous probing essays that call into question aspects of the orthodox Holocaust extermination story, and highlight specific Holocaust exaggerations and falsehoods." On the IHR website Barbara Kulaszka
defends the distinction between denial and revisionism by arguing that considerable revisions have been made over the years by historians and concludes:
Commentators have argued, however, that the avowals by the IHR that they do not deny the Holocaust are misleading. Paul Rauber
writes that:
According to British historian of Germany Richard J. Evans
:
, wrote, "We all abhor, on both moral and scholarly grounds, the substantive arguments of the Institute for Historical Review. We reject their claims to be taken seriously as historians."
In 2001, Eric Owens, a former employee, alleged that Mark Weber and Greg Raven from the IHR's staff had been planning to sell their mailing lists to either the Anti-Defamation League
or the Church of Scientology
.
In April 2004, following a complaint by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, The Nation magazine refused to accept advertising from the IHR, stating "[T]here is a strong presumption against censoring any advertisement, especially if we disagree with its politics. This case, however, is different. Their arguments are 'patently fraudulent.
, which its critics (including the ADL, the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide studies, and other scholars, such as Robert Hanyok, a National Security Agency
historian,) accused of being pseudo-scientific
. When Noam Chomsky
defended an author who wrote articles for the journal (Dr. Robert Faurisson
), it led to great controversy, though Chomsky insisted he was defending Faurisson's right to free speech rather than any specific claims made in his articles.
The journal, History Teacher, wrote of the Journal of Historical Review that the "magazine is shockingly racist and antisemitic: articles on 'America's Failed Racial Policy' and anti-Israel pieces accompany those about gas chambers... They clearly have no business claiming to be a continuation of the revisionist tradition, and should be referred to as 'Holocaust Deniers'."
The journal commenced publication in the spring of 1980 as a quarterly periodical. Publication was suspended in 1986-87, and thereafter continued until 2002. Publication of the journal was halted in 2002 due to "lack of staff and funding", according to the organization's website.
wrote that there have recently been attempts to forge ties between American and European Holocaust-denial groups such as the IHR and radical Middle East
ern extremists. According to Coogan, Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan
military officer who founded Radio Islam
to disseminate antisemitic, Holocaust denial, and pro-Nazi propaganda, teamed up with the IHR to organize a conference in a Hezbollah-controlled section of Beirut, Lebanon.
Neo-Nazism
Neo-Nazism consists of post-World War II social or political movements seeking to revive Nazism or some variant thereof.The term neo-Nazism can also refer to the ideology of these movements....
organizations, and assert that its primary purpose is to disseminate views denying key facts of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
and the genocide of Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
and others. It has been described as the "world's leading Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
organization." The Institute published the non-peer-reviewed Journal of Historical Review
Journal of Historical Review
The Journal of Historical Review is a non-peer reviewed serial, periodical, or journal published by the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California. Its subject is primarily Holocaust denial...
until 2002, but now disseminates its materials through its website and via email.
The Institute is affiliated with the Legion for the Survival of Freedom and Noontide Press
Noontide Press
Noontide Press is an American publishing entity which describes itself as a publisher of "hard-to-find books and recordings from a dissident, 'politically incorrect' perspective." It publishes numerous antisemitic titles, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The International Jew...
.
History
The IHR was founded in 1978 by David McCaldenDavid McCalden
William David McCalden was a figure in the British political far right. As co-founder of the Institute for Historical Review, he is notable for his Holocaust denial.-Early life:...
(also known as Lewis Brandon), a former member of the British National Front
British National Front
The National Front is a far right, white-only political party whose major political activities took place during the 1970s and 1980s. Its popularity peaked in the 1979 general election, when it received 191,719 votes ....
, and Willis Carto
Willis Carto
Willis Allison Carto is a longtime figure on the American far right. He describes himself as Jeffersonian and populist, but is primarily known for his promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.-Influences on Carto:...
, the head of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby was an American political advocacy organization founded in 1958 that went bankrupt in 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto. In their own words,-Antisemitic world-view:...
. Liberty Lobby was an antisemitic organization best known for publishing The Spotlight
The Spotlight
The Spotlight was a weekly newspaper in the United States, published in Washington, D.C. from September 1975 to July 2001 by the now-defunct Liberty Lobby...
, now reorganized as the American Free Press
American Free Press
The American Free Press is a weekly newspaper published in the United States.According to one former correspondent, the newspaper's direct ancestor was the publication The Spotlight, which ceased publication in 2001 when its parent company, Liberty Lobby, was forced into bankruptcy...
. Dave McCalden left the IHR in 1981. Tom Marcellus became its director, and Carto lost control of it in 1993, in an internal power struggle. Since 1995, the director of the IHR has been Mark Weber, who previously worked with the white supremacist National Alliance. Since taking over, Weber has continued to publish writing on the Holocaust and on World War II and has pushed to broaden the institute's mandate. He has been editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review for nine years. Publication of the Journal ceased in 2002 due to lack of funds, and its main form of spreading its message is through its website IHR Update and e-mail list. The website that Weber has built features such articles as "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution" and "Israel at 60: A Grim Balance Sheet."
At the IHR's first conference in 1979, IHR publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chamber
Gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...
s for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." This money (and an additional $40,000) was eventually paid in 1985 to Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein
Mel Mermelstein
Mel Mermelstein is a Hungarian-born Jew, sole-survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz concentration camp who defeated the Institute for Historical Review in an American court and had the occurrence of gassings in Auschwitz during the Holocaust declared a legally incontestable...
, who sued the IHR for breach of contract
Breach of contract
Breach of contract is a legal cause of action in which a binding agreement or bargained-for exchange is not honored by one or more of the parties to the contract by non-performance or interference with the other party's performance....
for initially ignoring his evidence (a signed testimony
Testimony
In law and in religion, testimony is a solemn attestation as to the truth of a matter. All testimonies should be well thought out and truthful. It was the custom in Ancient Rome for the men to place their right hand on a Bible when taking an oath...
of his experiences
Witness
A witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about an event, or in the criminal justice systems usually a crime, through his or her senses and can help certify important considerations about the crime or event. A witness who has seen the event first hand is known as an eyewitness...
in Auschwitz). On October 9, 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for summary judgment
Summary judgment
In law, a summary judgment is a determination made by a court without a full trial. Such a judgment may be issued as to the merits of an entire case, or of specific issues in that case....
in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County
Superior Court of Los Angeles County
The Superior Court of Los Angeles County is the Superior Court located in Los Angeles County. It is the largest single unified trial court in the United States....
took "judicial notice
Judicial notice
Judicial notice is a rule in the law of evidence that allows a fact to be introduced into evidence if the truth of that fact is so notorious or well known that it cannot be refuted. This is done upon the request of the party seeking to have the fact at issue determined by the court...
of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944." On August 5, 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke entered a judgment
Judgment
A judgment , in a legal context, is synonymous with the formal decision made by a court following a lawsuit. At the same time the court may also make a range of court orders, such as imposing a sentence upon a guilty defendant in a criminal matter, or providing a remedy for the plaintiff in a civil...
based upon the Stipulation
Stipulation
In the law of the United States, a stipulation is an agreement made between opposing parties prior to a pending hearing or trial. For example, both parties might stipulate to certain facts, and therefore not have to argue those facts in court. After the stipulation is entered into, it is...
for Entry of Judgment agreed upon by the parties on July 22, 1985. The judgment required IHR and other defendants to pay $90,000 to Mermelstein and to issue a letter of apology to "Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz" for "pain, anguish and suffering" caused to them.
David Irving
David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving is an English writer,best known for his denial of the Holocaust, who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany...
, Robert Faurisson
Robert Faurisson
Robert Faurisson is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers , which deny various aspects of the Holocaust,...
, Ernst Zündel
Ernst Zündel
Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer who was jailed several times in Canada for publishing literature which "is likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group" and for being a threat to national security, in the United States for overstaying his visa,...
, Fred Leuchter, Arthur Butz
Arthur Butz
Arthur R. Butz is a Holocaust denier and associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. He achieved tenure in 1974 and currently teaches classes in control system theory and digital signal processing.-Education:...
, Joseph Sobran
Joseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...
, Pete McCloskey
Pete McCloskey
Paul Norton "Pete" McCloskey Jr. is a former Republican politician from the U.S. state of California who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1967 to 1983. He ran on an anti-war platform for the Republican nomination for President in 1972 but was defeated by incumbent President...
, Bradley R. Smith, Carlo Mattogno
Carlo Mattogno
Carlo Mattogno is an Italian Holocaust denier.He is the author of numerous books and monographs, several of which have been published in the Journal of Historical Review....
, Jürgen Graf
Jürgen Graf
Jürgen Graf is a Swiss Holocaust denier and researcher. He studied philology at the University of Basel studying French, English, and Scandinavian languages and spent several years working as a school teacher at a prestigious private school. He is fluent in 15 languages...
, Doug Collins
Doug Collins (journalist)
Doug Collins was a British-born Canadian journalist. He was also a figure of Canada's far-right and a Holocaust denier.-Military service:At the start of World War II he joined the British Army...
and Radio Islam
Radio Islam
Radio Islam was a Swedish radio channel, now a website, which is dedicated to "the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel". The EU's racism monitoring organization has called it "one of the most radical right wing antisemitic homepages on the net"...
founder Ahmed Rami have attended conferences and/or contributed to publications of the IHR.
In 1996, IHR won a $6,430,000 judgment in a lawsuit against Carto in which IHR alleged that Carto embezzled $7.5 million that had been left to IHR from the estate of Jean Edison Farrel.
In January 2009, Weber, the IHR's director, released an essay titled, "How Relevant Is Holocaust Revisionism?" In it he noted that Holocaust denial had attracted little support over the years: "It’s gotten some support in Iran, or places like that, but as far as I know, there is no history department supporting writing by these folks." Accordingly, he recommended that emphasis be placed instead on opposing "Jewish-Zionist power", which some commentators claim is a shift to a directly antisemitic position.
Holocaust denial
Although the Institute for Historical Review comments on a variety of subjects, it is most noted (and criticized) for its Holocaust denialHolocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
. Critics have accused the Institute of antisemitism and having links to neo-Nazi
Neo-Nazism
Neo-Nazism consists of post-World War II social or political movements seeking to revive Nazism or some variant thereof.The term neo-Nazism can also refer to the ideology of these movements....
organizations, and assert that its primary focus is denying key facts of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
and the genocide of Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
and others.
The United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
's Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
describes the IHR as a "pseudo-academic body based in the United States which is dedicated to denying that the Holocaust happened," while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also known simply as the "PG," is the largest daily newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.-Early history:...
called the IHR a "blatantly anti-Semitic assortment of pseudo-scholars". The Daily Star
Daily Star (Lebanon)
The Daily Star is a pan-Middle East English language newspaper edited in Beirut. It was founded in 1952 by Kamel Mrowa, the publisher of the Arabic daily Al-Hayat to serve the growing number of expatriates brought by the oil industry...
, the leading English language paper in Lebanon, in response to a planned IHR meeting in the country called the IHR "loathsome pseudo-historians" and an "international hate group," and reported "as one former PLO official has put it, 'with friends like that, we don't need enemies'."
The IHR has insisted that they do not deny the Holocaust, claiming that, "The Institute does not 'deny the Holocaust.' Every responsible scholar of twentieth century history acknowledges the great catastrophe that befell European Jewry during World War II. All the same, the IHR has over the years published detailed books and numerous probing essays that call into question aspects of the orthodox Holocaust extermination story, and highlight specific Holocaust exaggerations and falsehoods." On the IHR website Barbara Kulaszka
Barbara Kulaszka
Barbara Kulaszka is a Canadian lawyer known especially for her role in defending far-right figures.Kulaszka has been a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada since 1980 and has practiced law since 1987. She acted with Doug Christie as co-counsel to Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel in the 1980s and...
defends the distinction between denial and revisionism by arguing that considerable revisions have been made over the years by historians and concludes:
For purposes of their own, powerful special interest groups desperately seek to keep substantive discussion of the Holocaust story taboo. One of the ways they do this is by purposely mischaracterizing revisionist scholars as 'deniers.'
Commentators have argued, however, that the avowals by the IHR that they do not deny the Holocaust are misleading. Paul Rauber
Paul Rauber
Paul Rauber is a Senior Editor at the Sierra Club magazine, an American environmental organization founded by conservationist pioneer John Muir in 1892....
writes that:
The question [of whether the IHR denies the Holocaust] appears to turn on IHR's Humpty-Dumpty word game with the word Holocaust. According to Mark Weber, associate editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review [now Director of the IHR], "If by the 'Holocaust' you mean the political persecution of Jews, some scattered killings, if you mean a cruel thing that happened, no one denies that. But if one says that the 'Holocaust' means the systematic extermination of six to eight million Jews in concentration camps, that's what we think there's not evidence for." That is, IHR doesn't deny that the Holocaust happened; they just deny that the word 'Holocaust' means what people customarily use it for.
According to British historian of Germany Richard J. Evans
Richard J. Evans
Richard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
:
Like many individual Holocaust deniers, the Institute as a body denied that it was involved in Holocaust denial. It called this a 'smear' which was 'completely at variance with the facts' because 'revisionist scholars' such as Faurisson, Butz 'and bestselling British historian David Irving acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and otherwise perished during the Second World War as a direct and indirect result of the harsh anti-Jewish policies of Germany and its allies'. But the concession that a relatively small number of Jews were killed was routinely used by Holocaust deniers to distract attention from the far more important fact of their refusal to admit that the figure ran into the millions, and that a large proportion of these victims were systematically murdered by gassing as well as by shooting.
Criticism of methods
The IHR is not regarded as conducting historical research by mainstream historians and academics, but rather as conducting pseudo-science aimed at proving that the Holocaust did not happen. The editorial board of one of the leading historical journals, the Journal of American HistoryJournal of American History
The Journal of American History is the official academic journal of the Organization of American Historians. It covers the field of American history and was established in 1914 as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, the official journal of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association...
, wrote, "We all abhor, on both moral and scholarly grounds, the substantive arguments of the Institute for Historical Review. We reject their claims to be taken seriously as historians."
In 2001, Eric Owens, a former employee, alleged that Mark Weber and Greg Raven from the IHR's staff had been planning to sell their mailing lists to either the Anti-Defamation League
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
or the Church of Scientology
Church of Scientology
The Church of Scientology is an organization devoted to the practice and the promotion of the Scientology belief system. The Church of Scientology International is the Church of Scientology's parent organization, and is responsible for the overall ecclesiastical management, dissemination and...
.
In April 2004, following a complaint by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, The Nation magazine refused to accept advertising from the IHR, stating "[T]here is a strong presumption against censoring any advertisement, especially if we disagree with its politics. This case, however, is different. Their arguments are 'patently fraudulent.
Journal of Historical Review
The IHR published the non-peer reviewed Journal of Historical ReviewJournal of Historical Review
The Journal of Historical Review is a non-peer reviewed serial, periodical, or journal published by the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California. Its subject is primarily Holocaust denial...
, which its critics (including the ADL, the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide studies, and other scholars, such as Robert Hanyok, a National Security Agency
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
historian,) accused of being pseudo-scientific
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
. When Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
defended an author who wrote articles for the journal (Dr. Robert Faurisson
Robert Faurisson
Robert Faurisson is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers , which deny various aspects of the Holocaust,...
), it led to great controversy, though Chomsky insisted he was defending Faurisson's right to free speech rather than any specific claims made in his articles.
The journal, History Teacher, wrote of the Journal of Historical Review that the "magazine is shockingly racist and antisemitic: articles on 'America's Failed Racial Policy' and anti-Israel pieces accompany those about gas chambers... They clearly have no business claiming to be a continuation of the revisionist tradition, and should be referred to as 'Holocaust Deniers'."
The journal commenced publication in the spring of 1980 as a quarterly periodical. Publication was suspended in 1986-87, and thereafter continued until 2002. Publication of the journal was halted in 2002 due to "lack of staff and funding", according to the organization's website.
Alleged links to Islamic antisemitism
In an article published in Hit list Magazine in 2002, author Kevin CooganKevin Coogan
Kevin Coogan is an American investigative journalist. He is the author of the biography Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International....
wrote that there have recently been attempts to forge ties between American and European Holocaust-denial groups such as the IHR and radical Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
ern extremists. According to Coogan, Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
military officer who founded Radio Islam
Radio Islam
Radio Islam was a Swedish radio channel, now a website, which is dedicated to "the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel". The EU's racism monitoring organization has called it "one of the most radical right wing antisemitic homepages on the net"...
to disseminate antisemitic, Holocaust denial, and pro-Nazi propaganda, teamed up with the IHR to organize a conference in a Hezbollah-controlled section of Beirut, Lebanon.
External links
- Institute for Historical Review home page
- Willis Carto and the IHR (critical site hosted by the Nizkor ProjectNizkor ProjectThe Nizkor Project is an ongoing Internet-based project run by B'nai Brith Canada which is dedicated to countering Holocaust denial. It was founded by Ken McVay as a central Web-based archive for the large numbers of documents made publicly available by the users of the newsgroup alt.revisionism...
) - Institute for Historical Review (IHR): Outlet for Denial Propaganda (critical site hosted by the Anti-Defamation LeagueAnti-Defamation LeagueThe Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
) - Institute for Historical Review Critical description of IHR from Channel 4Channel 4Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
's The Holocaust on Trial page. - Deniers in Revisionists Clothing Information about the IHR and Mermelstein settlement
- Holocaust Denial, a Definition Includes a description of the IHR and Mark Weber's views.
- The Mad Revisionist Spoof of the IHR and its Journal of Historical Review