Denying the Holocaust by Deborah E. Lipstadt

Author:Deborah E. Lipstadt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Carto was born in 1926 in Indiana. After serving in the army he attended college and then moved to San Francisco to work for a finance company as a debt collector. For a short while he was associated with the radical, right-wing John Birch Society, until he had a falling out with its founder, Robert Welch. According to a former editor at the Liberty Lobby, Carto’s antisemitic activities were too extreme even for Welch, a known antisemite, who personally fired him.26 In 1958 he organized a “pressure group for patriotism,” which eventually emerged as the Liberty Lobby. A former chairman of the Liberty Lobby’s Board of Policy acknowledged that by the 1980s its annual income was close to four million dollars. The lobby’s antisemitic, anti-Zionist newspaper, Spotlight, claims a circulation of more than 330,000. When it reached this goal in 1981 it celebrated by holding a gala reception at the National Press Club in Washington.

The Liberty Lobby has been described as so extreme that it is “estranged from even the fringes of the far right.”27 The investigative columnist Drew Pearson described Carto as a Hitler “fan” and the Liberty Lobby as “infiltrated by Nazis who revere the memory of Hitler.” The Wall Street Journal is also among those who have identified Carto and the Liberty Lobby as antisemitic.28

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) believes Carto to be the most important and powerful professional antisemite in the United States. According to the ADL, the Liberty Lobby stands at the helm of a major publishing and organizational complex that for more than two decades has propagated antisemitism and racism in the United States.29 The Wall Street Journal and the ADL are not alone in their assessment. When Carto and the Liberty Lobby sued the Wall Street Journal for calling them antisemites, the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against them and concluded that it would be difficult to imagine a case in which the evidence of antisemitism was “more compelling.”30

Some of the strongest condemnations of Carto and the Liberty Lobby have come from conservative and right-wing political groups in the United States. Scott Stanley, the managing editor of American Opinion, the publication of the John Birch Society, believes Willis Carto responsible for preserving antisemitism as a movement in the United States. In 1981 William F. Buckley described the Liberty Lobby as “a hotbed of antisemitism” centered around the “mysterious” Carto, who “regularly poisons the wells of political discourse.”31 The conservative weekly Human Events condemned the Liberty Lobby as an organization that exploited racist and antisemitic sentiments and Carto as someone who has long maintained sympathy for Hitler’s Germany. Buckley’s National Review, which accused Carto of always having “his eyes on Jewry,” warned that it was not only Carto’s antisemitism that was dangerous but his philosophy of pure power, which was alien and fundamentally hostile to the American tradition.32 The conservative columnist R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., editor in chief of the American Spectator, condemned the lobby as an organization that always attracted a

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