L'affaire Williamson: The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial by E. Michael Jones

Author:E. Michael Jones [Jones, E. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Fidelity Press
Published: 2012-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Professor Lipstadt is the spiritual descendant of these Jewish investigators. Professor Lipstadt's job is to shoot anybody in academe or publishing (the current equivalent of the Soviet army) who is not following the party line. Since she can't very well go out and shoot David Irving literally, she does the next best thing by assassinating his character by claiming that he is not really a historian (certainly not a "renowned historian" like Professor Lipstadt) and depriving him of a livelihood.

Professor David O'Connell, who teaches French at Georgia State University, found this out when he published an article on Elie Wiesel in Culture Wars. O'Connell's article did what scholarship is supposed to do. It pointed out inconsistencies in the conventional narrative that academe had been cowed into ignoring. It pointed out patent absurdities like the famous picture of Wiesel in Buchenwald; it pointed up the discrepancies in the various accounts Wiesel has given of his liberation from Buchenwald. It brought up the fact that after the release of the PBS documentary The Liberators, which purported to describe how an all-black tank battalion liberated Buchenwald, Wiesel suddenly became aware of memories he never had before, memories of being liberated by black soldiers emerging from Sherman tanks. "I will always remember with love," Wiesel wrote in 1989, "a big black soldier. He was crying like a child-tears of all the pain in the world and all the rage. Everyone who was there that day will forever feel a sentiment of gratitude to the American soldiers who liberated us."

It was a truly touching moment. Unfortunately, it never happened. First of all, Liberators was made up "to increase Black and Jewish mutual understanding in Brooklyn," and Elie Wiesel wittingly collaborated in that scam. O'Connell's article not only damaged Elie Wiesel's reputation, it also called significant segments of the Holocaust narrative, in particular those recounted by Wiesel, into question. Did Professor O'Connell's Culture Wars article then constitute Holocaust denial? This is where the story gets interesting.

After O'Connell's article on Wiesel appeared in the October 2004 issue of Culture Wars, Lipstadt wrote to the administration at GSU in an attempt to get him fired. She claimed in her letter that O'Connell had engaged in "fraud in research." What followed was several pages of single spaced writing in which she questioned O'Connell's spelling of Yiddish and labored mightily to convict Professor O'Connell of fraud. Unwilling to dismiss Lipstadt's letter, the administration at GSU appointed a panel of three full professors to look into the matter. After deliberating for almost a year, from December 2005 to October 2006, the professors concluded that there was no fraud, or that if there were, it was the doing of Elie Wiesel and not Professor O'Connell. If Professor O'Connell didn't get fired, it wasn't for Professor Lipstadt's lack of trying. The fault lay not in Professor Lipstadt's will but in her intellect. In spite of her endowed chair and years immersed in "advanced holocaust studies," she couldn't mount a coherent argument. Every claim she raised was ultimately dismissed as baseless.

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