'The left has really let us down.' Why many American Jews fe

BACKGROUND

In 1978, Willis Carto, founder and head of the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby, based in Washington, D.C., spun off a new organization called the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). It presented itself as a legitimate historical research group, devoted to "revisionism" — a term hijacked from a school of credible historians who offered new interpretations for the origins of World War I. But in fact, it was made up of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and it would draw expertise from the like-minded around the world. Its mission was to erase the Holocaust by any means at its disposal — including distortion, misquotation and outright falsification.

IHR's first annual conference in 1979 attracted deniers from around the world and helped to introduce some key American extremists to Holocaust denial. David Duke, the neo-Nazi who was then the national leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was so taken with the idea that he followed up the conference with a "Special Holocaust Edition" of his Crusader newspaper. In the same way, National Socialist Party of America leader Frank Collin enthusiastically embraced denial, saying, "There was no Holocaust, but they deserve one — and will get it." For years, IHR's yearly conferences were key events that offered networking opportunities for neo-Nazis and anti-Semites from around the world.

A critical contribution by IHR was the pseudo-academic gloss it applied to its anti-Semitism. The group actively tried to avoid blatant anti-Jewish slurs, and instead sought to couch its politics in distortions of history and science meant to sound reasonable. Though the theories that resulted were far out, they had at least the appearance of legitimacy, as did The Journal of Historical Review that the IHR began to publish in 1980. Deniers would claim, for example, that the Anne Frank diary is a fraud because it contained marks made with a postwar ballpoint pen (they didn't mention that the marks were made later by Frank's father, who survived German concentration camps to edit and publish the diary). They would assert that the death-camp ovens were not capable of burning as many bodies as the Allies had said were disposed of after gassing. They lied about the qualities of the Zyklon B gas used to kill Jews, the operation of the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile killing squads which shot to death more than 1 million Jews in Eastern Europe), and hundreds of other facts. Through it all, IHR sought to give the appearance that its writers were honest, if skeptical, students of history.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, IHR hosted conferences that attracted various well-known Holocaust deniers from around the world: Ernst Zündel and John Ball of Canada (Zündel was later deported by Canada to his native Germany); Robert Faurisson of France; Friedrich Berg of Germany; Carlo Mattogno of Italy; and Jürgen Graf and Arthur Vogt of Switzerland. Most notably, David Irving, a writer whose Holocaust denial activities caused a British judge to label him "a right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist," attended in 1983, and went on to speak before at least four more conferences, in 1989, 1990, 1992, 1994, as well as at numerous other IHR events.

www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/institute-historical-review