Opinions, News and Media

By Jeff Wright
Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Register-Guard

Critics of a speaker widely viewed as one of the nation’s most prominent deniers of the Holocaust say they will counter his talk in Eugene on Friday with a competing event and a later symposium.

Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, will speak on “The Israel Lobby.” His visit comes at the invitation of the Pacifica Forum, a local discussion group founded by retired University of Oregon professor Orval Etter.

Weber, a historian who grew up in Portland, describes himself as a Holocaust revisionist. But detractors point to Weber’s own writings in labeling him a white supremacist, racist and anti-Semite.

“People may think I’m wrong or I’m right, but they should have a chance to hear what I have to say,” Weber said in a telephone interview from his institute’s office in Newport Beach, Calif.

Local critics affiliated with Community Alliance of Lane County have scheduled a free speech vigil to be held just outside the UO hall where Weber will speak. “We are operating under the theory that the best response to hate speech is more speech,” volunteer Michael Williams said. “We want an opportunity for the community to show its opposition to the kinds of things that Mark Weber stands for.”

Williams said opponents don’t plan to shout slogans or prevent people from hearing Weber’s talk. “We will have a presence that is unavoidable but not obstructionist.”

David Frank, a professor in the Honors College at the UO, said he and two faculty members are planning a Holocaust symposium in response to Weber’s talk.

Weber “has the right to come to campus and make preposterous statements,” Frank said. “But we have a responsibility as scholars to demonstrate the expertise and research that shows his claims are not only false but dangerous.”

Weber’s speech is not the first to draw charges of anti-Semitism against the Pacifica Forum, which last year sponsored multiple talks by Valdas Anelauskas, a resident of Eugene and native of Lithuania who describes himself as a journalist, researcher and “white separatist and racialist.” Anelauskas dedicated one of his lectures to a Holocaust denier.

Critics responded by buying a newspaper ad denouncing such ideas, and by giving several public talks on anti-Semitism — including one at the Pacifica Forum itself.

Etter and other forum members have complained that anyone who sharply criticizes Israeli politics is automatically defamed as anti-Semitic.

Forum critics have said it’s not critiques on policy, but Jewish stereotypes and historical revisionism that cross the line into anti-Semitism.

Etter said he has long been impressed with the Institute of Historical Research’s work, and that he and other forum members decided several months ago to invite Weber.

Weber’s institute “has been battling Israel and the Jews for a long time,” Etter said. “They sort of lead the parade against those who say any extensive criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”

Etter said he welcomes the controversy sparked by Weber’s appearance because it will “improve understanding in this community about what’s been going on for a long time in regard to Israel and the Israeli lobby .... This will be another pinnacle of free speech.”

The forum has access to UO space because he and forum colleague George Beres are former UO employees, Etter said.

Weber said his talk will focus on contemporary U.S.-Israeli policies, not historical events. He said he doesn’t discount that many Jews perished in concentration camps at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War II, but said the number cited by historians of 6 million or more “is certainly too high.”

He questioned, for example, whether Anne Frank of diary fame should be counted as a Holocaust victim, since she died of typhus rather than at the direct hands of German soldiers in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Weber said it’s “probably” true that his critique of Israeli political power would carry more credence if he didn’t also challenge history’s understanding of the Holocaust. “But I see the two as connected.”

In one of its brochures, Weber’s institute says that “the ‘Holocaust’ campaign is a major weapon in the Jewish-Zionist arsenal. It is used to justify otherwise unjustifiable Israeli policies, and to extort enormous sums of money.”

Weber has been tied to the neo-Nazi National Alliance, an affiliation he downplays. In court testimony, however, he has acknowledged once serving as news editor of the alliance’s National Vanguard publication. In 2002, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., identified Weber as one of “40 to Watch” among key activists of the radical right.

Local critic Williams said the Pacifica Forum’s decision to invite Weber is deeply troubling. “This is a major escalation,” Williams said. “He is the No. 1 Holocaust denier; he has international status.”

David Luebke, an associate professor of history at the UO, is among the faculty planning next month’s symposium on the Holocaust. Luebke worked for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., from 1989 to 1993, and has taught classes on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Luebke said Weber practices “a pretty sophisticated form” of Holocaust denial in which historians’ evolving understanding about the event is selectively scoured for information that can be used to minimize or question the reality of the genocide.

“There’s debate in good faith among historians about what it all means,” Luebke said of the Holocaust. “But we tend not to disagree on the overwhelming positive confirming evidence, including from the people who perpetrated it.”