This unobtrusive two-inch-high display advertisement placed in a number of college and university newspapers around the United States during the 1996-97 school year was another gambit in Bradley Smith's campaign to deny the reality of the Holocaust. Smith, director of the so-called "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" (CODOH) and the point man in the deniers' college outreach program, is, as he says, "taking my show to the Internet."

The ad was another in the series he has been running in a number of college papers since 1991. The earlier ads were long essays designed to promote controversy, and Smith notes, "cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars to place." He sees the new ad as an improvement. It is cheaper and has, he hopes, the potential to reach a larger audience. "I'm running a small ad with almost no text but one that is backed up by a 'library' that includes the texts of entire books, scores of articles, news items...." The "library" he refers to is a series of several hundred articles and pictures published on the World Wide Web pushing the claims of Holocaust deniers that "something is wrong with how the story of Jewish 'genocide' [quotes in the original] is being promoted."

Smith, who was for almost eight years the Media Director of the "Institute for Historical Review," the world's leading clearinghouse of Holocaust denial propaganda, is in the business of marketing lies, albeit subtly presented ones, on the World Wide Web.

Smith describes the facts of the Holocaust as "the Holocaust-story fraud." This "fraud" is created and propagated by the "Holocaust Lobby. . . owned and run by Jews" that is out to destroy what he describes as "intellectual freedom." The "story is then enforced by the "Thought Police" led by Jewish groups out to stifle any vestige of free inquiry on college campuses. Leading this repressive conspiracy are ADL, an organization he asserts is identified primarily with a totalitarian, Eastern-European rooted campaign against intellectual freedom in America, and Hillel, the Jewish student group, that Smith characterizes as a "peculiar organization. . . fronted almost entirely by rabbis in an attempt to give the organization a patina of religious sensibility. . . [but whose rabbis and officers] act out the role of mere political operatives."

Smith's "defense" of free inquiry really masks a profound anti-Semitism although Smith insists that he is not out to attack Jews. He is simply seeking to "encourage intellectual freedom and let the chips fall where they may." To demonstrate his good faith, Smith explains that his standard answer to the question, "When are you going to challenge the Jews beyond the Holocaust. . . ?" is, "I have no plan whatever for challenging 'the Jews' [quotes in the original] for what's done in their name." But, he continues, reciting a litany of traditional anti-Semitic complaints that blame Jews as a group:

At the same time, I understand the thrust of the question. It addresses the double standard in the public discourse in America, particularly among our elites, over bigoted Jewish religious writings, Jewish participation in anti-Christian, Marxist-Stalinist horrors, the unnaturally bloated Jewish influence in American cultural affairs and political life (particularly relating to the Middle East), Jewish participation in the slave trade and so on.

    * * *

And after all the Christian bashing that has gone on in this country during my lifetime, oftentimes by Jews, it has been Gentiles who have been unwilling to return the favor by addressing, in a civilized way, the primitive anti-Christian ugliness in the Talmud.

What is the goal of "the Jews" in exercising the power Smith claims they have! His answer is an old standard from the denier repertoire: "to morally legitimate the invasion of Palestine by European Jews following World War II. . ." and the "sacrific[e of] Liberty to a pre-modern Judeo/Christian fundamentalism."  

Though Bradley Smith has been an active Holocaust denier for almost two decades, it was his Holocaust-denying ads published in about 70 college papers in the early and mid-1990s that brought Smith wider attention. For deniers such as Smith, colleges and universities are ideal locations to push their pseudo-academic wares. They are institutions devoted to vigorous debate and inquiry. College students are usually young and idealistic, predisposed toward the underdog, skeptical of authority, often willing to challenge received wisdom, struggling to cope with many new, disorienting ideas and, today, frequently without a strongly formed sense of history. Smith has tried to exploit these factors in his long ad format, but he now seems to have settled on the Web as the means for implementing his "Campus Project" strategy.  

Smith's goal is simple. He wants to legitimate Holocaust denial as being as valid as Holocaust study. To do this he must seize the discussion, to create a debate where there is none. Yet he is frequently frustrated. Reputable scholars will neither debate nor give credence to the tainted "research" produced by the Institute for Historical Review.  

Win or lose, Smith cynically saw advantage in this effort. If the student newspaper published the ad, it inevitably generated outrage, pain and, most important, publicity. If the paper refused the ad, Smith played the victim of the "Thought Police," wrapped himself in the First Amendment and loudly bewailed the death of the university with its ideals of open inquiry and academic freedom. Holocaust denial got extensive coverage on the campus, in the local, and occasionally, national media, and Smith assumed the guise of the "champion" of intellectual integrity all the while peddling tendentious, intellectually bankrupt propaganda.  

As he started having a hard time getting his material published on campuses, Smith turned to the Internet. Before hitting on his current approach, he attempted to place a different ad in classified sections of college papers. It read:   

and then gave Smith's online address.  

Smith was very pleased by the cleverness of this "stealth" approach  because it  kept students from knowing the nature of the material they were about to encounter.  

When they [students] first see this ad they have no idea what's waiting for them. ... Ignore the Thought Police, Read the Evidence. Judge for yourself. Three fundamental concepts in ten words. Electronic addresses for the CODOHWeb and myself. Not one word that is confrontational or that could be judged to be in bad taste -- yet perfectly clear. Brilliant (forgive me!) 

While he hasn't commented online about his current "stealth" ad, one can imagine that he feels the same sense of self-satisfied achievement. It is interesting, however, that a man who wants nothing more than "open debate" and loudly calls for "intellectual freedom" apparently believes that deception is necessary to pitch his claims. This is even more intriguing when the title of one of his ads (one so patently misleading that no school newspaper saw fit to publish it) included a Latin phrase -- Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus -- that translates as "false in one thing, false in everything.

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