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Feb. 25, 2005 Recently I posted an article entitled “Arthur R. Butz On The Holocaust”, where I outlined some of the salient points in Butz’ book, “The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century”, in which he argues against the widely-accepted belief that 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz between May and July of 1944, and exterminated there. I personally am not entirely convinced that he is utterly wrong in his assertions. The overall tone of his book, published in 1976, is scholarly and dispassionate, and one would come away from the book convinced that Butz was a serious researcher documenting a view he derived from studying the history of the period. Is this scholarly, dispassionate approach merely a façade to hide a seething anti-Semitism? That is what many who have commented on Butz would have you think. To bolster this contention, they cite his association with the Institute of Historical Review, a California-based research and publishing center specializing in holocaust revisionism. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, of the Bnai Brith, refer to the IHR as a “hate group”, but, having read dozens of their articles, I do not think I can concur with that characterization. There are “hate groups”, to be sure, but I don’t feel the epithet applies to the IHR. Even less would I apply it to Butz, though I am no authority on all his activities. He maintains a website hosted by Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he is a tenured professor of electrical engineering. The website is only rarely updated; http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/ Consulting his website, we see that if we click on “news items”, and then on the last line, we get Butz’ laudatory comments on the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s espousal of the doctrine of holocaust denial. Ahmadinejad, like Butz, holds a Ph. D. in engineering, and was himself an assistant professor of engineering, before he became mayor of Tehran, and then president of Iran. I suppose that Ahmadinejad’s religious views, which some might characterize as “fundamentalist” or “fanatical”, are at bottom a matter of politically-oriented public relations, a process Americans should understand quite well. Anyway, I do not think that I have seen anything so far that would lead me to believe that Ahmadinejad is the mad fool the Western media make him out to be. Here is Butz’ statement. Butz, a professor at NU since 1966, published his book in 1976. Over the past thirty years, NU has tolerated a lot of criticism for keeping Butz on the faculty at all, and particularly for hosting his website, a privilege granted to all faculty members. The university has always defended its position on grounds of academic freedom. Apparently, there have been flare-ups at NU now and then, but eventually they all have settled down. Now Butz’ praise of Ahmadinejad has caused a new wave of antipathy towards Butz and towards Northwestern, an expensive, exclusive, prestigious university with a beautiful campus. Here is the disclaimer of University President Henry S. Bienen; http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2006/02/bienen.html I’ve read that instead of singling out Butz to exclude from university-hosted websites, Northwestern may stop hosting faculty sites altogether. So far though, Butz’ site remains accessible online. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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