Editor,
It was hard to read the shocking ad "Are you a student?" from Bradley R. Smith, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, in last week's Daily Lobo by a Holocaust denier. I assume the Lobo has to publish this ad because apparently there is nothing in it that could justify refusing it. After all, he's not selling cigarettes, liquor or porn. But he is selling something worse: hate and racism.
So if he has a right to have his ad published, I have a right to object vehemently to his message. If it is not morally wrong to question a professor, as he suggests ("Can you provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz?"), it is historically ignorant, ethically questionable and tremendously stupid. If the professor is Jewish, it is even more threatening, insulting, deeply hateful and incredibly stupid.
I think students at UNM are much more intelligent than this and hope that no one takes him up on his offer of a beer to contribute to his project. The only reason people attempt to deny the Holocaust is anti-Semitism. It is targeted revisionism that targets Jews. That's the price of free speech: hearing - or publishing and reading - repellent ideas.
Marjorie Crow
UNM staff
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