Denial leaflets in uni carpark
HOLOCAUST denial reared its ugly head on campus on the first day of the new university semester on Monday.
HOLOCAUST denial reared its ugly head on campus on the first day of the new university semester on Monday.
Flyers claiming that “Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud” were placed on hundreds of cars in the University of Melbourne’s University Square carpark. The flyer said that the Holocaust was “the greatest swindle of all time” and that “in war, truth is the first casualty” before pointing people to an Australian website that is rife with Holocaust denial content.
The website claims that eyewitness testimony from Holocaust survivors is not reliable because the testimony is “downright implausible or impossible”, and that scholars and courts of law recognise the problem with eyewitness accounts.
“It really is a testimony to the effectiveness of post war propaganda that so few people in the war-time ‘Allied’ countries, Australia included, realise the practical non-existence of material or documentary evidence in support of essential narrative Holocaust allegations, while at the same time, so many harbour the deep impression that witnesses to alleged Holocaust crimes are far more numerous and far more credible than they really are,” the website states.
A spokesperson for the University of Melbourne confirmed the flyers were removed.
“After learning of the flyers, the university’s security staff went through the University Square carpark and removed all those they could find,” the spokesperson said.
“Other carparks were checked but no other flyers were found.”
B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich said that the flyers are “utterly sickening”, “repugnant” and “nothing more than anti-Semitic tracts” that sought to target and poison the minds of students on the first day of semester.
“This is an alarming escalation in anti-Jewish hostility and is a cause for serious concern,” Abramovich said.
“The racists and bigots who distributed these Holocaust denial materials want to confuse readers by disguising this venom and vileness as a legitimate alternative view of history, and are trying to promote the abhorrent message of racism, Nazism and Fascism.”
He said that universities are bastions of intellectual thought and academic exploration, and those who attend should not be subjected to such hateful propaganda that denies the reality of the Holocaust and spreads blatant lies about the near-extinction of European Jewry.
“It is another reminder that we must continue to speak out and educate against individuals and groups who are using the tools of prejudice to project a basic hatred of the Jewish people.”
JOSHUA LEVI
comments