Source: Committee for Open Debate | Smith's Report #83, December 2001

Smith is One of the Top Ten Extremists in
America: According to the ADL

by Bradley R. Smith

"Since 1983, Bradley R. Smith has effectively functioned as the Holocaust Denial movement’s chief propagandist and outreach director in the United States. Smith was the first director of the Media Project of the Institute for Historical Review, he took Holocaust denial to TV and radio stations across the Nation. He achieved his greatest notoriety, however, as the director of the Committee for Open Debate of [sic] the Holocaust, whose mission is to disseminate denial to students on college campuses."

Quoted from the most recent article published as a booklet and on its World Wide Website by the Anti-Defamation League.

A s noted here in SR82, The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) has published a paper on the World Wide Web titled "Extremism in America" (1) where it lists the ten most dangerous extremists in the country. I find that I'm on the list -- one of the most dangerous men in the land (there are no women on the list). I'm reminded of those serial murderers listed on the FBI's Most Wanted list -- it may be nice to see your photo on the post office bulletin board, but is it what you really want?

What have I done to be taken so seriously? Placing advertisements in student newspapers? Asking for some back and forth on a historical issue? Encouraging intellectual freedom, even with regard to the Holocaust question? Always with the cooperation of student editors, their business managers and faculty advisors? That makes me one of the top ten extremists in the nation? Maybe it just doesn’t take that much anymore.

The ADL home page for Extremism in America shows a photograph of the Oklahoma City Federal Building after it was bombed by Timothy McVeigh, et al. Is that what intellectual freedom leads to? The mass murder of civilians and their children? I’ve never thought so. Intellectual freedom promises a non-violent exchange of ideas, encourages communication among disparate sections of the citizenry, creates confidence in an open society, and has the inherent characteristic of illuminating every public issue, as if in the light of day, so that secret societies and special interest groups are open to the same scrutiny as ordinary individuals.

The one common thread among those on the ADL’s Top Ten list of extremists in America is that they are all involved with the White racialist movement. I’m the one exception, but I made the list anyhow. How? In a free society racialist theory should be on the table for open debate, but I have never been a member of a racialist organization or promoted racialist ideology. It wasn’t a difficult decision for me to make. I didn’t have to wrestle with my soul. The first barrier for me was the last. I have always disliked how too many racialists use the language. There are many individual exceptions, but a rule of thumb appears to be to use the language in a way that is both vulgar and self-defeating.

Why am I the only designated extremist in the ADL’s Top Ten who is not part of the racialist movement? I think we all know why. Because anyone who questions the orthodox version of the Holocaust story, particularly the homicidal gassing chambers, “hates Jews.” While this is a childish, if not a stupid concept, it has worked in America for half a century so there is no reason for ADL Jews to let it get away from them. Jews are not much of a race, but when it comes to the science and rewards of victimology it is very good business for ADL Jews to consider Jews to be something “like” a race, an “ethnic” group, or, as the man most responsible for the founding of Israel used to say, a “people.”

I think many individuals in the Industry sincerely believe that only someone who hates Jews could possibly question the gas chamber stories. These are not stupid people, but they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by their own rhetoric. For these people, hating Jews is just as bad, worse, than hating Blacks and the “mud” people. Others in the Industry certainly feel that questioning the gas chamber stories is probably anti-Jewish, so while they are not certain they don’t want to take any chances and urge its suppression on principle. And then there’s the problem that those who work for the Industry either make their living suppressing revisionist theory, or would have their income affected negatively by speaking out in support of intellectual freedom on the question. For many of these fighters-against-hate then, it’s a bread and butter issue.

The author of "Extremism in America" is not listed, but is most likely Jeffrey Ross. Jeffrey is the fellow in charge of the “campus desk” at ADL headquarters in New York City. He’s been on my case for ten years now. Everywhere I run an ad it’s been Ross’s job to see to it that the staff of the student paper, its faculty advisor, and the president of the college is contacted and chastised, urged to publish a condemnation of the ad, and warned to not make the same mistake again.

In "Extremism in America" Jeffrey has given me my own page, complete with photograph, background information, and then a history of my extremist actions and accomplishments. My page is titled “Bradley Smith / The Committee For Open Debate of [sic] the Holocaust (CODOH).” The first line of my personal background is my date of birth, January 18, 1939. Jeffrey got the year wrong, and he got the month wrong, but one out of three isn’t that bad when I recall what the ADL has produced about me over the years. It’s not important, but I was born on 18 February 1930.

I always imagined Ross to be a nervous, thin little guy with a beard, about thirty years old maybe. No mature person would describe me to student editors as “scum,” as Ross has. But the other day I saw a photograph of Jeffrey Ross. He’s twenty or thirty years older than I imagined him to be, has no beard, he’s not short, he’s putting on weight, and looks more or less like a small town college professor or businessman. He looks normal. These people can fool you.

I see too that ADL is still circulating the old story that Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) was “initially funded by William Curry,” a Nebraskan businessman. It’s not true. I’ve told them it’s not true, I’ve repeated on radio that it’s not true and reported in my newsletter (which Jeffery is very familiar with) that it’s not true, but they like the story so here it is again. William Curry had nothing to do with the initial funding of CODOH. In the first place, CODOH didn’t have any initial funding. CODOH was founded the day I typed up a letterhead that read Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), and had some copies made at my Iranian-Jewish copy shop on Highland Boulevard in Hollywood. I think I had fifty copies printed and the bill was about two dollars and fifty cents. And that was it.

It’s not really very important one way or the other – what difference would it make -- but I have always wondered, why do the ADL folk keep repeating the statement when they know I deny it and they have no proof that it is true? What’s in their heads? I needed funding. I certainly would have accepted funding from Mr. Curry if he had offered it, but he didn’t. I had never met the man when I founded CODOH, never talked to him, never to my recollection received a note from him. Nothing. Yet here it is again. Why? I think I have finally realized what this is all about. Jeffery (I will take it as a given until I learn differently that Jeffrey is responsible for Extremism in America) has put something together which must have been on his mind all this time, something that just never occurred to me.

In Extremism is America Jeffrey writes that in 1986 Curry attempted to place a full-page ad in the Daily Nebraskan, the student newspaper at University of Nebraska. It was refused. Curry then offered $5,000 to the university to pay for a speaker who would debate revisionist theory at an academic conference. The offer was refused. He wrote letters to the editor of various newspapers, and disseminated his ideas through mass mailings.

These four tools – purchasing ad space in student newspapers, sponsoring debates, writing letters to the editor and sending direct mail – were all adopted by CODOH….

That’s it then! At last! It’s pure speculation, it’s all wrong, but there is in fact a clear logic of coincidence to it. I do remember talk about Curry’s full-page ad and how it was refused, though I don’t think I ever saw the text. I do remember talk about the $5,000 offer to debate revisionism being refused. I don’t know anything about Curry’s letter writing campaigns or the mass mailings. In 1986 I was doing radio. I had my hands full with it. But the story makes sense if you want it to. William Curry tried to publish a full-page ad in a campus newspaper so that’s what gave me the idea to do it. He offered money to get a debate going over revisionist theory, so I followed his lead. And why wouldn’t I? After all, William Curry “initially funded” CODOH. It’s all nonsense. But at last I see the “logic” in Jeffrey’s obsession with William Curry and CODOH.

As a matter of fact, in addition to William Curry not initially funding CODOH, I do not remember that he ever contributed any money whatever to CODOH or to me. Not a dime. Maybe he did. But I do remember one afternoon a few days before Christmas when we were still in Hollywood and I received a $400 check from a revisionist organization that Curry was affiliated with. It was about 1987. The check was a lifesaver. We didn’t have any money at all. I felt so grateful that I got Curry’s phone number from a mutual friend and rang him up. I had never spoken to him. I identified myself. It must have been about eight o’clock in the evening in Nebraska. I thanked him with some fervor for the check and started to go on about it when he interrupted me.

Curry said: “I didn’t send you any money. I don’t want your thanks.”

I was stopped in my tracks. I mumbled some apology and hung up. It turned out that my friend Fritz Berg, who was also affiliated with the same organization (I don’t remember now what it was called) had sent me the money.

A couple years later I did meet William Curry. I was invited through a mutual friend to spend the weekend at his winter home in Borrego Springs in the desert south of Palm Springs. Curry was probably in his seventies then, white haired, rather an invalid, and needed an oxygen tank at his side during dinner. His manner was what we used to call “crusty.” There were maybe eight of us at a lively supper table, including his charming wife. He asked me how I had gotten into revisionism and I told him the story about reading Faurisson’s paper on Auschwitz and the Rumor of the Gas Chambers, and how I had sensed immediately that something was wrong with the stories.

“That was short and clear,” Curry said. “ That’s what I like.”

I had the impression that he had asked that question of others and had gotten some long-winded answers. I asked him how he had gotten into revisionism and he related an anecdote about how after the war in Europe he had met a G.I. at a bar in England (maybe it was Germany) who told him that the stories about the Dachau gas chambers were not true. Curry said: “I looked into it and found out that the Dachau gas chamber was crap. Afterwards I looked into the other gas chamber stories and found out they were crap too. Sometimes I think the whole goddamned war was crap.”

Sometimes I think the same thing. No – that’s what I think about it every time I think about it. I would like to have gotten to know William Curry better, but I had to return to Hollywood that night, my mother was having a problem, and I never saw him again.

Meanwhile, I’m back in action with the dreaded Campus Project. Now that I have become aware (again) of how important my work is to the ADL, how closely its agents read everything I publish, I will report here only after the fact on the upcoming successes (and failures) of the new Campus Project for the 2001 – 2002 academic year. I’m looking forward to it.