Setting Holocaust History Straight

To the editors:


The Jewish people have a “tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. […] Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed—more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.” These powerful and courageous words were spoken by President Barack Obama on June 4th, in his landmark address to the Muslim world from Cairo, Egypt. Yesterday, here in Cambridge, the Harvard Crimson chose to grant a platform to those “hateful” voices so strongly condemned by our President.

On the bottom of page A7 of its September 8th, 2009 issue, The Crimson ran an ad questioning the truth of the Holocaust. In it, Bradley Smith, the founder of an organization which calls itself the “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust,” asked readers if they could “provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.”

As Harvard students, many of us members of The Crimson’s various departments, and all of us with an abiding respect for the paper’s staff and its institutions, we were shocked and pained by this immoral subversion of our own publication of record. Some of us are the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and were deeply hurt by the implication that those stories passed on to us of our past—of lives lost and families destroyed—were all lies concocted by a vast Jewish conspiracy. Like President Obama, we can view such “baseless” sentiments with nothing but revulsion. That the Harvard Crimson would choose to fund its activities with money garnered from the promotion of such hateful, willful ignorance shames its good name.

Doubtless this was a late night oversight made under the pressure of impending deadlines. But it was a grave error nonetheless, and one that demands correction. As Americans, we must practice what we preach—what was true in Cairo is true in Cambridge. We—as fellow staff, students and human beings - ask that you please set the record straight for the Crimson’s readership and issue an appropriate apology for the hurt inadvertently caused to so many.


HARVARD UNDERGRADUATES FOR HISTORICAL HONESTY

Cambridge, Mass

September 9, 2009