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the enemies of Free Speech
We spend a second warm summer evening on the riverfront, dining on a boat-deck with ringside seats for the most lavish fireworks display in the mid-West; we hear Tony Martin , left, Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, reveal the shocking origins of the Black slave trade (and who the culprits were).
from the 2001 Cincinnati conference publicity brochure News, Traditional enemies of Free Speech try to torpedo the Cincinnati conference Dr Andrew Mathis tries to frighten off Professor Martin [ Who is Dr Andrew Mathis? ] Dear Prof. Martin: THERE is an old saying — I don’t know who coined it — that goes like this: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Such thinking led to such alliances as the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, in which the parties agreed to partition Poland between themselves. Each nation had its own reasons for hating Poland: The Soviets despised Polish nationalism as contrary to their hegemony in Eastern Europe, while the Nazis were angered over German territory lost to sovereign Poland in the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.
So two nations, the ideologies of which were polar opposites and whose dictators had flung invective at one another for close to a decade, agreed to make friends for the greater goal. Of course, less than two years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and in the following four years, tens of millions of soldiers and civilians on both sides were brutally murdered on the Eastern Front. Why am I telling you this?
You have a Ph.D. in history, so this is surely nothing new to you. My reason for writing to you now is to suggest that by agreeing to appear on a platform with Holocaust denier David Irving , you are playing into the same trap used by the Nazis sixty-two years ago. Never mind that I disagree wholeheartedly with your conclusions about Jewish involvement in the African slave trade. Never mind that I’m a Jew myself.
Put our own personal differences on hold for a moment and consider a very basic fact: David Irving does not like people of African heritage. How do we know this?
Mr. Irving, while pressing his failed libel suit against Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University last year, read a diary entry of his very own into the court record — a short poem composed by the man himself upon seeing an interracial couple walking down a London street. He shared this poem with his pre-school-aged daughter: I am a baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / And I shall never marry / An ape or Rastafarian Charming, no?
Furthermore, Mr. Irving has consistently decried the influx of non-white immigrants into the U.K. In addition, in the late 1990s, he addressed the National Alliance, which is our nation’s largest neo-Nazi organization. (Incidentally, when I call the National Alliance “neo-Nazis,” I’m not engaging in empty rhetoric. The organization is run by Dr. William Pierce , who was a lieutenant in Commander George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party.) If Dr.
Pierce had his way, you’d be on the next slow boat