1960-1999 Holocaust Deniers

 Nadene Goldfoot

1960s

-1999 Anti-Semitism Acts After Holocaust

                                                           

Chess player Bobby Fischer made numerous anti-Jewish statements and professed a general hatred for Jews since at least the early 1960s. Although Fischer described his mother as Jewish in a 1962 interview, he later denied his Jewish ancestry.  Fischer made numerous antisemitic statements, including Holocaust denial, despite his Jewish ancestry. His antisemitism was a major theme in his public and private remarks, and there has been speculation concerning his psychological condition based on his extreme views and eccentric behavior. Bobby Fischer was born at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, on March 9, 1943^] His mother, Regina Wender Fischer, was a US citizen, born in Switzerland; her parents were Polish Jews. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Regina became a teacher, a registered nurse, and later a physician.After graduating from college in her teens, Regina traveled to Germany to visit her brother. It was there she met geneticist and future Nobel Prize winner Hermann Joseph Muller, who persuaded her to move to Moscow to study medicine. She enrolled at First Moscow State Medical University, where she met Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, also known as Gerardo Liebscher, a German biophysicist, whom she married in November 1933. In 1938, Hans-Gerhardt and Regina had a daughter, Joan Fischer. The reemergence of antisemitism under Stalin prompted Regina to go with Joan to Paris, where Regina became an English teacher. The threat of a German invasion led her and Joan to go to the United States in 1939. Regina and Hans-Gerhardt had already separated in Moscow, although they did not officially divorce until 1945. At the time of her son's birth, Regina was homeless. For several years, she took jobs around the country to support her family. She engaged in political activism and raised both Bobby and Joan as a single parent.

1960

The Badges Act 1960 (Abzeichengesetz 1960) prohibits the public display of Nazi symbols in Austria, and violations are punishable by up to €4000.- fine and up to 1 month imprisonment.😊

1960

On 25 March, 1960, the synagogue Congregation Beth Israel and its members were subject to an antisemitic attack. About 180 members were attending a Friday evening service to dedicate the new Zemurray Social Hall, and led by then-rabbi Saul Rubin and Rev. John Speaks and Dr. Franklin Denson of First Methodist Church, when windows were smashed and the synagogue fire-bombed. Two members—Alvin Lowi and Alan Cohn—who rushed out to see what was happening were met by Jerry Hunt, a 16-year-old Nazi sympathizer, who wounded them both with a shotgun, then fled. Lowi was just shot in the hand, but one of Cohn's aortas was nicked, and he almost died, requiring 22 US pints (10 L) of blood. Earlier that week Hunt had attended a rally for antisemitic and white supremacist politician John G. Crommelin, and had had a fight with a Jewish boy over a chess game at the Gadsden Community Centre.

1961

In 1961, a protégé of Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan published Der Erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War) in West Germany, which claimed that Germany had been the victim of an Anglo-Polish conspiracy in 1939. Though Der Erzwungene Krieg was primarily concerned with the origins of World War II, it also down-played or justified the effects of Nazi antisemitic measures in the pre-1939 period. For example, Hoggan justified the huge one billion Reich-mark fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany after the 1938 Kristallnacht as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering" at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht (in fact, 91 German Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht).

1962

In his 1962 pamphlet, Revisionism and Brainwashing, Harry Elmer Barnes claimed that there was a "lack of any serious opposition or concerted challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of German national character and conduct". Barnes argued that there was "a failure to point out the atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most extreme allegations made against the Germans". He claimed that in order to justify the "horrors and evils of the Second World War", the Allies made the Nazis the "scapegoat" for their own misdeeds.

1963

"Judaism Without Embellishments" published by the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in 1963.

1964

In a 1964 article, "Zionist Fraud", published in the American Mercury, Harry Elmer Barnes wrote: "The courageous author [Rassinier] lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner." Using Rassinier as his source, Barnes claimed that Germany was the victim of aggression in both 1914 and 1939, and that reports of the Holocaust were propaganda to justify a war of aggression against Germany.

1964

Nasser told a German newspaper in 1964 that "no person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered [in the Holocaust]."

1964

The Roman Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI issues the document Nostra aetate as part of Vatican II, repudiating the doctrine of Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion.

1964

In 1964, French historian Paul Rassinier published The Drama of the European Jews. Rassinier was himself a concentration camp survivor (he was held in Buchenwald for having helped French Jews escape the Nazis), and modern-day holocaust deniers continue to cite his works as scholarly research that questions the accepted facts of the Holocaust. Critics argued that Rassinier did not cite evidence for his claims and ignored information that contradicted his assertions; he nevertheless remains influential in Holocaust denial circles for being one of the first deniers to propose that a vast Zionist/Allied/Soviet conspiracy faked the Holocaust, a theme that would be picked up in later years by other authors.

1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on religion, race, color, sex, or national origin.😄

1965

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as der Auschwitz-Prozess, or der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess, (the "second Auschwitz trial") was a series of trials running from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965, charging 22 defendants under German criminal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp complex. Hans Hofmeyer led as Chief Judge the "criminal case against Mulka and others" (reference number 4 Ks 2/63).

Overall, only 789 individuals of the approximately 6,500 surviving SS personnel who served at Auschwitz and its sub-camps were ever tried, of which 750 received sentences. Unlike the first trial in Poland held almost two decades earlier, the trials in Frankfurt were not based on the legal definition of crimes against humanity as recognized by international law, but according to the state laws of the Federal Republic.

1967

Allen Ginsberg stated that, in a private conversation in 1967, Ezra Pound told the young poet, "my poems don't make sense." He went on to supposedly call himself a "moron", to characterize his writing as "stupid and ignorant", "a mess". Ginsberg reassured Pound that he "had shown us the way", but Pound refused to be mollified:'Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions – the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things,' [he] replied. Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.'

1967

In 1967, Congregation Beth Israel of Alabama moved to its current location, a building on Old Canton Road described by Jack Nelson as "an octagonal structure dominated by a massive roof". On 18 September 1967 the new building was wrecked by a dynamite bomb placed by Klan members in a recessed doorway. According to Nelson, the explosion had "ripped through administrative offices and a conference room, torn a hole in the ceiling, blown out windows, ruptured a water pipe and buckled a wall." The perpetrators were not discovered. In November of that year the same group planted a bomb that blew out the front of the house of Dr. Perry Nussbaum (Beth Israel's rabbi from 1954 to 1973), while he and his wife were sleeping there.

1967

Six Day War: All Muslim countries attacked Israel:  All Jewish men in Egypt were placed in camps in 1967 during the Six-Day War, and they were kept there for more than two years; Karaite Jews were the last to leave.

1968–1971

State-supported anti-Semitism swept across Poland in 1968, not subsiding until 1971, by which time half of Poland's Jews had fled Poland.

1968

During the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the leadership of Beth Israel spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan's attacks on black churches. In response, Thomas Tarrants of Mobile, Alabama, who had helped bomb the synagogue building of a different synagogue, Beth Israel Congregation, and its rabbi's house there (see previous entry in this timeline) bombed Beth Israel's education building on 28 May 1968. The force of the blast knocked down several walls of the education building and caved in part of the roof while also destroying a door at the opposite end of the synagogue building. A hole approximately 24 inches (61 cm) in diameter was left in the concrete floor, and damages were estimated to be around $50,000 (equivalent to $452,000 today). According to Sammy Feltenstein, past president of Congregation Beth Israel, pieces of stained glass that survived the bombing were salvaged and adorn the front window of the synagogue today. Later that year, on 30 June, Tarrants returned to Meridian to bomb the home of Meyer Davidson, an outspoken leader of the Jewish community, on 29th Avenue. But the FBI and police chief Roy Gunn convinced Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts, local Klan members, to gather information about the Klan's operations, and leaders of the Jewish communities in Jackson and in Meridian had raised money to pay the two informants, who tipped off the FBI about the attack before it happened.

1969

David Hoggan explicitly denied the Holocaust in 1969 in a book entitled The Myth of the Six Million, which was published by the Noontide Press, a small Los Angeles publisher specializing in antisemitic literature.

1960s–1991

The rise of Zionology in the Soviet Union. In 1983, the Department of Propaganda and the KGB's Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public orchestrates formally "anti-Zionist" campaign.

1968

Polish 1968 political crisis. The state-organized antisemitic campaign in the People's Republic of Poland under guise of "anti-Zionism" drives out most of remaining Jewish population.

1968

The ancient Jewish community of Hebron, which had been destroyed in the 1929 Hebron massacre, is revived at Kiryat Arba. The community, in 1979 and afterwards, moves into Hebron proper and rebuilds the demolished Abraham Avinu Synagogue, the site of which had been used by Jordan as a cattle-pen.

1968

The Alhambra Decree was formally revoked on 16 December 1968.😀

1968

The Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) in the United States😀 introduced meaningful federal enforcement mechanisms. It outlawed:

• Refusal to sell or rent a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
• Discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in the terms, conditions or privilege of the sale or rental of a dwelling.
• Advertising the sale or rental of a dwelling indicating preference of discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin.
• Coercing, threatening, intimidating, or interfering with a person's enjoyment or exercise of housing rights based on discriminatory reasons or retaliating against a person or organization that aids or encourages the exercise or enjoyment of fair housing rights.

1969 November 9

Tupamaros West-Berlin attempted to bomb of West Berlin's Jewish Community Centre. The bomb, supplied by the undercover government agent Peter Urbach, failed to explode.

1970s

[edit]

1970s

Lyndon LaRouche and his ideas have been called antisemitic since at least the mid-1970s by dozens of individuals and organizations in countries across Europe and North America. LaRouche and his followers have responded to these allegations by claiming that LaRouche has Jewish supporters and by denying the accusations.

1970

Canada has no legislation specifically restricting the ownership, display, purchase, import or export of Nazi flags. However, sections 318–320 of the Criminal Code,  adopted by Canada's parliament in 1970 and based in large part on the 1965 Cohen Committee recommendations, provide law enforcement agencies with broad scope to intervene if such flags are used to communicate hatred in a public place (particularly sections 319(1), 319(2), and 319(7).

1970

After the Second Vatican Council, the Good Friday prayer for the Jews was completely revised for the 1970 edition of the Roman Missal. Because of the possibility of a misinterpretation similar to that of the word "perfidis" (see above in 1959), the reference to the veil on the hearts of the Jews, which was based on 2 Corinthians 3:14, was removed. The 1973 ICEL English translation of the revised prayer is as follows:

Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant. (Prayer in silence. Then the priest says:) Almighty and eternal God, long ago you gave your promise to Abraham and his posterity. Listen to your Church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

1971

The ban on Jewish immigration to Israel from the Soviet Union was lifted in 1971 leading to the 1970s Soviet Union aliyah.

1971

The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution stating in part, "we point out particularly one area of concern known as anti-Semitism, which some think erroneously is inherent in Christianity, and which we disavow." Sorry, but the Roman meetings show otherwise in the early 300s when making decisions.  Also, how about the Spanish Inquisition?

1971

To further the goal of reconciliation, the Catholic Church established an internal International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations. (This Committee is not a part of the Church's Magisterium.)

1972

The Southern Baptist Convention passed a "Resolution on Anti-Semitism" stating in part:

"Therefore, be it RESOLVED, That this Convention go on record as opposed to any and all forms of anti-Semitism; that it declare anti-Semitism unchristian; that we messengers to this Convention pledge ourselves to combat anti-Semitism in every honorable, Christian way."

"Be it further RESOLVED, That Southern Baptists covenant to work positively to replace all anti-Semitic bias with the Christian attitude and practice of love for Jews, who along with all other men, are equally beloved of God."

1972

11 Israeli Olympic athletes are taken hostage and eventually tortured and killed in the Munich massacre.

1974

Syria:  Four Jewish girls were raped, murdered and mutilated after attempting to flee to Israel. Their bodies were discovered by border police in a cave in the Zabdani Mountains northwest of Damascus along with the remains of two Jewish boys, Natan Shaya 18 and Kassem Abadi 20, victims of an earlier massacre. Syrian authorities deposited the bodies of all six in sacks before the homes of their parents in the Jewish ghetto in Damascus.

1974

Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last is a Holocaust denial pamphlet allegedly written by British National Front member Richard Verrall under the pseudonym Richard E. Harwood and published by Ernst Zündel in 1974.

1975

The United Nations passed a resolution determining that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." (It was revoked in 1991, as mentioned below.)

1976

Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry was published.

1977

David Irving's Holocaust denying book Hitler's War was published.

1977 March 9–11

1977 Washington, D.C. attack and hostage taking.

1977 October 3

In suburban St. Louis, Missouri, Joseph Paul Franklin hid in the bushes near a Shaare Zedek Synagogue (University City, Missouri) and fired on a group attending services. In this incident, Franklin killed forty-two-year-old Gerald Gordon and wounded Steven Goldman and William Ash.

1977

In a 1977 Globe-Democrat column discussing John Toland's biography of Adolf Hitler, Pat Buchanan wrote:

Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path. Buchanan supporters say the paragraph is taken out of context. They point out that in the same review Buchanan praised Winston Churchill for seeing that "Hitler was marching along the road toward a New Order where Western civilization would not survive" and concluded that modern-day statesmen were not following that example.

1977

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977) (also known as Smith v. Collin; sometimes referred to as the Skokie Affair), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with freedom of assembly. The outcome was that the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the use of the swastika is a symbolic form of free speech entitled to First Amendment protections and determined that the swastika itself did not constitute "fighting words." Its ruling allowed the National Socialist Party  (Nazi Germany) of America to march.

1978

In 1978 Willis Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust.

1978/1979

In December 1978 and January 1979, Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature at the University of Lyon, wrote two letters to Le Monde claiming that the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist.

1979

A House Joint resolution 1014 designated 28 and 29 April 1979 as "The Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (DRVH)." After that the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (DRVH) has been an annual 8-day period designated by the United States Congress for civic commemorations and special educational programs that help citizens remember and draw lessons from the Holocaust.

1979

When the Anti-Defamation League accused Lyndon LaRouche of antisemitism in 1979, he filed a $26-million libel suit; however, the case failed when Justice Michael Dontzin of the New York Supreme Court ruled that it was fair comment, and that the facts "reasonably give rise" to that description.

1979

"Jewish Princess" is a song by Frank Zappa released on his album Sheik Yerbouti in 1979. The song is a humorous look at the Jewish-American princess stereotype which attracted attention from the Anti-Defamation League, to which Zappa denied an apology, arguing: "Unlike the unicorn, such creatures do exist – and deserve to be 'commemorated' with their own special opus". In an interview with Spin magazine he was almost offended saying, "...as if to say there is no such thing as a Jewish Princess. Like I invented this?" Biographer Barry Miles claimed in his book, Frank Zappa (Atlantic Books of London, 2005), that the ADL asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban the record from being played on the air – a symbolic effort given that the song was not being played anyway.

1980s

[edit]

1980, 27 July

1980 Antwerp attack.^]

1980, 3 October

1980 Paris synagogue bombing.

1980

In 1980, the Institute for Historical Review promised a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Mel Mermelstein wrote a letter to the editors of the LA Times and others including The Jerusalem Post. The IHR wrote back, offering him $50,000 for proof that Jews were, in fact, gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Mermelstein, in turn, submitted a notarized account of his internment at Auschwitz and how he witnessed Nazi guards ushering his mother and two sisters and others towards (as he learned later) gas chamber number five. Despite this, the IHR refused to pay the reward. Represented by public interest attorney William John Cox, Mermelstein subsequently sued the IHR in the Superior Court of Los Angeles Countyℳ for breach of contract, anticipatory repudiation, libel, injurious denial of established fact, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and declaratory relief (see case no. C 356 542). On 9 October 1981, both parties in the Mermelstein case filed motions for summary judgment in consideration of which Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County took "judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944," judicial notice meaning that the court treated the gas chambers as common knowledge, and therefore did not require evidence that the gas chambers existed. On 5 August 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke entered a judgment based upon the Stipulation for Entry of Judgment agreed upon by the parties on 22 July 1985. The judgment required IHR and other defendants to pay $90,000 to Mermelstein and to issue a letter of apology to "Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz" for "pain, anguish and suffering" caused to them.

Early 1980s

Jesse Jackson was criticized in the early 1980s for remarks made to a reporter where he referred to New York City as "Hymietown". (Hymie is a pejorative term for Jews.) Jackson ultimately acknowledged he had used the term, and said he had been wrong; however, he also said that he had considered the conversation with the reporter to be off-the-record at the time he made the remarks. Jackson apologized during a speech before national Jewish leaders in a Manchester, New Hampshire synagogue, but an enduring split between Jackson and many in the Jewish community continued at least through the 1990s.

1981 August 29

1981 Vienna;, Austria synagogue attack.

1981 October 20

1981 Antwerp synagogue bombing.

1981

The Southern Baptist Convention passed a "Resolution On Anti-Semitism" stating in part, "Be it therefore RESOLVED, That the messengers at the 1981 Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Los Angeles, June 9–11, 1981, commend our Southern Baptist Convention leaders as they seek sincere friendship and meaningful dialogue with our Jewish neighbors."

1981

Elana Steinberg was killed by her husband Steven Steinberg, who claimed that she was a "spoiled, over-indulged brat – the stereotypical Jewish American Princess," and that she made him insane by spending and insisting that he become more successful; he was found not guilty.

1981-3

From 1981 to 1982, Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel had his mailing privileges suspended by the Canadian government on the grounds that he had been using the mail to send hate propaganda, a criminal offence in Canada.  Zündel then began shipping from a post office box in Niagara Falls, New York, until the ban on his mailing in Canada was lifted in January 1983.

1982

A bomb placed by neo-Nazis exploded outside the Jewish hunter of Nazis Simon Wiesenthal's house in Vienna on 11 June 1982, after which police guards were stationed outside his home 24 hours a day.

1982 October 9

Great Synagogue of Rome attack takes place.

1982

The thesis of the 1982 doctoral dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas, a co-founder of Fatah and president of the Palestinian National Authority, was "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement".This is why the PLO kept attacking Jews and could not be friends or trusted.

 In his 1983 book The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism based on the dissertation, Abbas denied that six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust; dismissing it as a "myth" and a "fantastic lie" At most, he wrote, 890,000 Jews were killed by the Germans. Abbas claimed that the number of deaths has been exaggerated for political purposes. "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand." In his March 2006 interview with Haaretz, Abbas stated, "I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were 12 million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it." While acknowledging the existence of the Holocaust in 2006 and 2014, Abbas has defended the position that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to perpetrate it. In 2012, Abbas told Al Mayadeen, a Beirut TV station affiliated with Iran and Hezbollah, that he "challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis before World War II".

1982 September 18

Great Synagogue of Europe attacked by a man with a submachine gun, seriously wounding four people. The attack has been attributed to the Abu Nidal Organization

1982

In the book Against Sadomasochism, Susan Leigh Star criticizes the use of swastikas and other Nazi imagery by some BDSM practitioners as anti-Semitic and racist.

1983

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod officially disassociates itself from "intemperate remarks about Jews" in Luther's works. Since then, many Lutheran church bodies and organizations have issued similar statements. (See Martin Luther and the Jews)

1984

On the evening of 18 June 1984, Alan Berg was fatally shot in the driveway of his Denver home by members of the white nationalist group The Order. His provocative talk show sought to flush out "the anti-Semitism latent in the area's conservative population". He succeeded in provoking members of The Order to engage him in conversations on this talk show and his "often-abrasive on-air persona" ignited the anger of The Order. Subsequently, members of The Order involved in the killing were identified as being part of a group planning to kill prominent Jews.  Ultimately, two members of The Order, David Lane and Bruce Pierce, were convicted for their involvement in the case, though neither of homicide.

1984

In 1984, James Keegstra, a Canadian high-school teacher, was charged under the Canadian Criminal Code for "promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements to his students". During class, he would describe Jews as a people of profound evil who had "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy." He also tested his students in exams on his theories and opinion of Jews.

Keegstra was charged under s 281.2(2) of the Criminal Code (now s 319(2), which provides that "Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group" commits a criminal offence. He was convicted at trial before the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench. The court rejected the argument, advanced by Keegstra and his lawyer, Doug Christie, that promoting hatred is a constitutionally protected freedom of expression as per s 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Keegstra appealed to the Alberta Court of Appeal. That court agreed with Keegstra, and he was acquitted. The Crown then appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, which rule by a 4–3 majority that promoting hatred could be justifiably restricted under s 1 of the Charter. The Supreme Court restored Keegstra's conviction. He was fired from his teaching position shortly afterwards.

1985, 22 July

1985 Copenhagen bombings

1985

At a meeting of the Nation of Islam at Madison Square Garden in 1985, Louis Farrakhan said of the Jews: "And don't you forget, when it's God who puts you in the ovens, it's forever!"

1985

On 24 December 1985, David Lewis Rice, a follower of the right-wing extremist group the Duck Club, gained entry to the Seattle home of civil litigation attorney Charles Goldmark using a toy gun and pretending to be a deliveryman. He tied the family up, chloroformed them into unconsciousness, beat them with a steam iron, and stabbed them. Rice mistakenly believed the family to be Jewish and Communist. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to the crimes in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. The Goldmark Murders remain one of the most notorious antisemitic hate crimes as well as politically motivated killings in recent memory in the United States, even though the victims were not actually Jewish and Communist as the killer mistakenly believed.

1985

Ronald Reagan visited a German military cemetery in Bitburg to lay a wreath with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It was determined that the cemetery held the graves of forty-nine members of the Waffen-SS. Reagan issued a statement that called the Nazi soldiers buried in that cemetery as themselves "victims," a designation which ignited a stir over whether Reagan had equated the SS men to victims of the Holocaust; Pat Buchanan, Reagan's Director of Communications, argued that the president did not equate the SS members with the actual Holocaust. Now strongly urged to cancel the visit, the president responded that it would be wrong to back down on a promise he had made to Chancellor Kohl. He ultimately attended the ceremony where two military generals laid a wreath.

1986

Leo Frank was posthumously pardoned by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles.

1986

In Israel, a law to criminalize Holocaust denial was passed by the Knesset on 8 July 1986.

1986 September 6

Gunmen opened fire during a Shabbat service in Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey which resulted in the death of 22 people. This attack is attributed to the Palestinian militant Abu Nidal.

1987

On 13 September 1987 Jean-Marie Le Pen said, "I ask myself several questions. I'm not saying the gas chambers didn't exist. I haven't seen them myself. I haven't particularly studied the question. But I believe it's just a detail in the history of World War II." He was condemned under the Gayssot Act and ordered to pay 1.2 million francs (183,200 euros).

1987

Pat Buchanan called for ending prosecution of Nazi camp guards, saying it was "running down 70-year-old camp guards."

1987

In 1987, Bradley R. Smith, a former media director of the Institute for Historical Review, founded the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).

1987

John Koehler was the communications director for five working days under President Ronald Reagan; Koehler, who was an immigrant from Germany, had been in Hitler Youth.

Since 1987

Activities of Pamyat and other "nonformal" ultra-nationalist organizations in the Soviet Union.

1988

In 1988, the American historian Arno J. Mayer published a book entitled Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which did not explicitly deny the Holocaust, but lent support to Holocaust denial by stating that most people who died at Auschwitz were the victims of "natural causes" such as disease, not gassing. Mayer also cited the works of Holocaust deniers Arthur Butz and Paul Rassinier in his book's bibliography. Critics such as Lucy Dawidowicz criticized Mayer's citation of deniers, and argued that his statements about Auschwitz were factually incorrect. Holocaust expert Robert Jan van Pelt has noted that Mayer's book is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial. Holocaust deniers such as David Irving have often cited Mayer's book as one reason for embracing Holocaust denial. Though Mayer has been often condemned for his statement about the reasons for the Auschwitz death toll, his book does not deny the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz, as Holocaust deniers often claim.

Some mainstream Holocaust historians have labeled Mayer a denier. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that Mayer "popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much more subtle form of Holocaust denial".

Defenders of Mayer argue that his statement that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers at once rare and unreliable" has been taken out of context, particularly by Holocaust deniers. Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman observe that the paragraph from which the statement is taken asserts that the SS destroyed the majority of the documentation relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable".

1988

In February 1988, an improperly drawn swastika and anti-Semitic slogans and "Jesus Lives; You Can't Kill Him" and "Accept Hitler, Respect Christ" were plastered across the synagogue Bet Shira Congregation, and 30 windows were smashed. In response, a neighboring church put a Star of David on its lawn, and its parish donated $1,000 towards repairing the windows. Miami Sunset High School students painted over the anti-Semitic slurs spray-painted by the vandals. Four teenagers, three of whom were football players at Miami Palmetto High School, were sentenced for having vandalized the synagogue to 200 hours of community service and ordered to pay the $14,800 ($39,300 today) in damages.

1989

Finland has no specific legislation aimed at controlling ownership, display, purchase, import or export of Nazi flags, however the Criminal Code (39/1889) (especially Chapter 11 'War crimes and offences against humanity' Section 8) may be applied where an offence has been directed at a person belonging to a national, racial, ethnic or other population group due to his/her membership in such a group.

1990s

[edit]

1990s

Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected to the United States Supreme Court bar inscribing its certificates "in the year of our Lord", at the request of some Orthodox Jews who opposed it, and due to her objection, Supreme Court bar members have since been given other choices of how to inscribe the year on their certificates.

1990

Lake Forest, Illinois kept anti-Jewish and anti-African-American housing covenants until 1990.

1990

On five occasions in six weeks vandals used slingshots to shoot out windows at the synagogue Bet Shira Congregation. Three teenagers, two of them students at Palmetto High School, were arrested for shooting out the windows.

1990

For his portrayal of Jewish nightclub owners Moe and Josh Flatbush in the 1990 film Mo' Better Blues, Spike Lee drew the ire of the Anti Defamation League, B'nai B'rith, and other such Jewish organizations. The Anti-Defamation League claimed that the characterizations of the nightclub owners "dredge up an age-old and highly dangerous form of anti-Semitic stereotyping", and stated it was "...disappointed that Spike Lee – whose success is largely due to his efforts to break down racial stereotypes and prejudice – has employed the same kind of tactics that he supposedly deplores." Lee eventually responded in an editorial in The New York Times, alleging "a double standard at work in the accusations of anti-Semitism" given the long history of negative portrayals of African-Americans in film: "Not every black person is a pimp, murderer, prostitute, convict, rapist or drug addict, but that hasn't stopped Hollywood from writing these roles for African-Americans". Lee argues that even if the Flatbush brothers are stereotyped figures, their "10 minutes of screen time" is insignificant when compared to "100 years of Hollywood cinema... [and] a slew of really racist, anti-Semitic filmmakers". According to Lee, his status as a successful African-American artist has led to hostility and unfair treatment: "Don't hold me to a higher moral standard than the rest of my filmmaking colleagues... Now that young black filmmakers have arisen in the film industry, all of a sudden stereotypes are a big issue... I think it's reaching the point where I'm getting reviewed, not my films." Ultimately, however, Lee refused to apologize for his portrayal of the Flatbush brothers: "I stand behind all my work, including my characters, Moe and Josh Flatbush... if critics are telling me that to avoid charges of anti-Semitism, all Jewish characters I write have to be model citizens, and not one can be a villain, cheat or a crook, and that no Jewish people have ever exploited black artists in the history of the entertainment industry, that's unrealistic and unfair."

1990

In France, the Gayssot Act, voted for on 13 July 1990, makes it illegal to question the existence of crimes that fall in the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–46. When the act was challenged by Robert Faurisson, the Human Rights Committee upheld it as a necessary means to counter possible antisemitism.

1990

In a 1990 column defending John Demjanjuk, Pat Buchanan said: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. In 1988, 97 kids, trapped 400 feet (120 m) underground in a Washington, DC, tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes. Demjanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill.  When asked for his source, Buchanan said, "somebody sent it to me." Critic Jamie McCarthy says this claim may have come from the German American Information and Education Association's newsletter, a publication he accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. He also argues that:  Unlike the locomotive engineer in Buchanan's example, who was concerned with saving the lives of trapped people, the Nazis had no qualms about opening the engine's throttle and restricting the air intake.  The Washington Post had reported in 1989, before the controversy, that:  An Amtrak train had been stalled in a tunnel for half an hour, and smoke from the diesel engine had filled the first car, where there were 97 fifth-grade pupils and 27 adult chaperones. [EMT Cynthia] Brown boarded the train, guided the passengers – most of whom suffered from smoke inhalation – from the car and assisted those who needed immediate attention.

1990

French literature professor Robert Faurisson was convicted and punished for Holocaust denial under the Gayssot Act in 1990.

1991

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, published in 1991, is a book that asserts that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. The book has been labeled an Antisemitic canard by historians including Saul S. Friedman, who writes that Jews had a minimal role in New World slave trade. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., head of the department of Afro-American studies at Harvard University, called the book "the Bible of new anti-Semitism" and added that "the book massively misinterprets the historical record, largely through a process of cunningly selective quotations of often reputable sources".

The book was criticized for being antisemitic, and for failing to provide an objective analysis of the role of Jews in the slave trade. Common criticisms were that the book used selective quotes, made "crude use of statistics," and was purposefully trying to exaggerate the role of Jews.  Historian Ralph A. Austen criticized the book, saying that the "distortions are produced almost entirely by selective citation rather than explicit falsehood.... more frequently there are innuendos imbedded in the accounts of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, and "[w]hile we should not ignore the anti-Semitism of The Secret Relationship..., we must recognize the legitimacy of the stated aim of examining fully and directly even the most uncomfortable elements in our [Black and Jewish] common past." Austen acknowledges that the book was the first book on the subject aimed at a non-scholarly audience.In 1995, the American Historical Association (AHA) issued a statement condemning "any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Atlantic slave trade."  The publication of The Secret Relationship spurred retorts published specifically to refute the thesis of The Secret Relationship:

• 1992 – Harold Brackman, Jew on the Brain: A Public Refutation of the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
• 1992 – David Brion Davis, "Jews in the Slave Trade," in Culturefront (Fall 1992) pp 42–45.
• 1993 – Seymour Drescher, "The Role of Jews in the Atlantic Slave Trade," Immigrants and Minorities, 12 (1993), pp 113–125.
• 1993 – Marc Caplan, Jew-Hatred As History: An Analysis of the Nation of Islam's "The Secret Relationship" (Published by the Anti Defamation League).
• 1998 – Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight, New York University Press.
• 1999 – Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade, Transaction.

A post-1991 scholar who analyzed the role of Jews in the overall Atlantic slave trade concluded that it was "minimal," and only identified certain regions (such as Brazil and the Caribbean) where the participation was "significant."

Wim Klooster wrote: "In no period did Jews play a leading role as financiers, shipowners, or factors in the Transatlantic or Caribbean slave trades. They possessed far fewer slaves than non-Jews in every British territory in North America and the Caribbean. Even when Jews in a handful of places owned slaves in proportions slightly above their representation among a town's families, such cases do not come close to corroborating the assertions of The Secret Relationship."

The Anti-Defamation League states that Volume Two of The Secret Relationship blames Jews for "promoting a myth of black racial inferiority and makes a range of conspiratorial accusations about Jewish involvement in the slave trade and in the cotton, textiles, and banking industries".

1991

The Crown Heights riot was a three-day racial riot that occurred from 19–21 August 1991 in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York City. It turned black residents and Orthodox Jewish residents against each other, causing deteriorated racial relations. The riots began on 19 August 1991, after two children of Guyanese immigrants were unintentionally struck by an automobile in the motorcade of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of a Jewish religious sect. One child died and the second was severely injured. This event was said to cause tensions between Jewish and black residents to erupt.

In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Orthodox Jewish man was killed; and a non-Jewish man, apparently mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of black men. The riots were a major issue in the 1993 mayoral race, contributing to the defeat of Mayor David Dinkins, an African American, who was blamed for an ineffective police response. Ultimately, black and Jewish leaders developed an outreach program between their communities to help calm and possibly improve racial relations in Crown Heights over the next decade.

1991

In December 1991 the American Historical Association issued the following statement: The American Historical Association Council strongly deplores the publicly reported attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust. No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place. This followed a strong reaction by many of its members and commentary in the press against a near-unanimous decision that the AHA had made in May 1991 that studying the significance of the Holocaust should be encouraged. The association's May 1991 statement was in response to an incident where certain of its members had questioned the reality of the Holocaust. The December 1991 declaration is a reversal of the AHA's earlier stance that the association should not set a precedent by certifying historical facts.

1992 March 1

A bomb attack was carried out by two men at Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey causing no damage or casualties.^[247]

1993

In 1993, Todd Hindin filed a lawsuit against State Farm for allegedly keeping a list of prominent Jewish lawyers referred to within State Farm as the "Jewish Lawyers List". Any claims made by clients of these attorneys were automatically forwarded to State Farm's fraud unit, purely on the basis of the religion and national origin of the lawyers. These claims would then be neither settled nor paid. State Farm initially claimed that this was not a matter of discrimination, but of coincidence. However, Dr. Frank Taylor (an experienced economist on retainer for the Appellants) discovered that despite the fact that the population of the states involved had Jewish populations between 2–5% of the total population, the list was composed of nearly 80% religiously or ethnically Jewish lawyers. Individuals who had worked for State Farm, including former Divisional Claim Superintendent Ron Middler, testified that the list was indeed used to discriminate against ethnic minorities. State Farm paid out $30 million to Todd Hindin and his clients for discrimination on the basis of religion and national origin.

1994 February 25

Second Hebron, Israel  massacre. Baruch Goldstein, a Jew, kills several Muslim worshippers; this leads to riots that kill both Muslims and Jews.

1994

On 1 March 1994, on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, Lebanese-born immigrant Rashid Baz shot at a van of 15 Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish students that was traveling on the Brooklyn Bridge, killing one and injuring three others. See 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting.

1994, 20 March

Chris Lord, an individual associated with the Volksfront and American Front, fired ten rounds with an assault rifle into Temple Beth Israel (Eugene, Oregon), damaging the interior.

1994

AMIA bombing against the Jewish community of Buenos Aires.

1995

In February 1995 a Japanese magazine named Marco Polo, a 250,000-circulation monthly published by Bungei Shunju, ran a Holocaust denial article by physician Masanori Nishioka which stated:  The 'Holocaust' is a fabrication. There were no execution gas chambers in Auschwitz or in any other concentration camp. Today, what are displayed as 'gas chambers' at the remains of the Auschwitz camp in Poland are a post-war fabrication by the Polish communist regime or by the Soviet Union, which controlled the country. Not once, neither at Auschwitz nor in any territory controlled by the Germans during the Second World War, was there 'mass murder of Jews' in 'gas chambers.'The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center instigated a boycott of Bungei Shunju advertisers, including Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, and Cartier. Within days, Bungei Shunju shut down Marco Polo and its editor, Kazuyoshi Hanada, quit, as did the president of Bungei Shunju, Kengo Tanaka.

1995

In Belgium, Holocaust denial was made illegal in 1995.

1996

In Turkey, in 1996, the Islamic preacher Harun Yahya distributed thousands of copies of a book which was originally published the previous year, entitled Soykırım Yalanı ("The Holocaust Lie") and mailed unsolicited texts to American and European schools and colleges. The publication of Soykırım Yalanı sparked much public debate. This book claims, "what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the end of the war caused by the defeat of the Germans." In March 1996, a Turkish painter and intellectual, Bedri Baykam, published a strongly worded critique of the book in the Ankara daily newspaper Siyah-Beyaz ("Black and White"). A legal suit for slander was brought against him. During the trial in September, Baykam exposed the real author of the book as Adnan Oktar. The suit was withdrawn in March 1997.

1996

The depiction of Jews in some of T.S. Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of anti-Semitism. This case has been presented most forcefully in a study by Anthony Julius: T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996). In "Gerontion", Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, "And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp." Another well-known example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar". In this poem, Eliot wrote, "The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs." Interpreting the line as an indirect comparison of Jews to rats, Julius writes, "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius's viewpoint has been supported by literary critics such as Harold Bloom, Christopher Ricks, George Steiner, Tom Paulin and James Fenton.

1997

This year the European Parliament, of which Jean-Marie Le Pen was then a member, removed his parliamentary immunity so that Le Pen could be tried by a German court for comments he made at a December 1996 press conference before the German Republikaner party. Echoing his 1987 remarks in France (see above), Le Pen stated: "If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail." In June 1999, a Munich court found this statement to be "minimizing the Holocaust, which caused the deaths of six million Jews," and convicted and fined Le Pen for his remarks. Le Pen retorted ironically: "I understand now that it's the Second World War which is a detail of the history of the gas chambers."

1997

Jean-Marie Le Pen accused Jacques Chirac of being "on the payroll of Jewish organizations, and particularly of the B'nai B'rith."

1997

In Luxembourg, Article 457–3 of the Criminal Code, Act of 19 July 1997 outlaws Holocaust denial and denial of other genocides. The punishment is imprisonment for between 8 days and 6 months and/or a fine.

1998

In a May 1998 interview with ABC's John Miller, Osama bin Laden stated that the Israeli state's ultimate goal was to annex the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East into its territory and enslave its peoples, as part of what he called a "Greater Israel". He stated that Jews and Muslims could never get along and that war was "inevitable" between them, and further accused the U.S. of stirring up anti-Islamic sentiment. He claimed that the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Defense were controlled by Jews, for the sole purpose of serving the Israeli state's goals.  In a December 1998 interview with Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, Osama bin Laden stated that Operation Desert Fox was proof that Israeli Jews controlled the governments of the United States and United Kingdom, directing them to kill as many Muslims as they could.

1999

Holocaust Remembrance Day has been commemorated as a national remembrance day in Sweden every year since 1999.

1999

Intelligence Ministry of Iran arrested 13 Iranian Jews, accusing them of spying for Israel. Arrestees were five merchants, a rabbi, two university professors, three teachers in private Hebrew schools, a kosher butcher and a 16-year-old boy. Ten of them were sentenced to 4–13 years in prison. As a result of the pressure campaigns and secret negotiations, the prisoners were gradually freed in small groups. All of them emigrated to Israel with their families.

1999

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, in an 11 October 1999, letter to The Washington Post claimed that A Republic, Not an Empire by Pat Buchanan "defends Charles Lindbergh against charges of anti-Semitism, not mentioning the infamous 1940 [sic] speech in which he accused the Jews of warmongering." Pat Buchanan denies this and points out Foxman's error, saying that he mentioned the 1941 speech to say it "ignited a national firestorm," which lingered after the aviator's death, and shows "the explosiveness of mixing ethnic politics and foreign policy."

1999

Richard Baumhammers was arrested in Paris, France for striking a 50-year-old female bartender named Vivianne Le Garrac because he "believed she was Jewish". Baumhammers then told both Le Garrac and the arresting officers that he was "mentally ill." The police took Baumhammers to the psychiatric ward of the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris for evaluation, then detained him at a police station. By week's end, he left on a flight for Spain.

1999

There were arson attacks in Sacramento, California – Congregation B'nai Israel, Congregation Beth Shalom, and Knesset Israel Torah Center. The fires caused over $1 million in damage. On 17 March 2000, brothers Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams were charged with setting the three synagogue fires and a 2 July fire at the Country Club Medical center, which housed an abortion clinic. The charges carried up to 235 years in prison. Matthew Williams later admitted to reporters that he was one of eight or nine men who set fire to the synagogues and the clinic; he also claimed that his brother Tyler had not been involved.

1999 August 10

Buford O. Furrow, Jr. kills mail carrier Joseph Santos Ileto and shoots five people in the August 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting.

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antisemitism_in_the_20th_century