Joseph Sobran libeled as a Nazi by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg

Neocon Liar Jeffrey “Dr. Goebbels" Goldberg Dishonors the Memory of Joseph Sobran

by Michael Hoffman | www. RevisionistHistory.org | Oct. 13, 2010

Jeffrey Goldberg is the Israeli agent who is currently national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. He helped engineer America’s invasion of Iraq based on the propagation of Goldberg’s well-publicized lie, published in the March, 2002 issue of The New Yorker and broadcast on NPR’s "All Things Considered” in February, 2003, that Saddam Hussein was an ally of the alleged 9/11 terror group, Al Qaeda. Now Goldberg is lying again. In a column published Oct. 12 on the website of The Atlantic magazine, Goldberg indicts the eminent Catholic historian and philosopher Joseph Sobran as a “Nazi.” This craven and despicable defamation had to wait until Sobran was dead and could no longer sue for libel.

It seems that Goldberg, his pal Greenberg, and a network of apologists for Israeli war crimes, had their ox gored when the New York Times published an obituary for Mr. Sobran which did not stigmatize him with the obligatory “Holocaust denier” Newspeak, preferring to describe him with the more moderate term, “Holocaust skeptic.”

This minor deviation from the approved script unleashed the hounds of Holocaust halachic correctness, in this case on the Times and on the memory of the deceased. Exploiting the Newspeak mechanisms of the imposed word “Holocaust,” the following fallacy has been advanced by Mr. Goldberg: "Imagine an obituary of a public figure who had denied that World War I had taken place. Or that fifty percent of the Civil War battles we know to have occurred did not, in fact, occur, and that there had been no slavery in the antebellum South.”

Sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but Mr. Sobran never “denied" World War II, or any battle therein; or that the persecution and murder of Judaics had actually occurred. He questioned the extent of the latter; a useful and worthy scientific inquiry which inquisitors like you can’t handle. This writer was present at Sobran’s speech in Irvine, California on June 22, 2002, when he asked, "Why on earth is it 'anti-Jewish' to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination? Surely these are controversial conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage..."

It was Zionism’s de facto propaganda machine which, in the late 1960s, began referring to Adolf Hitler’s crackdown on Judaics as a “Holocaust,” and in this context the neologism was imposed as the standard against which all skeptics are now forever measured and judged.

But this measurement is on a scale devised by bigoted Orwellian thought police like Deborah Lipstadt. It is not a reflection of precision historiography, but of hysteria and megalomania. If Sobran flunks  Zionism’s rigged test of what makes a man a non-Nazi, it is only because the whole argument is as stage-managed as Goldberg’s own denial of the Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians and Lebanese.

I have yet to see a  New York Times obituary for a prominent Israeli apologist in which the deceased was described either as a “denier” of or a “skeptic” toward the fact of Israeli mass murder in Deir Yassin in 1948, Beirut in August of 1982 or Gaza in December of 2008 and January of 2009. Denying Israeli slaughter doesn’t have a special name or category and does not register as an offense against morals in the establishment media of the West.

Goldberg and his network exhibit the familiar totalitarian, Talmudic mentality: they desire to micro-manage every detail of how we perceive Joseph Sobran and how his memory is presented. If the portrayal is not sufficiently debased, they will proceed to dishonor the dead man themselves, in the name of that irresistible shibboleth, fighting Nazism. Their own Nazi-Zionism cannot be an issue, of course; any more than Jeffrey “Dr. Goebbels” Goldberg has been held accountable for his Big Lie about Saddam and Al Qaeda, which helped frog-march America into war with Iraq. He is still a well paid, high profile journalist on the national scene.

Goldberg can lie us into a calamitous war and still lecture us on the supposed venality of Sobran, who lost his position as senior editor of National Review magazine because he would not lie.

Jeff, you’re not fit to shine Joe’s shoes, much less weigh him in the balance of your twisted, dictatorial version of history, to which all must conform or forfeit their reputation.

Hoffman edits Revisionist History newsletter. He writes from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

The Death of a ‘Holocaust Skeptic’

By Jeffrey Goldberg | The Atlantic | Oct. 12, 2010

The death of Joseph Sobran,  far-right columnist more-or-less associated with The National Review, even though the late William F. Buckley found his anti-Semitism semi-intolerable, was marked by an obituary in the Times by William Grimes, who wrote the following strange sentences about his subject:

Mr. Sobran's isolationist views on American foreign policy and Israel became increasingly extreme. He took a skeptical line on the Holocaust and said the Sept. 11 terror attacks were a result of American foreign policy in the Middle East, which he believed that a Jewish lobby directed. Not surprisingly, he spent much of his time defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism.

"Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew," he said in a speech delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for Historical Review. "My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous 'ally' to the United States. As of last Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct." 

Friend-of-Goldblog David Greenberg, the historian, wrote to the public editor of the Times, asking, just exactly, what it means to take "a skeptical line" on the Holocaust? And why would the Times mention the "Institute for Historical Review" without mentioning that it is the country's premier Holocaust denial outfit? Here is the response he received, complete with his name misspelled:

Mr. Greenburg:

Thank you for writing us.

I reached out to Bill McDonald, editor of the obituary pages, reached out to William Grimes, the writer on the piece.  His response is provided below:

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"I cannot see how describing someone as taking a skeptical line on the Holocaust can be interpreted as anything other than indefensible. He was not a Holocaust denier, precisely, but what he called a Holocaust agnostic. At any rate, both of the reader's suppositions are correct. First,  he did wonder if Hitler had pursued  a policy of genocide. Supposition two also applies, he did not deny that many Jews died, but suspected that the number was exaggerated. Space--the guy had about 300 words' worth of survivors--did not really permit me to go into the details, but the Sobran quote surely gives the flavor."
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I hope this helps clarify things for you.  It seems that The Times would have liked the opportunity to say more about this, but unfortunately space constraints made it difficult for them to include the whole thing in detail.

Once again, I appreciate you writing and bringing this to our attention.  It is greatly appreciated.

Best,
Joseph Burgess
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times

A fairly fatuous reply. Imagine an obituary of a public figure who had denied that World War I had taken place. Or that fifty percent of the Civil War battles we know to have occurred did not, in fact, occur, and that there had been no slavery in the antebellum South. Would the Times describe this person as a  "Civil War skeptic"? Or would it have described him as delusional?

A much better response to this obituary came from Jeet Heer:

The fact is, Sobran did more than "take a skeptical line of the Holocaust." Sobran, to be blunt, became a Nazi fellow-traveler. Most readers of the Times won't know what the Institute for Historical Review is. The name is certainly benign enough. It is in fact an organization devoted to Holocaust denial and other forms of Nazi apologetics. (At a recent talk Mark Weber, director of the Institute, argued that had England made peace with Nazi Germany the result would have been "an Axis-dominated Pax Europa ... [which] would have been prosperous, socially progressive, politically stable, and technologically advanced, with an extensive, continent-wide transportation and communications network, conscientious environmental policies, and a comprehensive healthcare system. At the same time, the continent would have remained ethnically and culturally European. Large scall immigration of non-Europeans would have been unthinkable.")

Leaving aside the issue of Holocaust denial, anyone who takes the time to read Sobran's writing will immediately notice that he shared many of the ideas of the European far right from the early 20th century, in particular the belief that Jews are an alien, nearly monolithic and subversive force whose main goal is to destroy Western Civilization. I usually avoid emotive language but there really was a Nazi thread in Sobran's thinking (combined of course with many other arguably related threads like his defense of the Confederacy, his anti-feminism, and his belief in all sorts of conspiracy theories).

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