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Get ShortlinkBy Sarah Breger
On Tuesday Harvard’s campus newspaper The Crimson published a full page ad from a Holocaust denial group, prompting outrage pretty much everywhere.
The ad was submitted by the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust and challenged readers to “provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.”
The Crimson reportedly received over 20 separate protest e-mails as well as a joint letter signed by over 30 undergraduates—including several Crimson editors. “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,” the joint letter said.
The Crimson’s president wrote an open letter of apology the next day, calling the decision to publish a “miscommunication.”
“Unfortunately, with three weeks of vacation between submission and publication, that decision fell through the cracks.”
All money from the ad has been returned.
I am amazed at the ignorance of Holocaust deniers who refuse to accept as truth what the very perpetrators do not deny.
Harvard’s campus newspaper deserves more harsh condemnation than Holocaust deniers. Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright hostility