The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has urged University of California president David Saxon to “carefully scrutinize the educational purposes of the Institute For Historial Review” before allowing it to use the university’s Arrowhead Conference Center for its third annual meeting in November.
The ADL has charged that the Institute for Historial Review (IHR) was created by the ultra-rightwing Liberty Lobby in 1979 “to disseminate as widely as possible the obscenity that there was no Holocaust and that the Nazis in Europe did not systematically search out and murder six million Jewish men, women and children solely because they were Jews.”
At a press conference here, Harvey Schecter, the ADL’s Los Angeles director, said that while the ADL commended Saxon for his recent statement describing the IHR’s goals as “reprehensible and abhorrent,” something more is required.
“It is our understanding that the university’s Lake Arrowhead Conference Center’s use is restricted to meetings with an ‘educational purpose,’ “Schechter said. “We urge President Saxon to carefully scrutinize the record of the ‘Institute’, the nature of the materials disseminated by it, the effects of its previous ‘conventions’ at Pomona College (1980), and Northrop University (1979), the anti-Jewish and anti-intellectual propaganda it disseminates and then determine whether or not it has an ‘educational purpose’ which would place it in compliance with the rules governing the use of the Arrowhead facility.
CITES CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
Saxon has publically said that “Although I personally find the Institute’s goal reprehensible and abhorrent, the way to combat false ideas is not be suppression but by exposure. I could wish that the organization had selected some other conference site, but it didn’t.”
Saxon noted the U.S. Constitution protects free speech and assembly. He said the university’s legal counsel has advised that once a university facility is open to the public for a broadly defined educational purpose the university cannot dictate or censor the content. “The organization’s mere use of a university facility in no way lends the good name of the University of California to the Institute,” Saxon declared.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
