The California Library Association (CLA) has revoked its decision to provide a forum at its state-wide convention next month for rightwing publisher David McCalden who claims the Holocaust was a hoax.
The CLA acted, according to its executive director Stefan Moses, after angry protests from the Simon Wiesenthal Center here, the American Jewish Committee and various other Jewish, Christian and interfaith organizations.
The plan to allow McCalden to display his material at the convention and to address it under the auspices of a so-called “Truth Mission” was denounced by Mayor Tom Bradley and the Los Angeles City Council and by leaders of the California State Legislature.
“It’s all over, we caved in. We have agreed to cancel both the program and Mr. McCalden’s right to exhibit his material,” said Moses who is Jewish. The CLA, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), had argued that McCalden had the right to present his views and material to the convention’s 3,000 delegates in the interests of “intellectual freedom” and free speech.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, and Neil Sandberg, Western regional director of the AJCommittee, accused the CLA and ACLU of confusing the issues of intellectual freedom and free speech with common sense. Sandberg remarked, “The extent of community outrage … is a testimony to the kind of community which Los Angeles has become.”
McCalden has been long associated with anti-Semitic and white supremacist groups and with the California-based Institute for Historical Review. The chief occupation of the latter is to publish revisionist histories that whitewash Nazi war crimes.
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