The Supreme Court this week refused to hear a case brought by the late David McCalden, a Holocaust revisionist who claimed that two Jewish groups had violated his civil rights.
The American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies expressed disappointment that the high court did not dismiss McCalden’s charges. They will now have to argue the case in federal district court in California.
McCalden, who died in 1991, claimed that the Jewish groups threatened violence prior to his scheduled appearance at a California Library Association conference in Los Angeles in 1984, and that those threats resulted in his being barred from the conference. His widow is carrying his case forward.
The Jewish groups deny having ever threatened violence. They say they sounded warnings about McCalden’s views and his planned appearance and that his suit violates their rights to free speech.
The groups had appealed a decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refusing to dismiss McCalden’s suit.
Representatives of the two agencies said this week they were disappointed at the Supreme Court decision, but were confident they ultimately would prevail based on the merits of the case.
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center is disappointed,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center’s associate director, “but we have every confidence that our actions in this case will be fully vindicated by the judicial system.”
Richard Foltin, the AJCommittee’s director of governmental affairs, also expressed regret at the court’s decision, saying there were “substantial and weighty issues of free speech” at stake, “apart from our specific institutional concerns.”
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