University Explains Why It Denied Its Facilities to Rightwing Group

The University of California denied the Institute for Historical

Review use of its Lake Arrowhead facilities for a convention next November after it discovered that the reservation was made under a false name by a person recently identified as a former British neo-fascist who edited anti-Semitic and racist publications in England. The Institute disseminates propaganda purporting to show that the Holocaust was a hoax.

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which says it provided the University with documents last February revealing the Institute’s true nature, cited the contents of a letter sent by Keith Sexton, Dean of the University of California Extension Programs, to the Institute for Historical Review on May 14, cancelling the Lake Arrowhead reservation.

Sexton noted that the reservation had been made by a Lewis Brandon and that “recent information indicates that Lewis Brandon is a false name used by a person whose real name is William David McCalden, that McCalden has resigned as director of the Institute for Historical Review.”

Sexton’s letter observed further that “recent information indicates that the reward offered by Brandon/McCalden and the Institute for Historical Review for proof that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz was a publicity gimmick which is further indication of a pattern of deception.”

Mel Mermelstein, a Los Angeles businessman and Holocaust survivor who saw his mother and two sisters taken to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, is suing the Institute for the $50,000 it offered for proof that at least one Jew was put to death and for $17 million in damages. McCalden left California, apparently to avoid the suit and his present whereabouts are unknown, according to Los Angeles Times Religion Writer Russell Chandler.

DOCUMENTATION BY THE ADL

Chandler reported earlier this month that McCalden’s long record of anti-Semitic activities before he became associated with the Institute for Historical Review was documented by the ADL on the basis of material it received from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. This material was brought to the attention of David Saxon, president of the University of California statewide system in a letter of February 6, 1981, according to David Lehrer, the ADL’s Western states counsel.

Saxon was asked to “carefully scrutinize the record of the Institute … to determine whether or not it had an ‘educational purpose’ which would place it in compliance with the rules governing the use of the Arrowhead facility.” The Institute for Historical Review was established in 1979 by Willis Carto, head of the far right-wing Washington-based Liberty Lobby which the ADL calls “the largest and best financed anti-Semitic apparatus in the country today.”

Maxwell Greenberg, ADL national chairman, commended the University today for refusing the Institute use of its facility. “It would have been inappropriate for one of the nation’s leading universities to rent its facilities to this racist group,” Greenberg said.