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4. JHR Volume 20

From the Editor

Theodore J. O’Keefe

First word of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon reached us at the Institute for Historical Review shortly after 7 a.m. (PST), September 11. As we followed the breaking news on our radios and over the Internet, our initial consternation was quickly followed by an awareness of the possible implications of these events for revisionists.

Would the Institute be exposed to new pressures? Would IHR’s revisionist associates abroad be vulnerable to further harassment by their governments and to additional attacks from Jewish “activists"?

Over the years, the IHR has been the target of terrorist assaults on its employees and premises. These have included the vandalizing of our vehicles; physical attacks; shots fired into our offices; and firebombings culminating in the July 4, 1984, destruction of our offices and stock. Those responsible for these criminal acts have never been identified, let alone apprehended, but there is little doubt that they are part of that international Zionist terror apparatus so often ignored by our leaders, law enforcement agencies, and media.

These efforts to terrorize the Institute not only failed, they have had as their effect increased security measures and a heightened vigilance against all comers. Thus we were prepared for anything from governmental snooping in the name of “security” to cutoffs in Internet service due to “business decisions,” and even “demonstrations” mounted by what’s left of the Jewish Defense League. Thus, too — need it be said? — we were able to dismiss any consideration of muzzling the Institute’s voice, whether out of timidity or “patriotic” piety, and to renew our resolution to confront our leadership with its mistakes, past and present, as revealed by painstaking and nonpartisan review of the historical record.

The decision to devote this issue of the Journal of Historical Review to the fast brewing, though undeclared, “war on terror,” was an obvious one. As the lead editorial makes clear, the conflict arises out of causes and factors that revisionists have long warned of, from America’s infatuation with Israel to our short-sighted, selfish meddlings in the Islamic world.

Despite the existence of a growing Arab and Muslim lobby, the Institute and its journal are uniquely qualified to inform the American, and world, publics of the facts and implications of our leaders' Middle Eastern policy mistakes. As the IHR’s quick response to the September 11 attacks, written by director Mark Weber, demonstrates, the Institute has no organizational rival in its ability to express the facts reasonably, effectively, and without concession to the political shibboleths and historical taboos which cripple so many other attempts to explain events.

News of an important, though little noticed, libel trial in Israel, and a brief account of the longstanding Zionist campaign to smear an eminent Palestinian nationalist as an accomplice to the “Holocaust,” signal a trend toward more material about the Mideast in coming issues of the JHR. No one can question the critical need for this focus; and this issue’s reports on the troubled historiography of Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing and on the propaganda frame-up of Haj Amin al Husseini relate closely to the Journal's traditional revisionist concerns.

In their attempts to provide context for the September 11 disasters, the best that most commentators could do was to evoke the Battle of Britain. A rather more illuminating comparison, perhaps, is offered by the vast sufferings of German civilians and the selfless struggles of German emergency personnel through five years of Allied terror from the air, as detailed by Samuel Crowell in “Defending against the Allied Bombing Campaign: Air Raid Shelters and Gas Protection in Germany, 1939-1945.” This essay, although written several years ago (for the Committee on Open Debate of the Holocaust’s website at www.codoh.com), is more timely than ever. Crowell’s measured tone and absence of direct censure for the authors of the attacks that claimed in excess of 600,000 civilian lives make his article’s unspoken indictment of the unpunished attackers — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and their underlings — all the more effective.

Mark Weber assesses David Irving’s long anticipated middle volume of his wartime biographical trilogy on Churchill. This new volume, in its exposé of the weakness that lay beneath Churchill’s bluster, is timely for its implicit warning against the intellectual obtuseness and moral blindness that threatens America today. While the United States, unlike Churchill’s Britain in the last world war, is nobody’s junior partner, we may well profit from Churchill’s legacy, that of a man who, in six years, fumbled away his country’s imperial past and blighted its national future, bequeathing in their stead a handful of empty phrases and grandiloquent gestures.