I’m posting this to underscore the patterns alleged by the late Christopher Hitchens which are in line with the harassment I’ve endured since I spoke up about the NXIVM operation.
Christopher Hitchens Said:
"When a man believes that any stick will do, he at once picks up a boomerang."
Introductory Note
After giving the matter a little thought, I have decided that I ought to give a comprehensive explanation, for the curious, of why I resorted to law when Henry Kissinger accused me of being a "Holocaust denier". I made this decision in spite of the fact that over-long defenses or justifications are apt to arouse suspicion in themselves - the suspicion of "protesting too much".
This difficulty is itself an aspect of the innuendo about "no smoke without fire." In the past several months, I have received a number of genuine and non-malicious inquiries, from people seeking to know how such a controversy got started.
It occurred to me that, if I put the entire record on view, I could save trouble by referring all questioners to one source. It also occurred to me that the story might possess some innate interest of its own.
Appended to this note, the reader may find everything I have ever written on the subject of the Nazi "Final Solution", as well as the complete record of my correspondence with Henry Kissinger's lawyers.
The rather murky antecedent story is as follows. In the mid-1990s I took an interest in the work of the Holocaust-denial and Holocaust-revisionist writers who were then beginning to have an impact on unofficial media.
I met and debated with Robert Faurisson, the Frenchman who is the leading "denier", and I met and debated with David Irving. What I wrote is to be found in the record that follows.
In Irving's case I took the view that, on First Amendment grounds of free speech as well as on general principles of free inquiry, his work should not be suppressed.
I also became aware, through conversations with Deborah Lipstadt, Christopher Browning and other "mainstream" writers on the subject, that there was a "grey area" of what might be called Holocaust mythology: an area where it had to be admitted that certain long-held beliefs were in error.
The classic instance here is the famous rumor of the making of Jews into soap: Lipstadt told me that she had herself been attacked for agreeing that this was a wartime propaganda horror-story with no basis in fact. (The National Holocaust Museum in Washington concurs with her on this, as do the Israeli scholars at Yad Vashem.)
However, there were those who felt that any admission of this kind could only give ammunition to the "deniers". I must have had numerous conversations about this at the time, and since, and can remember the details of several of them. I do not remember discussing the subject with Edward J. Epstein, a New York journalist whom I have met off and on over the past two decades.
Throughout the last few years sock puppets types have continually tried to provoke me into making “anti-Semitic” responses. I don’t bring them up much because I’m trying to avoid the traps.
However, he may be right when he claims to have heard me discussing the topic at a dinner in New York in 1995. I certainly remember his attaching himself, against my will at any rate, to a restaurant table after a reception.
The other guests were Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, and the restaurant-owner Brian McNally. I certainly did not on that occasion or any other describe the Holocaust as "a fiction", and I am inclined to think that my claim is borne out by three things.
The first is that I don't believe any such thing, and have never said any such thing in company or in print. The second is that neither Ms Wintour nor Mr McNally, when later asked, could remember my making such a memorable claim.
One of them finally backed off when I told her I have Sephardic lineage and I was trying to say, finally once and for all, that that trick’s not going to work on me.
The third is that Mr Epstein didn't think it worth mentioning either, until almost four years had passed. But in February 1999 he contacted the gossip columns and some other well-chosen sources, with the hot news that Christopher Hitchens wasn't satisfied with the evidence for the Holocaust.
I hardly imagine that even the most jaded tabloid editor would have found this allegation newsworthy in an average week. But in that particular week I had myself become briefly newsworthy.
I had given an affidavit in the Senate trial of President Clinton, saying that he had - contrary to his own claims and the claims of his defenders - sought to blacken and defame female witnesses.
I knew this for a fact, but I knew it as result of a lunch-table disclosure made by one of his aides. I suppose it may therefore have struck Mr Epstein, and perhaps the Daily News gossip page, as "ironic" to try and pay me back in the same coin.
Anyway, it got passed zealously along for a few days. (At one point, someone anonymously or mistakenly faxed me a clip on the subject, with a CC to both Alan Dershowitz and Sidney Blumenthal.)
But as it turned out, not even my enemies believed the story, and it didn't check out with the supposed witnesses, so it died a natural death.
Given the circumstances, and the fact that he never called me before making his little move, I don’t think that Epstein was honestly confused as between, say, my defense of David Irving's free-speech rights and my own views of fascism.
Had I wished to sue him, I think I could have shown malice as well as reckless disregard for the truth. I did consider suing him for defamation but thought better of it, since although he is a very bad writer specialising in paranoid subjects he is nonetheless a journalist of a kind. And by then, people had learned to recognise the hallmarks of a Clinton-operation smear.
My harassers hide themselves so I have to look to patterns of behavior in my efforts to identify them.
I might add, though, that if anyone has anything to fear from the repetition of dinner-table eavesdropping it would be Mr Epstein.
If I ever run out of things to write, I might one day try and recreate the wet-lipped way in which he boasted of having barely-legal girls supplied to him on the yacht of the late Sir James Goldsmith, the demented right-wing media tycoon.
"Jimmy" was also a steady source of name-drop material for Epstein, who is notorious for his inability to attract female company on his own merits.
It was no hardship for me to break relations with someone who I only knew in any case as a bore and a sycophant and an abject scraper of acquaintance.
There the matter rested until the spring of 2001, when I went to William and Mary College in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. I had published a series of articles in Harper's magazine - now available in expanded form as a book - in which I made the case for the prosecution of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal.
The students of the college had invited me to speak at a "teach-in" about the much-contested appointment of Kissinger as their chancellor. I went, and had a splendid time.
But one of Kissinger's partisans had gone to all the trouble of distributing, anonymously, a Xerox of the original Daily News gossip item. Even though this was self-refuting, containing as it did the denials of Ms Wintour and Mr McNally, its intention was obviously nasty.
hope I’m able to reveal their identities beyond a shadow of a doubt to my readers.
My book duly came out, and Kissinger was inconvenienced by a number of questions about it. At first, he refused to dignify such a scurrilous book with so much as a comment.
He kept up this pose through a succession of press inquiries. Then on Memorial Day he was served a summons in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, by Judge Roger LeLoire, asking him to testify about his possible complicity with the death squads of General Pinochet.
European press reports connected this annoyance to the then-recent publication of my book in French. A few days later - having left Paris in a hurry - he agreed to speak to Jim Ledbetter of Time and to describe my book as "contemptible".
And a week or so after that, he took to the airwaves and met a fresh inquiry with the sudden discovery that I had "denied that the Holocaust existed".
Very soon afterwards, as the patient reader will soon see, he discovered that he didn't think this any more, and undertook not to repeat the allegation - which he has not.
Meanwhile, and perhaps coincidentally, a group of manic- depressive mediocrities repeated the same accusation on a Clintonoid website calling itself - presumably in honor of its anonymous founders - "Media Whores.com".
This furtive little gang affects great horror at the role played by right-wing media interests, such as those of Richard Mellon Scaife, in the persecution of its hero Bill Clinton.
But it does not object to carrying water for Epstein, one of Sir James Goldsmith's toadies. (Goldsmith offered, from his huge ranch in Guatemala, a large cash prize for the exposure of leftist infiltrators in the press.)
By a nice coincidence, Mr "Mack" McLarty, formerly Mr Clinton's White House chief-of-staff, became a senior partner in the firm of Kissinger Associates at about this time.
One supposes that their common interest in Indonesian money provided the cement for this relationship. It isn't every day that one's foes cluster so conveniently, and so demonstratively, together. The Media Whores can relax. I won't sue them, either. They may be sad hacks and sorry pseuds, but they are journalists of a sort.
However, I did send a lawyer's letter to Kissinger, and anybody who has heard this filthy rumor about me from any quarter is now invited to read on, and to examine the evidence in full links [The links were dead]:
"Diluting Responsibility for the Final Solution," (In Hitler's Shadow), New York Newsday, August 23, 1989
"A German Aristocrat's Resistance to the Nazis," (Letters to Freya), New York Newsday, July 4, 1990
"A Monster Inside the Average Man," (Ordinary Men), New York Newsday, March 25, 1992
"Nuremberg: Judgement by Law, Not by Revenge," (The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials), New York Newsday, Oct. 7, 1992
"On Not Knowing the Half of It: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs" from Prepared for the Worst, pp. 345-357, summer 1988 Minority Report, The Nation, October 3, 1994
"Hitler's Ghost," Vanity Fair, June 1996 Los Angeles Times article of May 20, 2001