Eleven days later than advertised, fugitive nazi and all-round weirdo Germar Rudolf managed to broadcast his Holocaust denial ‘summit’ conference last weekend.
We reported two weeks ago how his first attempt to hold the event had to be called off when Amazon pulled the plug on it. He was a little more successful second time round.
His collection of ageing Hitler worshippers and younger cranks was a pale shadow of the well-financed conferences once organised by the likes of David Irving and the Institute for Historical Review, but thanks to the stupidity of elected politicians in the US state of New Hampshire, Rudolf was able to claim one victory.
Last month (a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day, the date originally scheduled for Rudolf’s ‘Holocaust Summit’) three leading deniers were allowed to make a public appearance at an official session of the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
They read their vile screeds into the official record, almost uninterrupted.
The nazis’ inside man was Republican Party state representative Matt Sabourin dit Chonière, who represents a district including Seabrook, site of a nuclear power plant.
His fellow assemblyman for this district (also a Republican) is one of New Hampshire’s few elected politicians of Muslim descent, Aboul Khan, son of a former Bangladeshi defence minister.
Sabourin hijacked a New Hampshire House committee that was discussing the extension of a state Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Well-meaning dupes
It’s embarrassingly obvious from video footage of the proceedings (gleefully broadcast by Rudolf and his fellow nazis) that the chair and fellow members of this committee were well-meaning dupes. They genuinely intended to fund a respectful commission, but they were played for fools (at least for the day) by nazis.
Sabourin was allowed to introduced three “witnesses”, all veteran Holocaust deniers. At least two of these had no connection whatever to the state of New Hampshire and it’s astonishing that the committee chair allowed them to testify and put their odious Hitlerite views on public record.
The only intervention the chair made was to ask Sabourin and Rudolf to remove a vast pile of Holocaust denial books that they had put on view for the cameras. Yet even then her objection was merely to having any books on display. She seemed to have no clue what she was dealing with, no idea of the subject matter that her committee was discussing.
‘Breakthrough’ victory
Sabourin’s “witnesses” were Germar Rudolf, a convicted Holocaust denier who doesn’t even have US citizenship but was given a platform to address the committee, Henry Herskovitz, a Jewish renegade from Michigan who regularly pickets synagogues waving anti-semitic placards, and David Skrbina, a former academic also from Michigan who (as Searchlight reported last month) wrote Holocaust denial books and articles under the name “Thomas Dalton”.
A film celebrating this Hitlerite gang’s “breakthrough” victory in New Hampshire was broadcast during the lunch break at Rudolf’s Holocaust denial “summit” last weekend.
This followed an opening session where the speakers were Rudolf and two Englishmen, schismatic Catholic priest James Mawdsley and his fellow anti-semite Peter Rushton, a veteran nazi who for more than twenty years has been deputy editor of the pseudo-intellectual racist magazine Heritage and Destiny.
In the afternoon-evening session the wheels came off, for both technical and political reasons. Several speakers seemed to have difficulty understanding how to use a computer and speak at the same time.
Another Jewish renegade Nathanael Kapner made a speech so extreme that even by American standards it came close to breaking the law, and Rudolf had to intervene to make clear that he wasn’t advocating violence against Jews.
A joint presentation from California by lawyer Andrew Allen and Heinz Bartesch, son of an SS war criminal, was at times inaudible. Anti-fascists can’t this time claim the credit. The failure was entirely due to the Californians’ own technical incompetence.
Another jailbird, French nazi Vincent Reynouard, gave most of his speech via a pre-recorded video since he hasn’t mastered sufficient English to give a speech.
His fellow Frenchman Georges Theil, another denier who has served time behind bars, was unable to speak and was replaced by the Australian ex-model Michèle Renouf, best known as a David Irving groupie, who has hung around with a succession of nazis for the past quarter-century.
Divisive figures
Renouf’s speech angered some of her fellow panellists by including rhetoric in support of her two favourite 21st century dictators, Vladimir Putin and Muammar Gaddafi, who unlike Hitler are both divisive figures on the far-right.
We can count on our nazi enemies to shoot themselves in the foot and fall out among themselves, but while laughing at their expense we shouldn’t ignore the fact that for the first time in years, Rudolf has managed to get the Holocaust scene semi-organised.
His main ally in this was Dave Gahary, host of the website that broadcast the event. Gahary’s FTJ Media is trying to be an online version of what Willis Carto achieved in the late 20th century USA, uniting nazis with an assortment of conspiracy theorists.
In opposing these people, it’s not good enough to be well-meaning liberals.
Committees such as the one in New Hampshire need to take specialist advice before holding public hearings on a topic as serious and complicated as the Holocaust, otherwise it’s no longer a risk but a certainty that they will end up being exploited by the likes of Germar Rudolf and other dedicated Hitler worshippers and Holocaust deniers.
And it’s time for the US authorities to take a hard look at whether their country should be harbouring Germar Rudolf, a convicted German nazi who has added to his criminal record while in the USA by acquiring a conviction in Pennsylvania for “indecent exposure and open lewdness”.
If Donald Trump’s government is so keen to expel immigrants, they should start with Rudolf.
