COLUMN: Bigotry makes a comeback

From Daniel Septimus', "I Know My Last Name is Septimus," Fall '00 From Daniel Septimus', "I Know My Last Name is Septimus," Fall '00Among the newly elected members of the Undergraduate Assembly are at least seven minority students. Several new ethnic and minority cultural centers have been given a home on Locust Walk. These are all bits of information that I learned over the past week -- a week in which the celebration of ethnic and racial diversity on campus has been tempered by stark reminders that ethnic and racial bigotry are still strong in the "real world." On Tuesday, British "historian" David Irving lost his libel suit against Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt. Irving had sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for defaming him in her 1994 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she labels Irving an anti-Semite and a Nazi apologist. Indeed, Irving has spent 30 years trying to downplay the systematic execution of the European Jews, particularly Hitler's role in the extermination plan. He acknowledges that many Jews died during World War II but claims that the numbers have been exaggerated. Indeed, during a speech in 1991, Irving stated that, "I say, quite tastelessly in fact, that more women died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz." Irving asserts that the gas chambers at the Nazi concentration camp were used to fumigate the corpses of prisoners who had died of disease. Irving lost his lawsuit, but his bravado and confidence are still frightening. Following the verdict, Irving maintained that "the Holocaust has been grossly inflated and there has been a hell of a lot of lying by the eyewitnesses." But perhaps the scariest news is that David Irving has a Web site. According to T.J. Leyden, a former white supremacist who spoke at Penn earlier this week, there are about 2,200 "white power" sites on the Internet. Irving's Web site wasted no time with its post-verdict reaction. The site focuses on an article in the British newspaper The Guardian that reported that Edgar Bronfman -- the head of Seagram's and a well-known Jewish philanthropist -- funded much of Lipstadt's trial fund. According to the Irving site: "Seagram's legal drug dealing operations [alcohol] have killed many more millions, and destroyed more families, than died in the Nazi Holocaust." This message intends to undermine the authenticity of Lipstadt's defense by presenting it as corrupt. Those who visit Irving's Web site are given a reason to doubt the validity of the verdict -- despite the fact that the judge ruled unambiguously that Irving was "anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." Ehud Barak, the prime minister of Israel, released a statement in support of Lipstadt, saying "her struggle and victory is the victory of the free world against the forces of darkness that would wish to obliterate from memory the [depths] humanity reached." The truth is Mr. Barak, we're not quite ready for the Star Wars language yet. The "forces of darkness" don't feel as defeated as you might think. To try and get a little closer to the heart of this darkness, I spent a few days this week surfing white power Web sites. My reaction to the unfiltered hatred was rarely anger or reciprocated hate. For the most part, I was just overwhelmed. Amazed, really. Take for example a site I found that had on its home page a picture of a gorilla in a red circle with a line through it. The caption: "Welcome to my anti-nigger page." Unfortunately, this was pretty standard, as were the links to a Hitler biography and a "white" chat room. While all of this is hard to swallow, what really got me was the fact that the creator of the site was a 14-year-old boy. Forgive my innocence, but I had never read the autobiography of a high school's Imperial Klan Wizard whose favorite saying is, "If life is death and death is hell, then hell is life so why not kill?" Yes, Mr. Barak, if a 14-year-old can have this much hate, then the forces of darkness have yet to be defeated. And so, amid all the exciting developments for cultural and ethnic celebration at Penn, I implore all of us to remember that beyond Locust Walk -- in London, California and every computer in the world -- hatred is still a very real enemy of us all.