Jewish Center Criticizes National Security Agency for IHR Mention
News from the Institute for Historical Review – October 7, 2005
A Jewish research group is sharply criticizing the National Security Agency for a new report that refers to the Institute for Historical Review as a center for “scholars and researchers” and as a “scholarly association.”
“For a US government report to call them ‘scholars’ gives them the legitimacy they desperately crave but do not deserve,” said Rafael Medoff, director of the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, who is calling on the agency to withdraw the report from circulation and “correct” it. ( http://releases.usnewswire.com/printing.asp?id=54658 )
The report, “Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945,” is posted on the NSA website at http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00044.cfm The NSA report cites, respectfully but critically, “The ‘Holocaust’ and the Failure of Allied and Jewish Responses,” a detailed article from the Winter 1984 issue of the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review that is posted on the IHR website at https://ihr.org/journal/v05p215_Gleason.html
IHR director Mark Weber dismissed the Wyman Institute’s complaint as bigoted and desperate. “To any unbiased person,” said Weber, “the IHR’s record of scholarship is self-evident and incontrovertible. Over the years, many scholars of unquestioned ability and stature have addressed IHR conferences, or have contributed to the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review. The Wyman Institute’s complaint only underscores its obvious bias.”
“While it’s gratifying to note that the National Security Agency acknowledges IHR scholarship,” Weber added, “it is unfortunate that it qualifies this recognition with a gratuitous reference to the silly smear that the IHR somehow represents, or is associated with ‘Holocaust denial’.”
Here is the relevant portion of the NSA report:
“In 1984 a monograph was published in the Journal of Historical Review that reviewed the published literature of wartime intelligence, including the Police decrypts, which carried information about the massacres and the concentration camps.19 The article called into question what the intelligence actually revealed about the Nazi’s ultimate plan for the elimination of Europe’s Jews. Unfortunately, the journal in which this article appeared was a well-known forum for that faction of scholars and researchers associated with a movement known as “Holocaust denial.”20 “
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