From: Sten Drescher <stend@grendel.texas.net>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 96 11:49:54 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: When they came for the Jews...
In-Reply-To: <199601101826.NAA04543@homeport.org>
Message-ID: <55d98r96f2.fsf@galil.austnsc.tandem.com>
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Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org> said:

AS> The Wiesenthal center is very influential in Jewish circles.
AS> Attacking them directly would probably be a bad idea, and create bad
AS> associations for anonymity amongst Jews.  (I'll come back to this.)

AS> As always, the best answer to bad speech is more speech.  Ken McVay,
AS> and his Nizkor project, (http://nizkor.almanac.bc.ca) have been
AS> involved in fighting hate speech, holocaust revisionism, and the
AS> like for long time through archiving the big lies that revisionists
AS> pump out, documenting the bogosity of their footnotes, showing their
AS> contradictions, etc.  Pointing out this, and other net resources
AS> fighting anti-semitism is a much cleaner approach than attacking the
AS> Wiesenthal center.

	Isn't this attacking, or at least opposing, them directly?

AS> Someone noted the police stopping skinheads in Oregon-- I'll point
AS> out that there is a substantial difference between talking and
AS> randomly beating the crap out of people.  The later is a fair basis
AS> for action by police, although we may choose to question their
AS> methodology.  There is also a difference between stopping skinheads
AS> and stopping blacks, in that the skinheads decided to wear clothing
AS> and tattoos that identify them as skinheads, and thus may more
AS> fairly be asked to bear the consequences.

	This is known as the "[S]he asked for it" argument, a widely
discredited defense.  If their _behavior_ doesn't indicate criminal
behavior, and there isn't a report of a crime with suspects meeting
their descriptions, there is no more excuse for hassling them than there
is for hassling blacks, or hispanics, or....  Who knows, they could
actually be a bunch of Marines (depending on the area).

AS> Another approach might be to talk about the concept of identity, and
AS> how dangerous mandating identity cards and papers can be.  Jews in
AS> Germany were tracked down via phone records, bank records,
AS> membership lists of organizations (a lesson probably noted by the
AS> NAACP in refusing to give Alabama its membership rolls, leading to a
AS> supreme court case upholding the right of anonymous association.)

	And more recently used in Texas by the KKK, represented by a
black (given the organization defended, I think that the race of the
attorney is relevant) attorney from the ACLU.  The attorney was
subsequently removed as the counsel for the Texas chapter of the NAACP.

-- 
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