WAR OF PERCEPTION

Saul D. Alinsky: A role model for left-wing satanists

The 1972 Vintage Books paperback edition of Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinksy has a page of quotes just before the table of contents. In the last of the three quotes, Alinsky himself said the following:

"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."

On page 71, speaking of his training program for political organizers, Alinsky remarked:

"The qualities we were trying to develop in organizers in the years of attempting to train them included some qualities that in all probability cannot be taught. They either had them, or could get them only through a miracle from above or below."

And, on the last page of a 1972 Playboy Interview with Saul D. Alinsky, he said:

ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not "Is there life after death?" but "Is there life after birth?" I don't know whether there's anything after this or not. I haven't seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man's obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let's say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I've been with the have-nots. Over here, if you're a have-not, you're short of dough. If you're a have-not in hell, you're short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there.

PLAYBOY: Why them?

ALINSKY: They're my kind of people.

I'm not sure whether Alinsky really was a Satanist/Luciferian of some sort or whether he was just joking. He may well have been just joking. The man certainly did have a sense of humor.

When asked his religion, he would always say that he was Jewish. But, on many levels, he seemed to have distanced himself from his Orthodox Jewish background. For example, in Rules for Radicals, when praising Moses as a "good organizer," Alinsky did so in a manner rather irreverent toward the egotism of the Biblical God (pp. 89 to 91).

Be that as it may, he's an excellent role model for politically left-leaning Satanists, whether theistic or symbolic. (When I say "role model" I mean only in a very general sense, not one to be followed slavishly.) Certainly he can be said to have manifested his true will. And he espoused a lot of values that are familiar to today's Satanists, such as his emphasis on power, self-interest, creativity, and practicality.

Rules for Radicals is full of pragmatic realism. For example, on page 88:

"In mass organization, you can't go outside people's actual experience. I've been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister in terms of the Judaeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. I never talk in those terms. Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their Church, even its physical property."

Alinsky accomplished a lot. He built many organzations that gave lot of people the power to improve their lives.

In Part 7 of the 1972 Playboy interview, Alinsky said:

"The biggest obstacles we faced were the apathy and despair and hopelessness of most of the slum dwellers. You've got to remember that when injustice is complete and crushing, people very seldom rebel; they just give up. A small percentage crack and blow their brains out, but the other, 99 percent say, "Sure, it's bad, but what can we do? You can't fight city hall. It's a rotten world for everybody, and anyway, who knows, maybe I'll win at numbers or my lottery ticket will come through. And the guy down the block is probably worse off than me.

The first thing we have to do when we come into a community is to break down those justifications for inertia. We tell people, "Look, you don't have to put up with all this shit. There's something concrete you can do about it. But to accomplish anything you've got to have power, and you'll only get it through organization. Now, power comes in two forms -- money and people. You haven't got any money, but you do have people, and here's what you can do with them." And we showed the workers in the packing houses how they could organize a union and get higher wages and benefits, and we showed the local merchants how their profits would go up with higher wages in the community, and we showed the exploited tenants how they could fight back against their landlords. Pretty soon we'd established a community-wide coalition of workers, local businessmen, labor leaders and housewives -- our power base -- and we were ready to do battle."

Unlike many leftists, Alinsky avoided dogma. In Part 10 of the 1972 Playboy interview, he said:

"I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

Now, this doesn't mean that I'm rudderless; I think I have a much keener sense of direction and purpose than the true believer with his rigid ideology, because I'm free to be loose, resilient and independent, able to respond to any situation as it arises without getting trapped by articles of faith. My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today."

But his "belief in people" certainly did not translate into utopian idealism. Also in Part 10 of the 1972 Playboy interview, Alinsky said:

"People don't get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as an act of charity; they have to fight for it, force it out of the establishment. [...] Reconciliation means just one thing: When one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it. That's where you need organization -- first to compel concessions and then to make sure the other side delivers. If you're too delicate to exert the necessary pressures on the power structure, then you might as well get out of the ball park. This was the fatal mistake the white liberals made, relying on altruism as an instrument of social change. That's just self-delusion. No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.[...]

In fact, of course, conflict is the vital core of an open society; if you were going to express democracy in a musical score, your major theme would be the harmony of dissonance. All change means movement, movement means friction and friction means heat. You'll find consensus only in a totalitarian state, Communist or fascist.

My opposition to consensus politics, however, doesn't mean I'm opposed to compromise; just the opposite. In the world as it is, no victory is ever absolute; but in the world as it is, the right things also invariably get done for the wrong reasons. We didn't win in Woodlawn because the establishment suddenly experienced a moral revelation and threw open its arms to blacks; we won because we backed them into a corner and kept them there until they decided it would be less expensive and less dangerous to surrender to our demands than to continue the fight. I remember that during the height of our Woodlawn effort, I attended a luncheon with a number of presidents of major corporations who wanted to "know their enemy." One of them said to me, "Saul, you seem like a nice guy personally, but why do you see everything only in terms of power and conflict rather than from the point of view of good will and reason and cooperation?" I told him, "Look, when you and your corporation approach competing corporations in terms of good will, reason and cooperation instead of going for the jugular, then I'll follow your lead." There was a long silence at the table, and the subject was dropped."

Given Alinksi's overall approach to organizing, he has been called a "Machiavelli for the common man." In Rules for Radicals, Alinksy's response to those who ask "Does the end justify the means?" was "The means-and-end moralists, or non-doers, always wind up on their ends without any means" (p. 25).

Some relevant web pages: 1972 Playboy Interview with Saul D. Alinsky, on the Progress Report website, which also has an article Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation by Sanford D. Horwitt

Brief excerpts from Rules for Radicals on the websites of Latter Rain (a left-wing Christian site), Thinking Peace and Maurice Institute Library.

As even the Latter Rain site acknowledges, in an introduction to its excerpt from Rules for Radicals:

"Alinsky's field of action was the field of change and a constant stream of conflict. Alinsky knew that in today's world, people are not motivated by altruism, you need to somehow appeal to their self-interest. The right thing usually done for the wrong reasons. When he came into a community in order to organize it, he had to get the local churches involved. He said that he never appealed to the ministers or priests in terms of Christian principles because they did not really believe in Christianity. Therefore, Alinsky appealed to what really motivated them, their self-interests and talked more about membership and more money. It worked every time."

Some may ask: Is left-wing politics of any kind consistent with Satanism? LaVeyans have often equated Satanism with pure capitalism.

I do not see Satan as championing any particular social, economic, or political order. I see Satan as encouraging us to think for ourselves and to be in touch with our own personal nature. It is up to us to figure out what kind of social, economic, or political order would work best for us, given our own circumstances.

I personally feel that it's in my best interests to live in the kind of society that, on the whole, works best.

My opinion of pure capitalism and economic libertarianism is that they work fine in a society that is largely rural and where there are a lot of small farm owners, as was the case in much of the U.S.A. until the early 20th century or so. However, in a more urbanized society, neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism works well; some sort of mixed economy is needed and can indeed work well, as per the example of most (though admittedly not all) continental Western European countries.

In small towns, "big government" may seem utterly unnecessary. A lot of small towns even have volunteer fire departments. This would never work in a big city like New York. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, there are strong social incentives to do various kinds of volunteer work. The social rewards for volunteer work are much less in a large city.

In a highly urbanized society, the alternative to having at least a moderately limited "welfare state" is to have very high crime rates every time there's an economic downturn. This sort of thing happened quite a bit in the early 20th century, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyhow, as the financial troubles of the Church of Satan itself should more than adequately demonstrate, we Satanists need to drop the fantasy that we're a bunch of supermen. Yes, we should aim to empower ourselves through our own individual efforts, but it also helps to have organizations that empower entire communities.

By Diane Vera

 

 

 

Canadian hate speech law unconstitutional: rights tribunal

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on Wednesday ruled that Section 13, Canada's much maligned human rights hate speech law, violates the Charter right to free expression because it carries the threat of punitive fines.

The shocking decision by Tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis leaves several hate speech cases in limbo, and appears to strip the Canadian Human Rights Commission of its controversial legal mandate to pursue hate on the Internet, which it has strenuously defended against complaints of censorship.

It also marks the first major failure of Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, an anti-hate law that was conceived in the 1960s to target racist telephone hotlines, then expanded in 2001 to the include the entire Internet, and for the last decade used almost exclusively by one complainant, activist Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman.

Mr. Warman's first big loss is a victory for the respondent Marc Lemire, webmaster of freeedomsite.org and a prominent figure in the Canadian far right.

Typically for the messy state of Canada's perennial hate speech debate, public reaction to the ruling yesterday was polarized, running the spectrum from glowing praise for the "bold" Mr. Hadjis, to criticism that his "outrageous" conclusion is "vulnerable on judicial review."

All sides seem to agree, however, that the stage is set for pitched battle in federal court, where CHRT rulings can be appealed. Another less likely outcome is for Parliament itself to repeal or amend Section 13, a law that even supporters say needs updating in the age of the Internet.

Neither the CHRC nor Mr. Warman would comment.

"No matter what happens, this decision is going to federal court," Mr. Lemire said. "This is the beginning of the end for Section 13 now. This law is 32 years old. Not a single person has ever won until today. But did I really win? I have given up six years of my life. The process is the punishment."

Mr. Warman, a former investigator for the CHRC, brought a complaint against Mr. Lemire in 2003, after monitoring his website for almost a year. He alleged that postings on the discussion forum, mostly written by others, contravened Section 13 in that they were "likely to expose" identifiable groups to "hatred or contempt." Mr. Warman later urged the CHRC investigators to expand their investigation to other websites he believed Mr. Lemire was involved with, but to "hold off on informing" Mr. Lemire "until the police take a good look at it." No criminal charges were ever filed.

In all but one case, Mr. Hadjis decided that these postings either did not contravene Section 13(1), or that Mr. Lemire cannot be held responsible for what others posted on his website.

Mr. Hadjis found Mr. Lemire violated the law in one case, by posting an article called "AIDS Secrets", written by an American neo-Nazi, which Mr. Hadjis found was "rife with hyperbole and moral condemnation. Homosexuals, and Blacks to a lesser extent, are denigrated as purveyors of a "killer" that is on the loose, agonizingly destroying the lives of American children and adults alike."

Even with this finding, however, Mr. Hadjis declined to make any order against Mr. Lemire. As a statutory tribunal, Mr. Hadjis does not have the legal authority to officially declare a law unconstitutional. But if he finds it would be unconstitutional to enforce it, he can do as he has done, which is to "simply refuse to apply these provisions."

Part of his motivation was that virtually all the offending material was removed either before or shortly after Mr. Lemire received word of the complaint against him.

"Mr. Lemire had not only "amended" his conduct by removing the impugned material, but sought conciliation and mediation as soon as he learned of the complaint against him," Mr. Hadjis wrote. "The problem had thus already been eliminated, yet the complaint continued to be processed."

Section 13(1) remains valid Canadian law, despite this ruling. Its constitutionality was last upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in a 1990 split decision, before the Internet age.

That decision, about neo-Nazi John Ross Taylor, upheld the law as a justifiable limit on free expression largely because of its remedial, non-punitive purpose. But Mr. Hadjis found that that, today, the law "has become more penal in nature," and this renders it an unjustifiable limit on freedom of expression.

Ever since a 1998 amendment to allow the Tribunal to levy fines up to $10,000 -- payable to the government -- the pursuit of Section 13(1) cases "can no longer be considered exclusively remedial, preventative and conciliatory in nature," he wrote.

He cited Mr. Warman's request for a $7500 penalty against Mr. Lemire. Mr. Warman has won over a dozen other Section 13(1) cases, many leading to similar fines, payments to himself, and legal restrictions on Internet activity.

This criticism about a punitive law masquerading as a remedial one echoes that of Richard Moon, a law professor hired by the CHRC last year to provide an expert analysis of their online hate speech mandate. In essence, his advice was that it could not be done fairly, and so should not be done at all.

Prof. Moon said Wednesday's decision is "obviously a significant moment in the history of Section 13, but it seems like it is in some important sense inconclusive."

He said the ruling has no weight as legal precedent, and could theoretically be ignored by future tribunals, but in practice it is impossible to ignore, and it hints at a fundamental problem with the law.

"As soon as the Supreme Court confirmed that the scope of Section 13 was narrow, and confined to extremely hateful messages, then it was highly unlikely that we were going to have a kind of regular human rights process that involves conciliation between the parties," he said. "That was always something that we could have foreseen."

"We still believe Section 13 is constitutional. There seems to be some major difference of opinion within the Tribunal itself," said Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, referring to previous constitutional challenges of Section 13 that went the other way.

Marvin Kurz, legal counsel to B'nai Brith, which was an intervenor in this case along with the CJC and others, echoed Mr. Farber's question about why Mr. Hadjis did not simply "read out" the penalty section -- that is, ignore it, but allow the actual hate speech section to stand.

"Not only did he not do it, but he failed to explain why he did not consider the alternative," Mr. Kurz said. "It's like if the police act wrongly in a criminal case, you don't throw out the criminal law. That's what he's done here, and that doesn't make sense to me."

Ezra Levant, a blogger who has led the campaign against human rights hate speech law, said the ruling "shows that the CHRC has been acting illegally for many years," and it forces the Conservative government to make a "new kind of decision" about whether to appeal.

"If they launch an appeal, they are casting their lot with the censors," he said.

Pearl Eliadis, a human rights lawyer and a defender of Section 13, played down the importance of the ruling, and said Mr. Hadjis "just got it wrong. With respect, it's constitutionally not within the normal way that these provisions are dealt with." She said he should have simply ignored the offending penalty section and upheld the law.

Bruce Ryder, a constitutional law professor at York University, said Mr. Hadjis was correct to find that the penalty provision "exacerbated the chilling effect" on freedom of expression. But he said Mr. Hadjis' reasoning "broke down at the end," and he should have simply rejected the penalty provision.

He also wondered how Mr. Lemire was acquitted over the posting of an article that explicitly denied the Holocaust, which he called "outrageous and inconsistent with jurisprudence," and makes the entire ruling "vulnerable on judicial review."

Mark Steyn, a conservative author who was the target of a prominent hate speech complaint over his writing in Maclean's, said Mr. Hadjis' realized "that there is no future for Section 13 because of the damage done to it by the dress-up Nazis of the CHRC and and the sordid racket of Richard Warman."

"It makes explicit that section 13 has no friends," he said.

Joseph Brean / National Post

Google Makes Bid To Become World's Librarian

The proposed settlement between Google and US publishers must be resisted, argues Bill Thompson

Google is in the middle of a massive project to scan and digitise every book it can get its hands on, whether old or new, and if it gets its way then the US courts will soon endorse an agreement between the search engine giant and the US book industry that will allow it to do this without fear of prosecution for copyright infringement.

Authors and publishers will get some money in return, and we will all benefit from the improved access to digitised books that Google will provide.

The deal sounds like a good one, but not everyone is happy with it. The Department of Justice in the US has begun an investigation to see if it is anti-competitive, and last month a number of library associations got together with Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft to form the Open Book Alliance which argues that it should not go forward.

The details of the settlement are complex, and it is almost impossible to be sure what would emerge from it because many of the provisions involve setting up things like a Book Rights Registry, and we don't yet know what they will look like.

World's librarian

But whatever the detail there remains a fundamental problem. It is not that the settlement will give Google indemnity from prosecution should it be found to have scanned books that are in copyright without the copyright owner's position, nor even that it gives Google freedom to exploit scanned content commercially.

It is, rather, that the settlement gives only Google these privileges, and places one company in a prime position to become the world's de facto librarian instead of encouraging open access, open standards and a plurality of services and service providers.

Neither Google nor any other company should be entrusted with that responsibility, and nothing in the detail of the agreement or the funds that will be made available to authors as a consequence can change this.

If Google is given a monopoly, either explicitly in the settlement or implicitly because any other scanning project would be forced to negotiate its own multi-million dollar agreement, then the deal must be rejected.

The proposed settlement came about after Google began a project to scan and index millions of books, including many that are still in copyright.

It was sued by groups representing authors and publishers who felt that scanning books, even if the text was only used to create a searchable index which then pointed readers to the relevant text, was an unlicensed use and therefore illegal.

The book trade was also worried that Google might scan the books under the pretext of creating an index and then start offering them online or even selling them, even though it was always absolutely clear that such behaviour would be a breach of copyright.

Instead of fighting the case through the US courts and winning a great victory for those of us who believe that three hundred year-old notions of copyright should not be used arbitrarily to limit new ways of making use of creative works, Google announced in October 2008 that it had reached a settlement with the US Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers that would allow it to continue scanning with permission.

At the moment the settlement hangs in the balance, waiting for what is quaintly termed a 'fairness hearing' in US District Court on October 7.

At this hearing of the questions raised since the settlement was announced will be debated, including the question of how the relatively small Authors Guild came to speak for all published writers in the US, living and dead, in negotiating with Google.

One of the arguments being made in favour of Google, most clearly by US industry analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, is that Google deserves to benefit from having taken the risk of digitising books when the project's legal status was uncertain and that Google, unlike Microsoft and Yahoo!, has invested millions of dollars in the project and is committed to pushing forward.

Microsoft did indeed abandon its own book scanning project, Live Search Books, in 2008, largely on cost grounds but also because the legal uncertainties clearly exposed the company to potential liability in what was never a core area of its activity.

Tribal lands

But Lindsay's view seems hard to accept. Pretending that the world's libraries are some unexplored continent to be opened up and claimed by the adventurers from Mountain View may appeal to the frontier mentality of US commentators, but it is not a metaphor likely to have much appeal elsewhere.

For one thing the bookshelves of the worlds are already inhabited, just like the territory of the United States, and those of us who remember the fate of the Native Americans may not be happy to see Google build its railroad tracks over our tribal lands.

Even without the dodgy analogy, the project of digitising the information held in the world's printed books is too important to be dealt with purely as a commercial venture between rights holders and a potential supplier of services.

We are at an inflection point in world history, and the transition we are making from analogue to digital is happening so quickly and offers so many delights that there is a temptation to let the past moulder in archive boxes and concentrate solely on the new and digital.

For those who take that view then letting Google pay to digitise books is an uncontroversial decision, one that can deliver more digital stuff to search through without apparently costing anything.

George Santayana wrote 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it', but it may also be true that those who do not care to digitise their own past will end up paying a high price to regain what they give up so thoughtlessly.

If we let Google have its settlement we will all be the poorer. Not for a while, perhaps, but one day we will need more from this new library of Alexandria than Google is willing to offer, and find that the price it demands is more than we can pay.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

Hamas condemns Holocaust lessons

Gaza's ruling Islamist movement Hamas has resisted suggestions that Palestinian children should be taught about the Holocaust in UN-run schools.

The head of its education committee in Gaza, Abdul Rahman el-Jamal, told the BBC that the Holocaust was a "big lie".

He said that to teach it would be to "grant a big favour" to Israel, which has been fighting Hamas for years.

The UN, which runs most Gazan schools, recently asked local groups whether the Holocaust should be taught.

It uses local textbooks and, in Gaza, that means using material from neighbouring Egypt, the BBC's Tim Franks reports.

But over the past seven years the UN has added its own coursework about human rights.

Mr Jamal told the BBC that the UN should, instead, teach about the Naqba, the term Palestinians use to describe the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

A spokesman for the UN said that no final decision on this year's curriculum had yet been made. Some 200,000 children are taught in schools run through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany murdered some six million Jews.

However, the event's significance is often disputed in parts of the Middle East where Israel is seen as the enemy and the Holocaust is seen as a tool used by Israel to justify its actions.

BBC News 

It is right to expose Wiesenthal

‘Simon Wiesenthal’s reputation is built on sand. He was a liar and a bad one at that. From the end of the war to the end of his life, he would lie repeatedly about his supposed hunt for Eichmann as well as his other Nazi-hunting exploits.

“Wiesenthal would also concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career.”

With these words, the historian Guy Walters begins his examination of the career of the world’s most famous Nazi hunter. It forms one of the main themes of his new book, Hunting Evil, a history of the Nazi war criminals who escaped and the effort to bring them to justice. And it is impossible to read it without feeling deeply uncomfortable.

There are two reasons for this, and only one of them is to do with Wiesenthal. The first reason for discomfort is simply that Walters lays bare, in what is a fine, very readable but nonetheless important, book about how the victors simply let criminals, thousands upon thousands of terrible murderers, walk away after the war.

A couple of years ago, at the end of a drama documentary on the Wannsee conference, the sentences handed out to the conspirators were rolled on the screen just before the credits. I remember watching aghast as I read that one after another of these monsters appeared to have gone back to Bavaria or wherever and lived a quiet life as a greengrocer. Walters explains how this happened.

To start with, the Allies simply had what they regarded as more important things to do. They didn’t want to spend any time or money catching Nazis. Walters prints a tragi-comic correspondence between a set of war crimes investigators and their superiors in which headquarters declined a request for an English-German dictionary, saying that it was out of print and wouldn’t be available for a year.

The victors were also fighting each other. Nazis were recruited to help fight the Soviets, and thus protected from justice. The Allies were fearful, too, that legal proceedings would expose their own soldiers to liability.

They failed to comprehend the scale of the Nazi crime until the units were disbanded and it was too late. Into the vacuum stepped privateers. And Wiesenthal was the most famous. He did a wonderful thing. He kept the issue in the public eye, kept the memories alive, kept the pressure on.

This made him a secular saint. Until now, criticising Wiesenthal has been the occupation only of cranks and antisemites. Walters is most definitely neither of those. But has he erred by providing them with ammunition? Should Jews welcome his book, or shun it? Very firmly the former, in my view.

Walters’s documentary evidence on Wiesenthal’s inconsistencies and lies is impeccable. He shows how the Nazi hunter’s accounts of his wartime experiences are contradictory and implausible. He demonstrates that he had no role, contrary to his own assertion, in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. He pitilessly dissects Wiesenthal’s overblown claims about the numbers he brought to justice, suggesting it was not much more than a handful.

When you read Hunting Evil, you know its author is telling the truth. And, above all — above everything — the truth matters. The truth however painful, the truth however embarrassing, the truth wherever it takes you. Jews can never be hurt by the truth about the Holocaust and must never fear it, never run away from it.

Ben Barkow, the director of the Wiener Library, the institution that my grandfather established to document the truth, has lent his voice to that of Walters, agreeing that a revaluation of Wiesenthal’s contribution was in order. Barkow argues that a nuanced view is possible. That accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made.

Surely he is right. But even if he is not, Walters has done a service to history and therefore to Jews.

By Daniel Finkelstein / The JC.Com