Doug Christie’s unsent letter to Desmond Tutu

If there were any doubts about recently-deceased Doug Christie’s personal motivations, they have been swept aside by Bradley Smith, who in the latest issue of his newsletter shares the draft of a letter that Doug Christie wanted to send to Bishop Desmond Tutu in 2012. Christie’s goal was to get Bishop Tutu to publicly advocate that the Holocaust should be “debated” on the international scene. (Smith thinks Christie never sent the letter.) It’s a sharp letter, somewhat overwritten, but with a couple of chilling images — such as Christie’s description of the evil golem that roams the world, day and night, spreading lies and hatred in the name of pro-Zionist Holocaust orthodoxy. Here is an excerpt from Christie’s letter:

“Unlike Santa Claus, this 24/7/365 myth monger brings not presents, but a congeries of lies and hatred whose purpose is to disguise and justify the doings of the evil juggernaut of Zionism, all the way back to 1948, the dark year in which both Apartheid and Israel were enacted. This impregnably entrenched golem of duplicity and depredation is, of course, the relentless campaign against historical revision—of Israel’s history, for one, but of paramount importance, the so-called “Holocaust” of the European Jews. It takes not just the form of denial and counter-propaganda, but also a covert but massive campaign of repression through reputational terrorism that has ruined careers and even lives in the media, in the academy, in government, and in ordinary lives. Its agents—sayanim in their own language—are placed high, low, and above all densely in the venues just named, including your own, religion.

“The targets of this vicious initiative encompass not only good, honest, hardworking people (many of them Jews), but political integrity, academic freedom, and truth itself—values equivalent to the spilling of untold gallons of human blood and the stuff, as your actions thus far against Apartheid in South Africa and Palestine eloquently demonstrate you know, that makes the lives of humans, human.

“Could you see your way to directing your massive moral authority explicitly and vigorously against this hideous handmaiden of Israeli apartheid, whose shadow falls not merely on the Middle East, but across the entire world, inciting neighbor against neighbor, race against race, army against army, and nation against nation, the while murdering truth, honesty and freedom?”

Note that in this letter, Christie makes no attempt to provide Bishop Tutu with any evidence that the Holocaust is a lie. The strength of his argument depends, on the contrary, on his passionate belief that anything benefiting Israel and Zionism is inherently suspect. It is as if Christie is motivated not by his belief in Holocaust denial, but by his hatred of Israel. He may have been playing on what he thought would motivate Bishop Tutu, but the passion of Christie’s prose makes that hard to believe.

In fact, this is a line that many Holocaust deniers walk. Only a tiny fraction of anti-Zionists are Holocaust deniers, but a huge proportion of Holocaust deniers are anti-Zionists. It is actually getting harder these days to find Holocaust deniers who stick with “pure” denialist work without getting sidetracked by anti-Zionist causes. Carlo Matogno and Jürgen Graf are still at work, I guess. But I can’t think of any active U.S.-based Holocaust deniers of significance who aren’t bound up in the anti-Zionist cause.