MSNBC's Deafening Silence on Buchanan's Holocaust Denial Forum

"MSNBC'S AUDIENCES for the most part have no idea that Buchanan is not just another affable, well-spoken if arch-conservative pundit. They do not know that he has compared John Demjanjuk, the Nazi guard at the death camps of Sobibor and Majdanek who has just been deported from the US to stand trial in Germany, to Jesus Christ. ... "

By MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT
JPost.com
Jun 3, 2009

More than three weeks ago, I outed Patrick Buchanan, the former senior White House official in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, erstwhile candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and now a highly paid political commentator on MSNBC, for sponsoring a Holocaust denial forum on his Web site. Within hours of this disclosure in a New York Daily News article, the forum in question, entitled "Disinformation, Deception and Other Tricks: Discussion About 'The Holocaust'" (with The Holocaust in quotes, of course), mysteriously vanished from Buchanan.org and the link to it was disabled.

The Buchanan Web site's forum followed the standard Holocaust deniers' playbook, complete with such gems as "Most historians believe it was logistically impossible to gas 6 million Jews and reduce their bodies to ashes"; "We have known for some time that the Auschwitz myth is of an exclusively Jewish origin"; "The same blinded people that believe that the Germans intentionally killed Jews - also believe the myth of the Anne Frank diary"; and "Rightly or wrongly - the Jew was blamed for a lot of the problems that Germany suffered. The Jews were given years of warnings that they were unwelcome in Germany. A lot of Jews fled Germany in the late 1930s. The United States was not very anxious to accept very many. This was when white Christians still had a little control of our nation."

ONE MIGHT have expected the disclosure of this forum to at least raise some eyebrows at MSNBC. After all, two years ago the news channel summarily fired talk show host Don Imus for making a racially insensitive remark about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Sponsoring a Holocaust denial forum on one's Web site strikes me as no less offensive. But not a single MSNBC executive has deigned to publicly address Buchanan's association with anti-Semites, white supremacists and other assorted bigots. ...

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