Williams resigns as Arizona conference director...

[JackRiddler]

News item on 911blogger.com:

Arizona 9/11 Accountability Conference Removes Williams
Submitted by casseia on Sun, 02/04/2007

Arizona 9/11 Truth, sponsor of the 9/11 Accountability Conference taking place in Chandler in late February, has removed Eric Williams from its list of speakers and from its program schedule. Earlier today, a post of mine noted that he had been re-titled on the conference website's "Contact Us" page from "Conference Director and Webmaster" to "Vendor Coordinator." He remains on the contact page in this reduced capacity.

http://911blogger.com/node/5959

(snip)

...they have added this statement to their homepage:

"As a result of the controversy surrounding Eric D. Williams, he has stepped down from involvement in the 9/11 Accountability Conference. The 911 Accountability Conference does not support Holocaust denial, nor does the 9/11 Truth Movement. No other speaker listed here is known to have published works related to the Holocaust."

---

To this I add: unless someone shows otherwise, I am satisfied that Eric Williams publicized his book of historical falsifications about the Nazi holocaust after the Arizona conference was already organized. It is reasonable to conclude that participants in the conference were unaware of this book or his views on the holocaust until it was picked up by ScrewLooseChange day before yesterday.

(For example, according to a thread on SLC, in a two-hour radio discussion with Kevin Barrett in December, no mention was made of the coming book on Auschwitz - I didn't listen to this show myself. The dubious quality of Mr. Williams's research on 9/11, or of too much of the research being promoted by activists of the 9/11 truth movement, is an important but separate issue.)

[reprehensor]

1. Whaddaya know, they listened to the feedback.

I know I wrote them. I'm going to write them again, and tell them that they did the right thing.

[AZCat]

2. Yes, please - let's all do this.

I don't really mind the "just asking questions" stuff (even if the questions are asked over and over again) but the growing presence of holocaust deniers in the 9/11 truth movement is a little too much for me to take.

[pauldp]

3. Good News. Thanks. n/t

[JackRiddler]

4. Some have framed this as an issue of poor PR (analysis)

Some thoughts in reply to another post that are generally relevant:

(...) the point is not "public relations," although I agree that anyone who advocates denial of the Nazi holocaust while pretending to organize a 9/11 conference clearly has no interest in advancing the political cause of 9/11 truth, certainly not in the United States in 2007.

People who want to present absurdities often frame these in terms of taboo-breaking, and tend to portray the inevitable rejection as a case of persecution by the zombies of political correctness. Well you know what, many a stupid idea is justly unpopular, and courage is a morally neutral category. It takes a brave man to burst into a church service and beat the choir boy with a tire iron. That doesn't make him cutting edge.

(some argue...) Williams should have stepped down because his views made for bad PR. It's easy for the less charitable to read that as saying it would have been all good, if only Williams had confined his crap to backrooms full of trusted fellow travelers. Need I point out that this is bad PR on (the part of those who argue this way)?

I don't support any laws to punish people for speech, so don't bring in that red herring. The issue here is also not "historical curiousity." Indeed, anyone can pose any question, no matter how provocative -- and is entitled to any answer he can actually justify through scholarship, fact and logic.

So what is the issue here? Historical falsification on behalf of an ideological agenda.

Williams published more than enough pages of his book on the Web for us to judge the methodology and the quality of the facts employed. I have studied and actually written enough history to know this. If his book was about Nessie or Bigfoot, the malapropisms would make it mildly comic. But it has a thesis of consequence: that the Nazi regime did not implement an open policy of extermination based on race, thereby killing millions of captive civilians through various means, including execution at concentration camps. This is not only untrue; defending it requires falsification, which Williams engages in.

Why? Why falsify to justify that thesis?

Stalin has his apologists. History departments to this day seek to add an air of romance and accomplishment to the Roman massacre of three million Gauls. (Well, three million if you believe Ceasar's own reports, but who knows? Maybe it's a Jewish forgery, like the Spandau conference.) One day, students of realpolitik will write papers to justify the geopolitics of PNAC and explain why the inside job of 9/11 was necessary.

And while open neo-Nazis are at least honest enough to approve of massacring the Jews and other "vermin races," the refined Nazi sympathizers and Jew-haters of our time prefer to minimize the historic Nazi crime, or blame it on the victim. In this they help the Nazis find new currency.

That may not be Williams's intent, but I really don't care what he thinks he's doing. I shall criticize it without the limits imposed by the conspiracy niche-market's idea of political correctness. While I might debate his likes in a public forum, I wouldn't attend a conference on 9/11 he organized, or accept its claim of supporting the 9/11 truth movement. He can label it what he likes; I belong to a different movement.

NOTE TO ANY WHO MIGHT TWIST MY WORDS:

At any rate, I'm happy people reacted and forced him to step down. Most understand the real reasons why, and it's a good sign.