The Second Question

My second question was the more important one. You were given the construction blueprints almost three months ago. The question was whether you would continue to ask for those blueprints after having already seen them:

Is your questioning really honest, Dr. Toeben?

An honest researcher on an "intellectual adventure," having been shown the plans he asked for, would remove his request for those plans, and begin the analysis process.

And if you are willing to begin such analysis, I would like to ask you to share your opinion of these plans with me. I'm fairly well-versed in the history of the Birkenau Krema and their homicidal gas chambers in particular, and I hope you and I might discuss them.

And, of course, you would remove your request for those plans, on your home page, because to keep that request in place would imply that you had not seen them, which would be dishonest. That goes without saying.

This question got an answer, too. Your home page continues to state, as of today, September 2, 1996:

We have requested of Professor Lipstadt and of the Holocaust Museum, Washington, to provide us with copies of such conversion plans. We are still waiting for them to provide us with these plans.

...almost three months after I provided you with exactly those plans.

It is true that you offer up some ineffectual arguments as to why you don't find the plans to fit the bill. Is it possible that you believe, for your own, unexplained reasons, that the plans are not really the plans? I don't think so. Judging by your reply, you haven't even considered Pressac's point -- possibly not even understood it. Your supposed reasons for disagreeing with him don't begin to address his points.

If I'm wrong -- if you really do think your strawman arguments are relevant, and if you really have convinced yourself, through careful thought, that Pressac is wrong -- then you could have at least mentioned on your home page that some plans had been provided.

Maybe you could have denigrated our arguments, or maybe you could have sneered at what we were saying. That would have been expected. But you could have at least provided the link to the plans and to our correspondence about them, and let the reader make up his or her own mind.

That would have been the honest thing to do. But you chose not to do it.

Every reader that stops by your home page sees a lie in the second paragraph. "We are still waiting," you say -- but you're not.

That's the main thing I wanted to ascertain: whether you would make a misleading claim on your home page. Evidently, you would.

[ Previous | Index | Next ]