Bradley Smith has developed a new tactic in his long-term effort to place Holocaust denial materials in the campus media. He is now sending a 27 page publication, The Revisionist, to campus publications for distribution as an insert. Smith’s The Revisionist is made up of repeated denials that gas chambers ever existed and assertions that there never was a Nazi program of extermination directed at the Jewish people (and others deemed undesirables).

While most campus newspapers (including, for instance, those at the universities of Delaware, South Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, Georgia State, Michigan State, Penn State, Millikin, Syracuse, Rice, Tulane and Queens College) rejected this item, The Chronicle, at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY included it in its October 28, 1999 issue. The Arbiter, at Boise State University, on November 17, 1999, became the second campus newspaper to distribute The Revisionist as an insert.

Along with the insert, Smith continues to submit his most recent quarter-page ad. Campus newspapers at Iowa State, Ohio-Wesleyan, Randolph Macon Women’s College, Maine/Farmington, Maine/Orono and Boisie State (which published both the ad and the insert during the same semester) have published it.

The text of this new two-column ad is a marked departure from the more nuanced approach that Smith has used in recent years. The 1998-1999 ad, for instance, featured a supposed offer of $250,000 (up from the previous year’s $50,000 offer) to anyone who could arrange a 90 minute, prime-time, nationally televised debate between Bradley Smith and a representative of ADL. Other ads never used the word "Holocaust" in the text.

This ad is both direct and blatant. Its themes include:

• A shrill attack on the entire field of Holocaust Studies. Smith asserts that the field is characterized by anti-German prejudice and based on forged documents, false testimony, doctored photos, induced confessions, etc.

• Smith attacks Elie Wiesel as a serial liar and as a proponent of hatred. The honesty of several other prominent survivors is impugned as well.

• The claim that Anne Frank’s Diary is a "literary production" and that Schindler’s List was based on a "cheap novel."
  
  
• Implying that not a single Jew was gassed by the Nazis as part of a program of genocide, Smith goes on to question whether the Nazis committed any crimes that the Republicans and Democrats have not committed themselves.
  
  
• It asserts the bogus claim that the airing of Holocaust denial propaganda is an issue of fairness, free speech, open debate and intellectual freedom. These are themes that are calibrated to play well in a campus community.

• Like the more subtle ads from previous years, it provides the Internet address of Smith’s web site. This web site provides a massive library of Holocaust denial and blatantly anti-Semitic materials, deliberately mixed in with a good deal of unobjectionable material. From this site, an Internet surfer can link into a grand tour of the hate movement, incorporating everyone from David Irving and Ernst Zundel to Tony Martin and the Nation of Islam.

The insert and the ad are designed to do two things. First, Smith seeks to generate a heated controversy on campus so as to leverage interest on the part of the general off-campus media, which will report on the ad in print and broadcast news stories. Second, he seeks to entice members of the campus and general communities onto his web site and onto those sites linked to it.