This letter to the editor was originally published on WorldNetDaily.com August 25, 2003.
To the editor:
Ilana Mercers recent column, in which she maliciously persists in trying to link me with the Institute for Historical Review, states, I am presuming that his own publication in the Journal of Historical Review, Volume 18, No. 1 (January-February, 1999), p. 36. is in all likelihood an unauthorized reprint. Her presumption, in this case, is correct. I was never asked for permission to reprint my article (which had nothing to do with Israel), and I would not have granted it had I been asked. Since Ms. Mercer has been in touch with a top person at the IHR, she might have found this out for herself. Apparently, there are limits to her intellectual curiosity. The IHR link she provides displays titles of articles by other unlikely authors: Yehuda Bauer (noted Holocaust historian and author of The Impact of the Holocaust), Seymour Martin Lipset (former chairman of the National B’nai B’rith Hillel Commission), Allan Brownfeld (of the American Council for Judaism), and Doug Bandow (Cato Institute). I doubt they authorized use of their articles.
If the gulf between me and the IHR is not yet clear enough, I quote from a paper I wrote on the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East for the Cato Institute in 1991: The murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis and the deplorable state of the Holocaust survivors had stimulated the international effort to establish a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine….
As to Ms. Mercers other groundless charge, that I believe that all the land of Israel belongs to Arabs, I quote again from my paper: Jewish land purchases accounted for only 10 percent of the proposed Jewish state….
Of course, Ms. Mercer could have found this material herself had she done a little Internet research. I reproduce it here for the fair-minded among WorldNetDaily readers.
Sheldon Richman
Conway, Arkansas