Surprise, surprise: Bolton's anti-semitism goes back online

In a recent post I noted the Broadcasting Standards Authority's decision not to uphold a complaint that Kerry Bolton, one of New Zealand longest-serving and highest-profile neo-Nazis, made against me back in 2009. Bolton had objected to my calling him an anti-semite and a Holocaust denier during an appearance on Radio New Zealand, and the BSA had initially upheld his complaint. After Radio New Zealand got litigous the High Court asked the BSA to revisit its decision, leading to December's verdict against Bolton.

Bolton's complaint to the BSA had dwelt upon the link I had made between him and the Adelaide Institute, one of the world's most notorious organisations of Holocaust deniers. The Institute is forthright about its anti-semitism and its admiration for Nazism - at the moment, the homepage on the organisation's website features a heart-warming Christmas message recorded for radio in 1942 by Goebbels - and its director Frederick Toben has been imprisoned in Australia for inciting hatred against Jews.

In his submissions to the BSA, Bolton denied any sort of association with the Adelaide Institute, asserting that he had not produced texts for the outfit and stating rather irrelevantly that, since he had not travelled to Australia for many years, he had not had any direct personal contact with Frederick Toben.

When the BSA asked me back in 2009 for proof of my claims about Bolton's ties with the Adelaide Institute, I sent them an e mail with a set of links to articles which Bolton had published on the Institute's website, and also referred them to pages on the site which described Bolton as the Institute's official 'New Zealand Associate'. By the time the BSA got my e mail, though, the pages I had referred to had mysteriously disappeared from cyberspace.

The disappearance of the texts from the Adelaide Institute website helped convince the BSA to rule initially that the evidence I had provided against Bolton was 'scant'. After Radio New Zealand won a second hearing from the BSA, I helped its team to dig up a large number of offline texts which demonstrated Bolton's anti-semitism and his history of Holocaust denial. These texts, and the testimony of a series of academics, probably helped convince the BSA to overturn its decision and to find against Bolton at the end of last year.

Now that Bolton's complaint against me has been dismissed, and the mass media has cited and quoted some of the plentiful evidence of the man's Holocaust denial, a curious event has occurred over at the website of the Adelaide Institute. Without any warning or explanation, all of the Bolton-related pages at the Institute's site have miraculously reappeared.

In an open letter to the German ambassador to New Zealand written at the beginning of 2004 and now available once again at the Adelaide Institute website, Bolton explains that Judaism and Bolshevism are the same thing, and condemns the 'craven, defeatist' mentality of Germans who regret the history of the Third Reich. An open letter to 'the War Generation' reveals that the Jews were responsible for starting of the Second World War, claims that the concentration camps where they were kept during the war were actually quite nice places, and salutes Hitler for 'discovering the link between cancer and tobacco'. Mel Gibson doesn't have many friends these days, so he may be comforted by the fact that Bolton wrote a piece for the Adelaide Institute defending him as a 'moral, decent man' unfairly traduced by a sinister cabal of Jews. Bolton's contributions to the Institute's website also include a couple of defences of Joel Hayward, the pseudo-historian whose Holocaust-denying Masters thesis for Canterbury University caused a scandal back in 2003, and a wild rant about Jewish 'anti-Gentilism'.

Other newly-resuscitated pages at the Adelaide Institute website name Bolton as the organisation's New Zealand Associate, and reveal that he was lying when he claimed not to have had personal contact with Frederick Toben. In a 'Letter from Wellington' written in May 2004 and published in the Institute's newsletter, Toben explains that he has been enjoying a holiday at Bolton's home in the windy city. Toben notes excitedly that he and Bolton have had 'lots to talk about'.

When he spoke to the Otago Daily Times about the BSA's recent ruling against him, Bolton asserted that he was "agnostic" about the Holocaust. "I simply don't know how it happened" he claimed, "and to what extent it happened". The texts which have reappeared on the Adelaide Institute website show that Bolton is anything but 'agnostic' about the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. They show him repeatedly denying that Jews were the victims of genocide during World War Two, and repeatedly deploying the notion of a global Jewish conspiracy which was such a stock in trade of Hitler's regime.

Bolton has presumably decided, in the aftermath of the BSA's verdict, that there is nothing to be gained from continuing to disguise his connections with the Adelaide Institute and with Frederick Toben. But his crude attempts to manipulate the record of his views and his political connections by deleting and then restoring webpages only demonstrate his hostility to rational argument and serious research.