Arthur Butz
Arthur R. Butz (born 1933 in New York City) is an American Holocaust revisionist and an associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, where he has been tenured since 1974. Butz attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he received both his Bachelor of Science and, in 1956, his Master of Science degrees. In 1965 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His doctoral dissertation considered a problem in control engineering.
In 1976, Butz wrote The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry[1] , in which he asserted that the Holocaust (a) did not occur and (b) has been deliberately contrived in order to justify the creation of the state of Israel. Hoax, which was first published by Anthony Hancock before being reprinted worldwide, is one of the documental keystones of Holocaust denial. The title derives from a well-known Nazi book called The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg.
Most recently, Butz attracted attention when he issued a statement in which he agreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's alleged statement that the Holocaust is a "myth." In a press release dated December 18, 2005, Butz wrote
I congratulate him [Ahmadinejad] on becoming the first head of state to speak out clearly on these issues [the alleged fabrication of the Holocaust], and regret only that it was not a Western head of state. His political remarks receive no comment on my side. By 'political remarks' I mean those that deal with questions of what ought to happen now.
The press release was in response to Ahmadinejad's call for "the regime in Jerusalem" to be "wiped from the page of history".
Butz's remarks have evoked the ire of a considerable majority of Northwestern affiliates, and the university's president, Henry Bienen, issued a statement condemning Butz's viewpoints, saying they are an "embarrassment to Northwestern."
Sixty-one of Butz's own colleagues in the department of electrical engineering and computer science published an official censure in February 2006, calling for Butz to "leave our Department and our University and stop trading on our reputation for academic excellence." The Never Again Campaign has over 10,000 signatures on their Never Again Petition, which asks "that the Northwestern community take decisive action to sever the name of our university from Arthur Butz's bald denial of history".
References
See also
- Holocaust denial
- Criticism of Holocaust denial
- Historical revisionism
- Historical revisionism (negationism)