Down The Rat Hole

Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong
Embassy of China
2201 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20007

Jan. 13, 2010

Dear Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong

Re: Google vs. China

In today’s news we read what appears to be the stirring stand of Google, the Internet search engine giant, in defying “Chinese censorship.” The U.S. media is complicit in disseminating the farcical myth about Google’s alleged stand against censorship.

The fact is, Google itself practices censorship of dissident history and scholarship. Scientists, historians and journalists in the West who investigate and subsequently dissent from any aspect of the vast corpus of World War II history classified under the neologism “The Holocaust,” are denied access to the public by various forms of censorship and repression. Dissident investigative research by scholars and journalists in this field is called by the pejorative and highly inaccurate quasi-theological term, “Holocaust denial.”

At Google this takes the form of refusing advertisements for “Holocaust denial” books and other media and censoring any form of expression dubbed “Holocaust denial.”

In 2006 Google censored several videos produced by this writer that pertained to Auschwitz, Deborah Lipstadt and the Protestant historian Charles Provan. In the case of Mr. Provan, the video interview with him was censored by Google because Provan, who accepts the claims of homicidal gas chambers allegedly used by the Nazis, dared to state in the course of his videotaped interview, that Judaic inmates were the ones who operated the killing gas chambers in the concentration camp at
Treblinka.

After receiving numerous complaints and protests over the removal of my history videos from “Google Video,” the Google corporation never responded to a single complainant. Google’s arrogance and hypocrisy truly knows no bounds.

The history videos censored by Google contained no racial invective of any kind. Neither did they contain any sexual pornography. They were censored by Google strictly on the basis that they contradicted the official American
version of what transpired during World War II.

I am writing to inform you and the Chinese people that Google’s attempt to pose as a champion of freedom of speech against China, is a sham. They are censors and what is more, they are dishonest censors in that they pretend to be advocates of freedom of speech when they are in fact guilty of the very thing for which they accuse the government of China.

Sincerely,
Michael Hoffman

Former reporter, New York Bureau of the Associated Press