The Spartan Daily erred in running this ad. The paper helped in a small way to legitimize a hate group. By attacking the facts of the Holocaust, deniers' propaganda insinuates subtle but hateful anti-Semitic beliefs of Jews as controllers of academia and the media or exploiters of guilt. His ad, and the Web site highlighted in the ad, are made up of repeated denials that gas chambers ever existed and assertions that there never was a Nazi program of extermination.
Deniers have very close ties to some of the country's most hateful and violent extremists.
They have been featured by groups like the National Alliance, whose founder's writings are believed to have inspired the Oklahoma City bombing and many other horrific hate crimes across the country. Aryan Nations also uses their propaganda to inspire people like Buford Furrow, who recently shot children at a Jewish day care in Los Angeles and killed an Asian-American postal worker. The ad is designed to do two things. First, it seeks to generate a heated controversy on campus so that the general off-campus media will provide coverage for the ad in print and broadcast news stories. The honesty of several other prominent survivors is impugned as well.