Some other Holocaust deniers
Last month, I reported that Indian Men’s Rights Activist and marital rape apologist Amartya Talukdar — a regular contributor to leading Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — was a Holocaust denier.
The evidence? A series of Tweets in which, among other things, he declared that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” expressed a certain admiration for Hitler and, bizarrely, declared that Hillary Clinton was a “Jewess.”
When I asked AVFM’s then-managing editor Dean Esmay about these troubling Tweets from someone he had published on his site only a few days earlier, he responded … by calling me a “stalker madman” and threatening to call the police if I ever emailed him again. (It was, as far as I recall, the only time I’ve ever emailed him.)
Well, ok, I thought, the folks at AVFM seem to be congenitally unable to ever admit to being wrong, even when the evidence is right before their eyes. But I didn’t think AVFM would be dumb enough to post anything by Talukdar ever again.
I was wrong. Yesterday, AVFM put up a new post by him. No, it contains no Holocaust denial or defenses of Hitler. But the question remains: why is AVFM continuing to post the writings of a Holocaust denier even after being presented with irrefutable evidence of his noxious beliefs?
The answer may be that the folks at AVFM live so completely in their own little bubble that they cannot see the evidence right in front of them.
In my email to Esmay, I not only provided a link to my post on Talukdar’s Holocaust denial but also provided direct links to archived copies of four of his most troubling Tweets. Esmay didn’t have to take my word for anything or even look at my post. All AVFM’s “managing editor” had to do was to click four links and read four tweets in order to see the sort of vile nonsense Talukdar had been tweeting.
It’s not clear if Esmay was able to bring himself to do even this much due diligence of a writer he was responsible for publishing.
Instead, as I discovered when looking back through Talukdar’s tweets today, Esmay’s “investigation” of the matter may have consisted of nothing more than this brief Twitter exchange, in which Talukdar, using a technique popular amongst small children and liars of all ages, simply told Esmay what he wanted to hear:
Talukdar took a similar tack with me, though he took a little more time in getting to the “telling me what I wanted to hear” part. Here’s just one of the rather surreal exchanges I had with him on Twitter (click here for more context).
I got no reply to this last question, but I guess I shouldn’t complain; Talukdar also offered no response, at least not on Twitter, to Esmay’s questions on whether or not his remarks had been “taken out of context” or whether he had been “making intemperate remarks you did not mean perhaps?”
I’m not sure in what circumstances saying that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” or calling Hillary Clinton “a “Jewess” could be dismissed as nothing more than “intemperate remarks” made in the heat of passion; that would be akin to excusing Mel Gibson’s famous rant on how “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” as just one of those things people say when they’re pulled over for drunk driving.
But I can help Esmay out with the whole “context” thing. Here are some of Talukdar’s Tweets in their original context on Twitter. (Click on the screencaps below to see archived versions of the Tweets.)
Huh. Somehow that doesn’t seem any better in context.
That’s just as bad.
Not only anti-Semitic, but we’re in tinfoil hat territory now.
Dude, “hail Hitler” is not the preferred nomenclature. It’s “heil.”
As far as I can tell, Talukdar has never apologized for or even directly acknowledged his Holocaust-denying Tweets; he’s content to pretend they never happened, as is, evidently, Dean Esmay.
Weirdly, Talukdar’s attempts to cover up his Holocaust denial have been as cursory as Esmay’s quarter-assed “investigation.” Not long after I posted about him, Talukdar tried to clean up his Twitter timeline by deleting the offending Tweets. But he didn’t get them all.
Indeed, when I searched Twitter for his handle and the word “holocaust” today, I found three of his Holocaust-denial Tweets still up, lurking at the bottom of the search results. (I’ve archived the search results, as well as the individual tweets (1, 2, 3), in case he goes back and deletes them today.)
On his Twitter page, Talukdar describes himself as, among other things, a “Humanist.” A Voice for Men describes itself as the voice of the “Men’s Human Rights Movement.”
So I have to wonder: Do Talukdar and his editors think those killed in the Holocaust were somehow less than human?
H/T — Talukdar himself, who Tweeted me about his latest AVFM post
EDIT: Proofreading correction, minor tweak, added the H/T
