New York, May 20, 2009. Sam Bloch, Roman Kent, Max Liebmann, Menachem Rosensaft and the Executive Committee of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, has called on the Jewish community and the American people as a whole to join the Holocaust survivors and their descendants in contacting the president of MSNBC regarding the news channel’s failure to react to the disclosure that MSNBC political commentator Patrick Buchanan sponsored a Holocaust denial forum on his website.

Writing in the New York Daily News on May 12, Rosensaft, a vice-president of then organization, described the forum, entitled “Disinformation, Deception and Other Tricks: Discussion about ‘The Holocaust.’” Among the comments posted on this forum were: “Most historians believe it was LOGISTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO GAS 6 MILLION JEWS AND REDUCE THEIR BODIES TO ASHES;” “We have known for some time that the Auschwitz myth is of an exclusively Jewish origin;” “The same blinded people that believe that the Germans intentionally killed Jews – also believe the myth of the Anne Frank Diary;” and “Rightly or wrongly – the Jew was blamed for a lot of the problems that Germany suffered. The Jews were given years of warnings that they were unwelcome in Germany. A lot of Jews fled Germany in the late 1930s. The United States was not very anxious to accept very many. This was when White Christians still had a little control of our Nation.”

Within hours of the publication of Rosensaft’s article, the forum in question disappeared from Buchanan.org, and the link to it was disabled. However, MSNBC’s management has not criticized Buchanan for providing a platform to Holocaust deniers. Buchanan also recently compared Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk to Jesus Christ.

“One might have expected the disclosure of this forum to at least raise some eyebrows at MSNBC,” Rosensaft wrote on The Huffington Post. “After all, two years ago, the news channel summarily fired talk show host Don Imus for making a racially insensitive remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. Sponsoring a Holocaust denial forum on one’s website strikes me as no less offensive. But not a single member of MSNBC’s management has deigned to publicly address Buchanan’s association with anti-Semites, White supremacists and other assorted bigots.”

Rosensaft is calling on Holocaust survivors, members of their families, and the Jewish community and other people who are opposed to hate speech, Holocaust denial and defense of Nazi war criminals, to write to MSNBC president Phil Griffin at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112, telephone number, 212-664-4444; fax number, 212-664-4426, and ask for an explanation why the hosts of programs on which Buchanan regularly appears such as Morning Joe, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and Andrea Mitchell Reports have not asked him a single question about his sponsorship of the Holocaust denial forum on his website.

If MSNBC’s management insists on retaining Buchanan as a fixture on their programs, Rosensaft wrote, “he must be clearly identified as an enabler of Holocaust deniers and a defender of Nazi war criminals whenever he appears on the air.”