Controversial Jewish Holocaust Skeptic Speaks Out

David Cole Breaks Years of Silence at IHR Meeting

Controversial Jewish Holocaust Skeptic Speaks About His Clash With Zionist Thugs, His Secret Life as a Republican Party Activist, and His Views Today

Institute for Historical Review
March 2014

A man who made headlines during the 1990s as a controversial Jewish “Holocaust denier” has broken 18 years of silence to speak publicly for the first time about the challenges, achievements and mishaps of that era, and his secretive career since then.

David Cole – now 45 years old – was in good form as he addressed a spirited, well-attended IHR meeting in southern California on Feb. 22, 2014. His lively, articulate presentation was packed with colorful anecdotes, humorous asides and eye-opening insights. The event included an introduction by IHR director Mark Weber, and a robust question-and-answer session.

A two-hour audio recording of the event is available from the the IHR as a two disc CD set.

Mark Weber, Bill Nelson and David Cole, at February 2014 IHR meeting

Cole explained how and why he became a skeptic of the standard Holocaust narrative, and he vividly recalled the campaign of physical violence and threats against him by the extremist Jewish Defense League (JDL). He described how JDL thugs attacked him at a meeting at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1992. One first tried to push him down a flight of stairs, and then others threw food at him. Finally, a JDL thug assaulted him, hitting him in the face and bloodying his nose.

During the 1990s, Cole was prominently involved in the much-publicized global controversy on the role and function of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex during World War Two, and the extent to which it was a center of mass killings. His widely viewed “Cole- Piper Auschwitz video,” based on his 1992 visit to the camp site, exposes some of the deceit and fakery of the familiar Holocaust narrative.

During those years, Cole also presented his provocative views on national television, including an appearance on the popular “Phil Donahue” show. In April 1992 he appeared together with Mark Weber on the nationally syndicated “Montel Williams Show”. He was also interviewed in prominent periodicals, includingThe New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Jerusalem Report. Cole spoke at two IHR conferences, in 1992 and again in 1994. (The text of his address at the 1992 gathering, “A Jewish Revisionist's Visit to Auschwitz,” is posted on the IHR website.)

In response to new JDL threats against his life, and a $25,000 bounty on his head, Cole decided in 1997 to leave Holocaust revisionism. He adopted a new identity (“David Stein”) and in 1998 began a career as a filmmaker, Republican Party activist and conservative commentator. His work under his new name was carried by every major conservative organ in the U.S., including Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News,Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and The Washington Times.

He also ran one of the largest GOP organizing operations on the West Coast, “Republican Party Animals,” which mixed congressmen, military leaders, and administration officials with rock and roll, pole dancers, and abundant alcoholic beverages.

When his past caught up with him last May, news of his hidden life was announced in a range of websites and periodicals. The most detailed revelatory item, titled “Hollywood Conservative Unmasked as Notorious Holocaust Revisionist,” appeared in the British newspaper, The Guardian:

“To those who knew him, or thought they knew him, he was a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood's political conservatives. David Stein brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders ... Over the past five years Stein's organisation, Republican Party Animals, drew hundreds to regular events in and around Los Angeles, making him a darling of conservative blogs and talk shows ... There was just one problem. Stein was not who he claimed.”

In his talk at the IHR meeting, Cole provided an inside look at the Republican Party, based on his collaboration with important local and national GOP figures. The Party’s real focus, he emphasized, is a never-ending scramble for funding. “In the end it is always about money,” he said. His collaboration with the GOP, Cole went on, was not driven by affection for the ideology or policies of George W. Bush and the Republicans, but rather by contempt for liberal-leftist hypocrisy, cant and arrogance.

Cole also said that he stands by what he said and wrote during the 1990s about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. He is not a Holocaust revisionist to make any kind of political point. There is no political or ideological “agenda” or motive behind his non- conformist views on this subject, or his extensive investigation of the Holocaust issue, he explained.

In response to a question, he spoke specifically about the large-scale deportations of Jews from Hungary in May-June 1944. As he noted, it is often claimed that this mass transfer was organized to kill the deported Jews, especially by gassing at the Auschwitz- Birkenau camp. There is no evidence for that “stupid, ridiculous notion,” he said. In fact, he went on, “there is so much evidence” to show that those Jews were deported for labor.

There’s much more about this, Cole added, in his forthcoming memoir, Republican Party Animal.