Art Jones: GOP Congressional Candidate,...

Art Jones, a man running in the Republican primary to represent Illinois' 3rd Congressional District, is a Holocaust denier. Jones, 64, hopes to win his primary and run against incumbent Democrat Rep. Dan Lipinski to take his seat in congress in November. He's an insurance salesman in Lyons, Illinois, and according to the Huffington Post, organizes "family-friendly" neo-Nazi events every year around Adolf Hitler's birthday. This disgraceful behavior is an embarrassment to the party and to the country. He has been quoted: "As far as I'm concerned, the Holocaust is nothing more than an international extortion racket by the Jews. It's the blackest lie in history. Millions of dollars are being made by Jews telling this tale of woe and misfortune in books, movies, plays and TV. The more survivors, the more lies that are told." It's unclear why he would use the word "survivor" if he believes that there was no European Holocaust during the second World War.

It is truly remarkable that Holocaust deniers still exist in America, due to the indisputable body of evidence that the Nazis murdered eleven million people, including six million Jews--some of the most poignant evidence is contained in photographs taken by shell-shocked Allied soldiers who liberated the camps and were confronted with piles of corpses of clearly starving people. Reducing this stain on human history to a fabricated tale of "misfortune" that has been used for profit, exposes a chilling remainder of the same anti-Semitism--often fueled by baseless fears regarding imagined Jewish control over the economy and the media--that caused the horrific genocide in the first place. An argument can be made that Art Jones does not deserve even a scrap of attention. However, when a member of such a dark movement that still has a frightening amount of organization attempts to take a seat in Congress, and attempts to use the nation's capital as a platform for such dangerous idiocy, attention must be paid. The people of Illinois' 3rd district deserve to know the full truth about this ugliness in their midst.

Comments: 9

Steve !!!! Feb 29, 2012, 11:20pm UTC

Sounds like he would feel at home in Iran.

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Renee Nal Mar 1, 2012, 7:17am UTC

ew, get him out!! Quick!

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A Collective Good Founder Mar 1, 2012, 7:35am UTC

Thanks for pointing this guy out - as depressing as it is to know he exists. He is just one example of why those of us who are close to the political center, and who can get turned off by the extremes of both parties, are much more afrad of the nuts on the far right than the nuts on on the far left.
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A Collective Good

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Rory M. Mar 1, 2012, 10:06pm UTC

It is not surprising that there are still Holocaust deniers. In fact, I expect that as the last survivors of the Holocaust vanish from our midst there will be more to deny what no one living actually witnessed.

Lauren Moccio Mar 4, 2012, 5:12pm UTC

I understand your cynicism completely, but I still think it's surprising based on the body of evidence we have. You don't see people lining up to deny that the Salem witch trials happened because no one is alive who remembers it. This is a unique denial of documented history.

Rory M. Mar 4, 2012, 8:16pm UTC

True. But no one really speaks of Napoleon in the way that we speak of Hitler, and they were basically the same kind of megalomaniac conquerors.

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Kathleen Ewing Mar 3, 2012, 4:10am UTC

This infuriates the historian in me. Deniers need to get a life.

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Art Jones: GOP Congressional Candidate, Holocaust Denier

Comments: 9

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