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Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has plenty of bad opinions, including but not limited to thinking that there might be “real questions” about vaccine safety, and also that wi-fi might hurt children. At least she isn’t a Holocaust denier! But hey—what about her VP pick, Ajamu Baraka?

Well, that’s a bit more complicated. Earlier this year, Holocaust denier and 9/11 Truther Kevin Barrett included an essay written by Baraka in an anthology he edited, ANOTHER French False Flag? Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernadino. Other contributors include known antisemite Gilad Atzmon (David Duke is a fan), the French neo-fascist Alain Soral, Ken O’Keefe, a 9/11 Truther who thinks that Hitler was right, and former Sesame Street illustrator David Dees.

“Do you really believe in all the Zionist propaganda about Auschwitz?” Barrett once asked. “Everywhere you go, it is denied that the Holocaust is just one unfortunate historical episode among others, and that the data can be interpreted and reinterpreted in a wide variety of ways.” Anyone who violates this orthodoxy, he feels, is dubbed a heretic. “And the heretics are sent to prison, or have their careers destroyed, simply for writing or speaking about their interpretations of historical data.”

Meleiza Figueroa, press director for the Stein campaign, told Gawker that Baraka “was not aware of Barrett’s views on the Holocaust” until yesterday.

“I often get requests to reprint my articles, and since I look at my work as belonging to the public I don’t often pay a lot of attention to the outlets,” Baraka said in a lengthy statement provided to Gawker. (In fact, Figueroa said, Baraka wasn’t even sure which article of his was republished.) “When Kevin Barret, someone who has interviewed me in the past, contacted me to ask if he could include my piece in a compilation on the Paris Attacks, I didn’t see any problem with it. I didn’t inquire as to the other authors and don’t know much about some of them or their positions on various issues. I stand by everything I wrote in that article and would be happy to discuss the details.”

Baraka has appeared at least twice on Barrett’s radio show. In one interview, he argued that the United States created the “boogeyman” of ISIS “to basically garner significant public support for an argument that says that this monster, these evil forces—that, by the way, we helped to create—we are the only ones that can go in and slay this monster.”

An essay of Baraka’s with the same title as that included in Barrett’s book, “The Paris Attacks and the White Lives Matter Movement,” was first published in November 2015 by the website CounterPunch, a week after a Brussels-based Islamic State terror cell perpetrated a series of coordinated attacks in Paris. Baraka writes:



While the victims of the violence in Paris may have been innocent, France was not. French crimes against Arabs, Muslims and Africans are ever- present in the historical memory and discourse of many members of those populations living in France. Those memories, the systemic discrimination experienced by many Muslims and the collaboration of French authorities with the U.S. and others that gave aid and logistical support to extremist elements in Syria and turned their backs while their citizens traveled to Syria to topple President Assad, became the toxic mix that resulted in the blowback on November 13. Although a number of the dead in Paris are young Arabs, Muslims and Africans, in the global popular imagination, France, like the U.S. (even under a Black president), is still white. So in Iraq the Shia will continue to die in the thousands from ISIS bombs; the Saudi’s will continue to slaughter Houthi’s with U.S. and NATO assistance; and Palestinian mothers will continue to bury their children, murdered by Zionist thugs in and out of uniform, without any outcry from the West. CNN and others will give non-stop coverage to the attacks in Paris because in the end we all really know that the lives that really matter are white.

This is not a particularly original interpretation of white supremacy’s role in American and European foreign policy, which makes its appearance alongside speculation that the November 13 attacks were a false flag operation organized by the CIA and Mossad all the more surprising. “If others want to imply other motivations or positions not stated in my article related to the subject of the book or any of the authors, I cannot control that,” Baraka’s statement continued. “But all who know me and my 40-year history of fighting for the rights of all people who have experienced the indignity of oppression will share my confidence that any smear campaign against my life of human rights activism will not succeed.”

Last month, the Green Party of Canada was forced to expel a former member—a candidate for office in Alberta in 2006, 2008, and 2011—after she described the Holocaust as “the most persistent lie in all of history.” When Gawker noted that Baraka’s statement did not actually include a rejection or disavowal of Barrett’s views, Figueroa said that “of course” Baraka disavows all Holocaust deniers, and moreover that he does not deny the Holocaust.

Reached for comment, Barrett wrote to Gawker in an email:

I didn’t know about my views on the Holocaust, either! What are they? Meanwhile, hear is a quote: This witch-hunt against Ajamu Baraka is utterly bizarre, and the people participating it—from the media barons who ordered it to the lowly reporters who carry out those orders—are pathetic cowards who disgrace the name of journalism.

“Make that ‘participating in it,’” he followed up. “Thanks for correcting the typo.”

Update – 5:00 pm

Gawker has received this further statement from Ajamu, regarding his disavowal of Holocaust deniers: “There has never been any question in mind about the genocidal madness of the Nazi Holocaust throughout Europe during the second world war. I abhor and reject any individual or group that fails to understand the tremendous suffering of Jewish people during that dark period. My deep moral principles and commitment to human rights have always compelled me to speak out against any and all efforts that deny the recognition of a common humanity to any group.”