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
You almost have to respect this level of dedication to being absolutely horrible.
Nah, Esmay can see the evidence, he just doesn’t care. This looks like a cursory CYA to me. “Well, I asked him if he was a Holocaust denier, and he didn’t cop to it, so it must be fine!” That’s not an attempt to exonerate the Holocaust denier. It’s an attempt to CYA on the part of Esmay.
None of this is in the same galaxy as surprising, they’d post articles by everyone from Donald Trump to Dylann Roof as long as they said “Women are bad, rape is good,” but “Hail Hitler” makes me want to break out the stupid Photoshops.
POM, you may be right; hard to know which scenario makes Esmay look worse.
Look how cheerful the guy on the right in the photo looks.
Talukdar looks disconcertingly cheerful in his twitter pic as well, a strange contrast with the terrible content of his tweets.
That’s because Dean basically told him it’s totally OK and he’ll keep publishing the guy’s stuff!
David, you’re totally taking these tweets out of context. Especially the one where he’s trying to hail a cab to the Hilton.
Yeah, it’s not like feminism has anybody that has a questionable past. Simone de Beauvoir.
Yes, it does. A little pelting is the least he deserves.
Nobody deserves Hitler Hail, though.
I can think of many things that coming out about should make one look that pumped.
“Hey folks! I’m a raging asshole!” is not one of them.
I’ve been to Passau. I’ve seen the camps. I’ll never understand how this insane idiocy can maintain itself.
So did Dean Esmay call the Internet Po-Po on you? What’s the charge, Malicious Butthurt??
These MRAs are their own worst enemy – how can ANYBODY take them serious??
Baby hippo! Baby hippo!
@I-Over
What camp is in Passau? AFAIK, that could only be a KZ-Aussenlager connected administratively to either Dachau or Mauthausen.
There is a difference between the concentration camps, which were used for political prisoners, homosexuals, and “antisocial elements”, and the extermination camps. The former were brutal and many people died of sickness, starvation, and forced labour, but the Holocaust in the literal meaning was carried out in extermination camps, all of which were established in occupied Poland, and where people were separated at arrival in those being used for forced labour and those being murdered directly in the gas chambers.
The strange thing about holocaust denial is that the people who do it are usually the most vicious antisemites and at the same time deny the Holocaust and say that it was the right thing to do. It’s basically their bizarre idea of a moral copout: if it didn’t happen, you are allowed to say that it should happen.
Isn’t there an old English usage of “hail” as a salute? How is that different from the meaning of German “heil”?
(since we started nitpicking on this)
The part that makes me weep is that I can see how he got sucked into Holocaust Denial, and it’s tragic–in particular, because it’s made him bedfellow with the likes of AVfM. The West does have a long history of exploitation of the subcontinent, and there is a tendency, particularly among the Brits and Americans, to insist that the people who opposed Hitler are somehow absolved of our own crimes.
Here’s one of many noteworthy bits from the Wikipedia page on the Bengal Famine:
So you can see where the baseline anger comes from. There’s doubtless a not insignificant portion of the Indian population that views Churchill and his allies (including the U.S.) as war criminals. From there, it’s a hop, skip and pithy saying (“the enemy of my enemy…”) to decide that if someone opposed the war criminals, they must be a good person.
It’s a common result of black & white thinking, really. The notion that the leadership of both sides was horrible in different ways, to different sets of marginalized peoples, is a difficult one for these folks to grasp.
How can Hilary Clinton be a Jewess when she is so clearly a lizard person? Or are lizard people Jewish?
In all seriousness, they do realize that (I’m assuming) about half the victims of the holocaust were men and boys, don’t they? What a staggering amount of men’s human rightsing over at AVFM!
The old Jon Ronson question:
“Do you think that, when David Icke says lizards, he means Jews?”
Love the baby hippo. It rescued my mood after reading about the Holocaust denier. What does he think his fate, as a man of colour, would be under the Third Reich?
And now he’s a Holocaust-denier-denier.
Also, I love how Esmay calls you a “stalker madman” and then sends you a LinkedIn invite.
Don’t call them insane, please.
I find your victim blaming appalling. Over one MRA a year gets an email from David. This is a serious problem in our culture. Akin to white tears and not getting a reply from most of the women you’ve spammed on OK Cupid. I’ll thank you not to make light of this issue.
I can’t help comparing the beliefs of Mr. Talukdar and Mr. Roof on the subject of women since the two postings here are back to back.
Mr. Roof was concerned about white women remaining the property of white men and stated that he was killing Black people because Black men were “raping” white women. He held classic White Supremacist beliefs. These beliefs included the necessity for the preservation of the purity of the race by maintaining at all costs the “chastity” of white women, seclusion in the home, piety, and service to men and children as their only purposes in life.
Article II, section I of the Women’s KKK Constitution held that the purpose of the organization was to unite white, native-born women, to promote patriotism, “to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood” and to “maintain forever white supremacy.” http://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1689&context=etd at p. 45
Here is Mr. Talukdar’s statement on the same subject:
“If a woman is pure she can save and purify man. She can purify the race. She can make a home a sacred temple. Hindu women have been the custodians of the Hindu race.
Hindu religion and civilisation still survive in spite of the many foreign invasions. Other civilisations have come and gone, but only Hindu civilisation has survived on account of the purity of Hindu women.
The women are taught to regard chastity as their most priceless possession, and the loss of it equal to the eternal damnation of their soul. From their very childhood religion is ingrained in Hindu women. As such they illumine and enliven the home through the glory of their purity. This is the secret of the endurance of the Hindu religion, civilisation and culture.” https://bengaliwomen.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/women-as-saviour-of-race/
The idea that “unchaste” women cause destruction of the race (whatever race you’re promoting) is one of the global pillars of patriarchal ideology. Mr. Talukdar is very actively promoting exactly the same racism as Mr. Roof, a racism that rests on the strict control of women’s sexuality and their lives.
That Mr. Talukdar and Mr. Roof are agreed in their virulently antisemitism hardly needs to be said. Mr. Talukdar’s statements above correspond to Mr. Roof’s here: “The issues with Jews is [sic] not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the Jewish identity, then they wouldn’t [sic] cause much of a problem.” http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/a-new-hitler-dylann-roofs-anti-jewish-spanish-east-asian-manifesto/2015/06/21/
This particular knot of hatred where race and sex intersect is central to so much of the world’s violence. It needs to be emphasized and examined very carefully.