The NBA should use Kyrie Irving to shine a light on antisemitism

Faculty and students were outraged. They took out an ad in the Daily demanding that the university do something. The president and provost issued statements denouncing the book and the professor’s views.

Yet, four decades later — after the Fabrication metastasized into “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination European Jewry,” after the professor began using the university’s internet domain to disseminate his Holocaust denials, after his engineering colleagues petitioned in 2006 for him to leave by his own volition — Arthur Butz is still there.

Not only that, but Butz was never suspended or otherwise sanctioned by his employer as NBA star Kyrie Irving has been by the Brooklyn Nets over the past couple of weeks for tweeting a link to a four-year-old film that, in part, echoes Butz’s denial of the most-documented genocide in the 20th century.

The Nets can’t delay their Kyrie Irving decision forever

The worst Butz suffered for his irresponsible faux scholarship in a field out of his bailiwick was the ignominy of being a Holocaust denier. Northwestern Provost Raymond Mack lamented in 1977, as would university executives in years after him, that Butz was insulated by tenure and protected by freedom of speech. “It is a right available to any citizen of the United States under the First Amendment,” Mack said of Butz’s Holocaust misinformation then. “It is a shame when that right is used to insult survivors of concentration camps.”

Or the progeny of enslaved Africans, or the native people who remain on this land despite the genocide they suffered.

Whatever Butz, now in his mid-80s, achieved in his academic career may as well be in the dust bin. Irving should consider Butz’s recklessness if he cares about being remembered as a great basketball player.

But being a seminal fabricator about an undeniable truth is but half of Butz’s legacy. The other is something the NBA should consider, no matter how repugnant the idea of letting an unsatisfactorily apologetic Irving play may be to the sensibilities of many among us. The league should consider elucidation. I think there is more for all of us to gain by dealing with Irving’s miseducation in the light than in the darkness.

For in the immediate wake of the first wave of the Butz tsunami, Northwestern started disinfecting Butz’s pollutant lies by shining a light on them with symposia on the Holocaust and courses constructed to explore it. It developed an endowed professorship on the Holocaust and began hosting a summer program around the horrific history. It funded a political…