David Duke, Historian

Iran's recent conference on the Holocaust drew attention to many of its participants, including a few conservative, anti-Zionist Jewish rabbis, a Canadian political scientist at St. Francis Xavier University, and an American historian, Dr. David Duke.

It escaped my notice 14 months ago that the Ukranian Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP) had conferred a doctorate in history on David Duke. His dissertation title?"Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism." Earlier, MAUP had conferred an honorary doctorate on Duke. Founded in 1989 and now enrolling 50,000 students in a variety of programs, MAUP is the Ukraine's largest private institution of higher education. It has become a major center – not only of anti-Zionism – but of anti-Semitism, in a country with a troubled history of anti-Semitism. Knowing that one of its major academic institutions now entitles David Duke to call himself"a historian" makes me a little less proud to be one.