There should not be any censorship of any kind, period

To The Daily Sun,

I am writing to respond to Ryan Murdough’s letter of 4/17/2019. Ryan, if you have the courage to find out that your Holocaust denial is not based in reality, I invite you to read “The Hiding Place” by Corrie Ten Boom. Corrie and her family were watchmakers who lived in the Netherlands during the time of the Holocaust. “The Hiding Place” is her account of how they hid Jews during the Nazi occupation of their country. The Ten Booms were devout Christians and they demonstrated their love of the Savior by hiding His persecuted people. They hid hundreds of Jews during that time. Finally, one day, an informant told the occupying force what they were doing and their home was raided. Corrie, her sister and father were taken to a death camp. The father died within a few days. Corrie’s sister Betsie was frail and sickly. She held on for a couple of years of continual hunger and cold but reached the point where she couldn’t hold on any longer. As she lay freezing and starving to death in a cold, loveless barracks, she spent her last days praying for her tormentors because she felt sorry for them because she knew the awful Judgment they faced for their crimes.

One of the last things Betsie said was, “No matter how deep the pit you’re in, Jesus is deeper.”

As I’ve dealt with my own trials over the past few years, I’ve discovered that Betsie was right. Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. John 16:33

When you turn to the Lord with your troubles, your circumstances may not change. And in fact, if He’s using your troubles to bring you closer to Himself and teach you things, they probably won’t. At least not right away. But you’ll find a peace and a comfort in your soul that the world can’t touch.

The details of Corrie’s and Betsie’s suffering in the concentration camp as well as the details of their underground work hiding Jews is so obviously authentic and true, no one can read this book and not see that.

Ryan, you know you give yourself away because your discussion of the “Holohoax” is set against an antisemetic backdrop. Your hatred of the Jews is obvious. The Holocaust “has been used as a financial and political weapon” by a people who “have subverted, deceived and been expelled from 109 places on earth,” according to you. Anyone who reads this can see that you need to believe the Holocaust was fabricated because you hate the Jews. What did we ever do to you?

Lastly I want to comment on Rick Crockford’s letter of 4/18/2019. Rick, I understand your disgust at the sentiments expressed in Murdough’s letter. Yes, many brave American servicemen died defending freedom and decency and liberating the concentration camps and I understand that Murdough’s Holocaust denial enrages you. But I don’t agree with you that the Laconia Daily Sun staff should have issued a “toxic content” label or an emphatic disavowal of Murdough’s letter. You say that Holocaust denial is outlawed in Germany and France and some other European countries, but you don’t agree we should do it here because of the first amendment. I think you’re right, but there should not be any censorship of any kind against any opinion, period. I always learned in school that the real purpose of the first amendment is that when expression is free, all ideas will be known and the best of them will float to the top and the bad ones will sink of their own weight. The other reason to be against censorship is that when people have to hide their opinions we don’t know what they’re thinking. It’s better if everything is out in the open and we know what people are thinking. Also,The Bible says we are all born with an innate knowledge of right and wrong. Which means that if we’re being misled about something to satisfy someone else’s bigotry, eventually we’ll figure it out. We’ll read other things on the subject and see that they make more sense. Because the “law [is] written in their hearts , their conscience also bearing witness....’ Romans 2:15

God put the knowledge of right and wrong into us. I don’t need the editor of the Daily Sun to tell me what to think, any more than I need the government to tell me what to think. God has put the ability to recognize truth into me. I was born with it. If the truth gets supplanted by lies for a while, eventually it will break through. If the editor of the Daily Sun can tell me what to think about the Holocaust, he can tell me what to think about anything.

Hillarie Goldstein

Franklin