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David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt Libel Trial in London England
Part Five: Feb. 5--Feb. 18, 2000
Dates and sources are listed at the end of each respective report
Irving's opinion of Hitler is perverse, claims Keegan
David Irving's views on Hitler and the Final Solution are "perverse" and defy common sense, Sir John Keegan, defence editor of The Daily Telegraph, told the High Court yesterday.
Giving evidence after being subpoenaed by Mr Irving, he said the author's proposal that Hitler could not have known what was happening to the Jews until late 1943 "was so extraordinary it would defy reason". Sir John, knighted in the New Year Honours for services to military history, had been called by Mr Irving in his libel action against the American author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books over a claim that he is a "Holocaust denier".
Mr Irving told the court that Sir John had, in the past, recommended his book Hitler's War to students of the Second World War. Sir John told the court that he had recommended two books, Mr Irving's and another, Struggle for Europe, by Chester Wilmot. He said: "Together they gave Hitler's side and the Allies' side."
That did not mean, he said, that he endorsed the opinions in Mr Irving's book. Sir John said: "I read Hitler's War very carefully at the weekend. I continue to think it is perverse in the proposal that Hitler couldn't have known until October 1943 what was going on with the Jewish population in Europe and many other minority groups as well."
Mr Irving, 62, who is representing himself, said he had called Sir John as a witness to his reputation. But Sir John had been unwilling to attend unless summoned.
Sir John, who had never met or corresponded with Mr Irving, said he admired Hitler's War in what it had to say on the subject he was most interested in as a military historian - how Hitler conducted military operations. He said: "That sort of history interests me. It does not mean I endorse your opinions beyond that."
Explaining his reluctance to give evidence, Sir John said: "It seemed to me this was going to be a very contentious case and one is easily misunderstood in discussions of this dreadful episode. I did not wish to put myself in a position where I might be misunderstood."
Mr Irving asked: "You were apprehensive about giving evidence on my behalf?" Sir John replied: "But I am not giving evidence on your behalf, but under subpoena."
Mr Irving claims libel damages over Prof Lipstadt's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he claims has generated hatred against him. The defendants have accused him of being a liar and a falsifier of history.
Mr Irving believes that the killing of the Jews was organised by Heinrich Himmler, but accepts that after 1943 Hitler had no excuse for not knowing about it.
Source: The Daily Telegraph, Feb. 8, 2000
David Irving comments: "This article is a travesty of the evidence which Sir John Keegan actually gave." [End quote from Irving]
What Historian Keegan Wrote About Irving
"The role of leadership in the Second World War invests biography with particular importance... The most valuable of books in this category, however, in my view, is one that has been called "the autobiography Hitler did not write" -- David Irving's Hitler's War. Irving is a controversial figure, an Englishman who has identified with the German war experience to a remarkable degree, who has offered a cash award to anyone producing written evidence of Hitler's authorisation of the "Final Solution," and who currently champions extreme right-wing politics in Europe. Nevertheless, he is a historian of formidable powers, having worked in all the major German archives, discovered important deposits of papers himself, and interviewed many of the survivors of their families and intimates...No historian of the Second World War can afford to ignore Irving..."
Source: John Keegan, The Battle for History: Refighting World War Two (Hutchinson, London: 1996)
"Holocaust Expert" is Taken Down a Peg
The American Professor and "Holocaust expert" Christopher Browning took the stand for Deborah Lipstadt yesterday (Feb. 8) and Mr. Irving cross-examined the professor concerning the $35,000 advance Browning was paid by the Israeli government, making Browning appear as an Israeli mercenary rather than a disinterested and objective academic.
Mr. Irving scored again when he went to the heart of the claims for the infallibility or invincibility of Jewish eyewitness testimony concerning the alleged existence of homicidal gas chambers. After establishing that on his visit to Dachau in 1990, Browning had been shown what was purported to be a gas chamber in Dachau, Irving persuaded Browning to agree that the gas chamber on display in Dachau was a fake. Mr. Irving then pressed his advantage by remarking upon the fact that numerous eyewitnesses had claimed that there was an operating homicidal gas chamber at Dachau and since there was not, this says a great deal about the supposed reliability of eyewitness acoounts.
Prof. Browning also admitted under oath that the alleged homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz on display there to tourists in 1990 were "reconstructed" and not genuine.
Mr. Irving gave evidence that Browning, in order to bolster the credibility of Nazi Officer Kurt Gerstein, a paramount "Holocaust" source, omitted insane statements by Gerstein. The discredited and demented Gerstein is one of the pillars of the oft-stated refrain that "the Nazis themselves admitted to the existence of homicidal gas chambers" in Auschwitz.
Irving had a good day in court on Monday, Feb. 7, as well. This may be why The Times (of London) published no account of the trial yesterday, Feb. 8 or today, though it had been covering the trial assiduously heretofore and giving extensive and malicious publicity to anything that would put Irving in a bad light.
Source: Keith Wilkins, Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2000
Auschwitz comes to Court No 73
Hitler, the Holocaust and the minutiae of mass murder are being re-examined daily in a libel action brought by controversial historian David Irving.
"The word 'denier' is particularly evil - it is like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile": David Irving
In the visitors' book at Auschwitz, the Jewish Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal has written: "Information ist Verteidigung" -- "Information is defence". According to his biographer Hella Pick, what he meant was that "historical truth becomes an essential deterrent to the practice of evil"
Wiesenthal's words might aptly be chalked on the door of Court No 73 in the Royal Courts of Justice, where, for the past four weeks, Auschwitz and other Holocaust horrors have been revisited daily and where arguments about their malevolent originators and expositions as to their motives fume and flare discordantly.
Yet, for many of us squeezed into the court, there are times when the sheer volume of information being exchanged seems almost a barrier to historical truth, as the Hitler historian David Irving pursues his libel action against American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Having claimed that Irving is "a liar and falsifier of history", they deny libel and plead justification.
To settle the argument -- without the help of jurors, it being thought the intricacies would daunt them -- Mr Justice Gray is obliged to graze upon the communal pastures of recorded history and scraps of paper that are capable of misleading as well as informing. He will look out for ideological partisanship as much as for scientific errancy, and be reminded from time to time that the continued influence of the past upon the present is inexorably manifested in all our destinies. Irving, asserts Richard Rampton QC, for the defendants, has made statements deliberately "designed to feed the virulent anti-Semitism still alive and kicking throughout the world".
The judge may give thought to Heinrich von Treitschke's advice: "The historian must candidly explain the moral significance of the confused facts with which he is dealing, and this is why the compelling force of a historical work subsists ever in the strong personality of the narrator."
And he will have to decide whether David Irving, 62, has been stigmatised as a mere contrarian, or may be regarded as a panegyrist of Adolf Hitler.
So stupefying is the information overload that nerves occasionally fray, and the usually unflappable judge vents his distress. "Really, this is most irritating," he exclaims on falling to locate a document concerning an order to liquidate Jews. And later: "I am still trying to find this ..." Later still: "I have tracked down the document, and there appear to be two versions in German. It is not for me to plough through these with my inadequate German. What I'm looking for is an English translation, which I think is not an unreasonable request for a document that is quite important."
Rampton gazes pinkly around him and jiggles his knee. David Irving, conducting his own case, drops his spectacles on the floor. The courtroom lapses into a three-minute reverie.
'Well," says the judge, breaking the silence and startling his interlocutors. "Am I going to be supplied with it or not?" Irving: "My Lord, I will prepare a translation of that document overnight." Stacked in teak bookshelves around the walls are nearly 400 files of information. Teak tables groan beneath the weight of further boxes, books and laptops. A large number of Jews are in the public gallery -- a veritable yarmulka archipelago in a teak sea -- listening intently to every word, many of them Holocaust information repositories in their own right.
This trial is stuffed with the minutiae of mass murder: Zyklon B pellets, racism, the operations of the Einsatzgruppe, the Nazi military mission in the Ukraine and Crimea, and the geography of a war which for many of us still seems recent, even though time has already consigned it to the last century. Irving insists he never has claimed that the Holocaust did not occur, but he questions the number of Jewish dead (usually estimated at six million) and the manner of their destruction. He has suggested that British intelligence spread the "propaganda story" about Germans systematically using gas chambers to kill millions of Jews and other "undesirables". And he claims to be a victim of a "global conspiracy", led by Jews, of which Professor Lipstadt is, he says, a major part.
It is a case that should interest sociologists as much as it does historians. One finds traces of the mind-set of Middle England as well as Mittel Europe where, to this day, xenophobia determines caste and fuels politics. During the giving of evidence and in cross-examination, I pick up little sighs and gasps from the gallery and ominous pleasantries from the well of the court as adversaries rake over the smouldering past for what they call the "smoking gun" -- an order signed by Adolf Hitler himself for the liquidation of the Jews. Since this has failed to turn up -- and seems unlikely to do so -- the dispute revolves around "circumstantial evidence", "inference", "context" "atmosphere", Hitler's speeches, Himmler's diary, Heydrich's communications, Eichmann's testimony, Britain's intercepts, and so on.
Grotesqueries are matched by bizarreries. The words "deny" and "denier" are uttered often. Irving says he intends to show that "far from being a Holocaust denier", he had repeatedly drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust. Early in the proceedings, a line from Goethe spins into mind:
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint -- "I am the spirit that ever denies" -- as Mephistopheles declares when Faust demands his name.
"The word 'denier' is particularly evil," Irving says, 'because no person in full command of his mental faculties, and with even the slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two, can deny that the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae ... It is a poison to which there is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same; for the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile ... It is a verbal Yellow Star."
One morning Irving draws the judge's attention to a report that the German government has asked for his extradition over a statement years ago that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a fake. "I mention this in case this end of the bench should suddenly be empty." Judicial eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly as the historian says he has written to Jack Straw, warning him that if the Home Office tried to serve a warrant on him he would prosecute the Home Office for assault.
At one point, Irving calls an American witness, Kevin MacDonald, to give evidence on his behalf. MacDonald, professor of psychology at California State University and an author of books on Judaism and anti-Semitism, is asked by Irving:
"Do you consider me to be an anti-Semite?"
MacDonald: "I do not consider you to be an anti-Semite. I have had quite a few discussions with you and you almost never mentioned Jews, never in the general negative way."
Next day, however, Rampton questions Irving on his "utterances both in public and private on the subject of Jews, blacks, etcetera", and reads out a ditty which he says Irving sang to his nine-month-old daughter while walking past mixed-race children in 1994. The QC reads out the lines, extracted from the historian's diary:
"I am a baby Aryan / Not Jewish or sectarian / I have no plans to marry an / Ape or Rastafarian."
Irving says he doesn't think it anti-Semitic or racist. Rampton: "The poor little child is being taught a racist ditty by her perverted racist father?"
Irving: "I am not a racist." Disclosure of the "baby Aryan" ditty has an unexpected consequence. Four days later, an emotional Irving complains to Mr Justice Gray that sections of the media have declared open season on him. "The principal of the school attended by my little girl -- the ballet school ..." He pauses, lowers his head, does not finish the sentence. He refers to "waves of hostility affecting this court".
The judge regards him sympathetically. "As long as you can carry on ... The newspapers don't have the last word." No one is likely to have the last word. As another American academic, Professor Christopher Browning, observes under Irving's questioning: "There is no last chapter."
Irving has a dry sense of humour, which sometimes serves him well and sometimes not. In one exchange over the name of a German adjutant on a document, Browning says: "I am not as familiar as you are with the initials of adjutants. I defer to you on the initials .."
Irving throws an amused glance at the defence table. "Professor, I don't think Mr Rampton would wish you to defer to me on anything." A ripple of laughter runs through the gallery. But Irving's wit assumes a blunter edge in a 1992 speech of which Rampton reminds him. In this, Irving declared: "For the time being, for a transitional period, I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, followed by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts ..."
It was, Irving explains, the kind of speech a stand-up comic might give at the end of Brighton pier. In court, however, it has lost its hilarity.
Similarly, one feels a chill in court as Rampton recalls a Canadian audience in Calgary laughing when Irving told them in 1991 that "more people died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz", and that he had referred to "Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars" as "A-S-S-H-O-L-S".
To this the supplicant historian replies: "I have the utmost sympathy for people who genuinely suffered the torments and horrors of Auschwitz and the other camps ... But spurious survivors who tried to cash in and say they too were there -- I have the greatest contempt for these people trying to climb on the Holocaust bandwagon."
Irving clearly is endowed with extraordinary critical insight. His contentious book, Hitler's War, shows a literary style that is often vivid, attractive and lucid. But even those who decline to demonise him say he lacks the power of an elementally great and continually growing individuality. In interviews he has described himself as "stubborn". He seems able to live with much of the obloquy surrounding him as a dissentient chronicler.
In this, curiously enough, his experience resembles that of Simon Wiesenthal who, according to his biographer, was to his detractors "an egomaniac who has lost sight of honesty and straightforward action", and whose writings had been accepted only with great reluctance by academics as "major contributions to Holocaust literature".
However, Wiesenthal's reputation was more than buoyed up by admirers, among them an American ambassador to Austria who defined the Nazi-hunter as "raw goodness crushing raw evil". From the tone of some of the High Court exchanges, it is clear that the defence sees itself as embarked on defining Irving as quite the reverse.
Source: The Evening Standard, February 11, 2000
Holocaust Historian Denies 'Uncritical Approach'
Historian David Irving today, Feb. 14, rejected an accusation that he placed a faith in the reliability of oral testimony given to him by Hitler's former aides that was "almost entirely uncritical".
The author, who denies distorting history to exonerate Hitler, told the Holocaust libel trial at the High Court that on "numerous occasions" he had persuaded those he interviewed "to reveal to me matters which were against their interest or against that of Hitler" and had not concealed that information.
Mr Irving, who is representing himself in his damages action at London's Law Courts over a claim that he is a "Holocaust denier", was answering one of the criticisms of him contained in a 740-page report before the court by top academic Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University.
Cross-examining Professor Evans, who has been called as an expert for the defence by author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, Mr Irving put to the witness that he was accusing him of "gullibility in falling for what they told me".
Professor Evans, who says he does not regard Mr Irving as a "reputable historian", replied: "I wouldn't accuse you of being gullible Mr Irving." In his report, Professor Evans states that Mr Irving makes "massive use of oral testimony" and, in particular, had over the years "interviewed a large number of Hitler's former aides and other leading former Nazis, and he places, as this report will demonstrate repeatedly and in detail, a faith in the reliability of their testimony that is almost entirely uncritical".
It was in the interest of former Nazis of all kinds, he wrote: "to deny all knowledge of, let alone participation in, the crimes of Nazism, including the extermination of the Jews".
Professor Evans said that if they had an incentive to avoid implicating themselves before a court: "they had a motive for persuading Irving to be their mouthpiece in continuing their personal quest for public exculpation at a later date".
He added: "Their testimony has to be subjected to particularly searching critical scrutiny. The need for a critical attitude is borne out by the evidence of the memoirs that many of them published - self-serving, mendacious, dishonest and designed to minimise their own involvement in the crimes of Nazism.
"This report will examine many examples of this kind of evidence, much of it relied on by Irving in an entirely uncritical way."
Mr Irving claimed that Professor Evans had made: "an over-hasty rush to judgment on me which is not borne out by the evidence".
Professor Evans said he did not deny the fact that Mr Irving had obtained "a great deal of material" which others had not, and that his interviews with former members of Hitler's staff "have contributed in some way to historical knowledge".
Source: Press Association Newsfile, February 14, 2000
Michael A. Hoffman II comments: This line of inquiry (above) is quite humorous. On the one hand we have a band of media-certified saints and martyrs of the universe (the so-called "Holocaust Survivors") who, if any historian dares to be anything but uncritical toward-- having complete faith in their testimony--he or she will be branded an anti-semite or worse.
Many of these camp "Survivors" are "self-serving, mendacious, dishonest" etc. but Lipstadt will call any historian a "holocaust-denier" who exhibits skepticism toward the "oral testimony" of these Jewish persons.
On the other hand, we have German eyewitnesses Irving has interviewed. Suddenly, in their case, every weapon in the arsenal of investigative reporting is incumbent upon a historian, lest he or she be condemned for not being skeptical enough toward these German persons.
The implicit anti-German racism in the equation tends to indicate that much of the media, the governments of the West and professorcrats like Lipstadt are still fighting WWII. Hostilities have not ended, passions have not cooled and objectivity is still not possible -- and won't be -- until German and Jewish testimonies are accorded the same treatment.
Holocaust Denial Trial: Do We Care?
With historical truth at stake, little interest found in landmark libel case in London. The plaintiff is British, a historian of World War II who has asserted that Jewish claims of genocide by the Nazis are exaggerated, that the Auschwitz gas chambers were built after the war by the Polish government as a tourist attraction, that Adolf Hitler did not become aware of the full extent of the Final Solution until 1943.
The defendant is American, a scholar and leading authority on Holocaust denial. At stake in the international trial, now entering its sixth week in London's Royal Courts of Justice, may be the historical veracity, at least in some people's minds, of the Shoah.
But David Irving vs. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt -- probably the most extensive judicial examination of the Holocaust period since the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel nearly 40 years ago -- has not captured the interest of the Jewish community, even of Holocaust survivors, in England, Israel or abroad.
A few British Jews come to court daily to watch the libel case brought by Irving, the historian who claims his career was ruined by Lipstadt, says Douglas Davis, a journalist who covers the trial for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But, he says, "There's been no other sign of interest."
"Only the serious newspapers" in Israel are providing thorough reports on the trial, and most readers don't seem to care, says Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "In Israel people are not that scared of Holocaust denial, they're not that conscious of Holocaust denial."
Among Holocaust survivors in this country, as well, "there's not so much interest," says Benjamin Meed, founder of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. "The average survivor knows what happened" during the war, and thinks, "How can you deny what happened?"
Irving, 61, the author of 30 books and an acknowledged expert on Germany during the war, says Lipstadt is part of a "global Jewish conspiracy" determined to blacken his professional reputation. Lipstadt, 52, holds the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
Irving is representing himself and is seeking an unspecified amount of damages. Under British law, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Lipstadt, who in her 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" (Penguin Books) called Irving a "Hitler partisan," must show that Irving deliberately distorted events in his writings. A judge, with no jury, will rule on the case.
A verdict in favor of Irving -- unlikely, according to many prominent members of the American Jewish community -- would provide ammunition for the Holocaust denial movement, sometimes called Holocaust revisionism, which calls Jewish losses in the war widely exaggerated.
The case marks "the second stage of Holocaust trials," Zuroff says. "If, in the past, we have been dealing with the perpetrators of the Holocaust, we are now dealing with the challenges to the historical record."
As novelist Cynthia Ozick notes, the trial comes during "a period of denial of the atrocity." An official Syrian newspaper recently accused Israel of "invent[ing] stories regarding the Nazi Holocaust" to improve its bargaining position in Middle East peace negotiations. And the British government announced last month that it is deferring plans to outlaw Holocaust denial in order to ensure that free speech is not "unduly restricted."
Is "The Holocaust on Trial?" asks a cover story about Irving vs. Lipstadt in the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly. No, say authorities on the Holocaust. But the trial, which is expected to last three months, provides an opportunity to discredit the deniers.
"This is not the first trial involving a denier," says Raul Hilberg, a retired history professor at the University of Vermont whose 1961 book, "The Destruction of European Jews," was among the first scholarly examinations of the subject in the U.S. "The trial won't change anything. There's no winning here. It doesn't add a visible iota to the general perception of what happened."
Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, said at the trial that Irving has no right to call himself a historian. He cited "distortions and manipulations" he found in Irving's works.
Under cross-examination, Irving retracted an earlier statement that the Nazis had used sealed gas trucks "on a very limited scale to experiment. He also acknowledged that at least 90,000 Jews were killed in that way, according to Nazi records.
"In the intellectual world he has been thoroughly discredited," says Michael Berenbaum, founding project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He calls the trial "an opportunity to learn more about the Shoah ...to answer Irving with great scholarship."
"If Irving wins, does that mean the Holocaust did not take place?" asks Berenbaum. "Of course not. The Shoah is not on trial. It just means that in one legal preceding [Irving] prevailed."
With an Irving loss, he says, "essentially denial has been shown to be shown as absolutely false by a different test -- the test of judicial accuracy.
"Irving is different" than most leaders of the denial movement, who have questionable academic credentials, Berenbaum says. "He really knows [his subject]. Irving has studied the documents. One must assume that the mistakes he makes are deliberate rather than based on ignorance."
Irving, who calls himself a "laissez-faire liberal" but not an anti-Semite, formerly gave frequent speeches before neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups in Germany and Austria, countries from which he is now barred. He is also banned from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
He has been quoted as doubting accounts of Auschwitz ("baloney ... a legend") and the Anne Frank dairy ("a forgery"). He has accused one Auschwitz survivor of fabricating the tattooed number on his arm.
During the trial, Irving labeled anti-Semitism "a recurring malaise in society," and stated, "There must be some reason why anti-Semitic groups break out like some kind of epidemic."
Yehuda Bauer, director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, calls the Irving trial "very important." "It may become one of the classics in Holocaust awareness," he says. " It presents for the first time a direct confrontation with a denial of facts regarding the Holocaust in front of the court. There was never a trial of this kind." Past trials in the United States and overseas, particularly of accused war criminals, have focused on limited aspects of the Holocaust experience.
"It's really astounding," Ozick says, that the Irving trial has not captured Jewish interest. "I think it is as important for this period as the Eichmann trial was for its period. It will show that there is indeed a historical record," she says. "At stake is the truth -- the truth that is being lost and undermined and forgotten."
For Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist and professor of human rights at Fordham University, a trial that examines the veracity of the Holocaust risks bruising the sensitivities of Holocaust survivors, as well as historical truth. "Particularly while survivors are alive, these types of [proceedings] are an outrage," Rosenbaum says. "We are all harmed when we have to re-evaluate the essential tenets of what the Holocaust is about. It makes a huge difference" to the survivors. "You can't tell a rape victim, `You weren't raped.' It's grotesque for survivors to hear this."
Source: Jewish Week, Feb. 18, 2000
Hoffman comments on the preceding article: If the Jewish history of WWII is written as badly as this article from "Jewish Week," then there is plenty to question and doubt. I love Berenbaum's remark that Irving "really knows" his stuff, i.e the history of the Second World War, so, if Irving is skeptical of Jewish accounts of gassings etc., it's because he's lying, not ignorant. Such arrogance! You would think gassing was a dogma from the medieval Papacy. If you question any detail, you're a liar at best. These Jewish intellectuals engage in no self-reflection whatever. They have the true belief of the religious fanatic and they penalize others who don't share their zealotry.
The details of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, other than one admission from Irving about a casualty figure, are not even discussed in the preceding report. It is all emotion and pontificating. Using their Newspeak "Holocaust" word they confuse the issue, suggesting that questions about the existence of homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz are tantamount to saying there are no Jewish "survivors" or they all are liars. Jewish survivors of World War Two? Yes, of course! Jewish "survivors of the Holocaust"? Well, what precisely does that neologism mean in this context--anything the Jewish partisans say it means, including having "survived" gas chambers in Auschwitz?
As for Jewish or "Israeli" non-interest in the trial, that claim is preposterous. They are obsessed with this issue. There has been a reduction in media attention to the trial because Irving has conducted himself well and certainly proved he is a "credible historian" --however controverial -- even if he can't get credit from the main arbiters of what is, effectively, the theology of Holocaustianity.
I enjoyed seeing Raul Hilberg brought into this--the same Hilberg who got his clock cleaned at the Zundel trial in 1985 (see my book, "The Great Holocaust Trial"); when Hilberg admitted that there is no scientific evidence for gassings.
Fianlly, if Jewish eyewitnesses are so sacrosanct and infallible, how about German eyewitnesses? Many German witnesses like Thies Christophersen said they saw no gassings in Auschwitz. The ever-present racist supposition is that Jewish witnesses are always truthful, and those Germans who were also in Auschwitz and contradict them, must be liars. Am I the only one who discerns the madness in that equation?
Can we at least support John Milton's standard from the year 1644 (!)--that anyone has the right to question and investigate anything, including even the claims and reports of The Holy People themselves? If this is a standard we in the year 2000 can finally bring ourselves to support, then perhaps the Irving trial can be discussed from the point of view of the transcript and the day to day testimony, rather than recycling the predictable squeals of outrage from Jewish chauvinists who, like any imperial personality, fear any opposition and can't tolerate the least dissent from their sacred doctrines.
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