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David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt Libel Trial in London England
Part Six: Feb. 19--Feb. 29, 2000
Dates and sources are listed at the end of each respective report
The Media Blackout
Since mid-February there has been a nearly worldwide press blackout on the details of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, largely because Mr. Irving is doing well in court and the mandarins of media do not want to destabilize their own caricature of revisionists as sinister lunatics who can be easily refuted by "the experts," as well as the fact that the Arab world is responding to coverage in the Western media. Syrian and other newspapers have accused the Israelis of using the half-century old Holohoax propaganda to distract attention away from Nazi-like Israeli war crimes in Lebanon.
The "Atlanta Constitution" newspaper , based in the town where Lipstadt teaches at Emory University, began covering the trial with in-depth reports from London-based correspondent Bert Roughton, Jr. These reports were blasted off the Atlanta paper's pages under the pretext of "the combination of unseasonable snow and ice storms in America's deep south arriving simultaneously with the occasion of the Superbowl championship football game."
Well, the snow and the Superbowl are long gone and so is the coverage of Irving/Lipstadt in the pages of the "Atlanata Constitution." In response to an Atlanta reader's complaint about the dearth of coverage, an editor at the "Atlanta Constitution" stated that "the trial was not newsworthy." The editor wrote that reports by Roughton would be printed "when developments warrant coverage."
As long as Mr. Irving continues to do well in court, the promise of further coverage appears "unwarranted," since, by media definition, revisionists triumphing over their academic adversaries and vaunted "experts," is "not newsworthy." Now if Irving were being clobbered, that would be page one news.
US television has produced no stories on the trial except for one 16 minute package on CNN which had been bumped by a breaking tabloid story the previous weekend. The blackout includes all major prime time and evening news shows.
An email query was sent to the radio show of Lynn Samuels which can be heard on New York radio station WABC on Sunday evenings. "Why not," the e-mailer asked her, "give a little coverage to the libel case going on in Great Britain? The mainstream media wouldn't." Lynn Samuels replied: "There is too much about it in the media. To cover it would be to give too much publicity to the holocaust deniers."
Manchester, England's "Guardian" newspaper, one of the largest and most influential in Britain, launched a special Irving/Lipstadt website at the start of the trial, dedicated to constant coverage of the courtroom proceedings. Yet, as of Feb. 26, all coverage on the dedicated website has been frozen at February 11. There was not one iota of reporting about the trial from Feb. 11 to the 26th (Coverage was resumed on March 1).
"Reporting" on the Irving-Lipstadt trial in the establishment media of late has been limited to windy essays and opinion pieces by staff pundits which pay little heed to the details of the day to day courtroom battle. Instead, the spectacle of the trial itself is used as a platform for yet another platitudinous excerize in the reiteration of the Official Line We All Must Adopt Toward Revisionists ("How dare they dare to doubt What We All Know To Be True?" etc. ).
This kind of "journalism" is about as engaging as watching paint dry, but it keeps the mercenary media-dorks on good terms with their paymasters, even as it represents the death of thinking because its apriori premise is predicated on the death of curiosity (we're not interested in controversial research and unpopular data).
The transcripts of the trial have even been interdicted. The cone of silence has descended. The imposed silence will probably only be shattered when and if Irving makes a blunder or the judge issues a verdict against him. If things continue to go Irving's way in the courtroom, the trial itself will go the way of the memory hole. This is how the System manufactures news and history; not so much by outright lying (though mendacity plays a major part, surely) but through omission, by suppressing inconvenient facts and information which subvert indoctrination, and then consigning those facts and that information to the category of "not newsworthy."
Source: Michael A. Hoffman II
Irving warned to "mind his tongue" after clashes: Judge loses patience over 'offensive' exchanges
David Irving was admonished by Mr. Justice Gray on Monday after angry High Court exchanges with an expert witness during his libel action against American academic Deborah Lipstadt, which has entered its seventh week.
The judge intervened following protests by defence QC Richard Rampton, who accused Mr. Irving of being "offensive" and called on him to "mind his tongue," in his questioning of Cambridge historian Professor Richard Evans.
He appeared to side with Mr. Rampton, warning Mr. Irving that "lack of civility" was not the way to respond to Professor Evans's 740-page report, in which he contended that the right-wing historian's writings on Hitler and the Holocaust were "a mass of distortions and manipulations."
This followed heated debate between the witness and the plaintiff, which included lengthy arguments about the meaning of words, particularly those spoken about the Final Solution by prominent Nazis.
At one stage, Mr. Irving complained that the professor was quoting at length from his own report about the gassing of Jews in Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor.
"I had to," responded Professor Evans. "Mr. Irving [in his writing] has left so much out."
Exasperated, the judge appealed to the adversaries to "stop the argument and get on with it." However, the exchanges continued, prompting him to lament that the proceedings were 'degenerating.'"
Professor Evans told the court that despite Mr. Irving's insistence that Hitler did not know about the systematic extermination of the Jews, documents showed that his entourage did not believe this to be so.
"Do you know that I questioned them [members of Hitler's staff] myself?" Mr. Irving asked.
"You waited for them to give you the answer you wanted and then did not dig any further," Professor Evans sniped back.
Mr. Irving said he had been particularly close to Hitler's secretary, Christa Schroeder, who had "sent me from her death bed" a self-portrait drawing by Hitler, which he "kept at home."
If she had "reason to be disgruntled with my books, why would she have continued an amicable correspondence with me until the last weeks of her life?"
Moving on, the professor said that in his argument that Hitler opposed the killing of Jews, Mr. Irving had pointed to a document indicating that the dictator wanted the Jews of Rome taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where they were to be held as "hostages," rather than being liquidated by the SS.
This was "camouflage," Professor Evans asserted. "They went instead to Auschwitz and it was quite clear Hitler knew that would happen."
Mr. Irving said that around 1,000 of Rome's 8,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz and ""never seen again." But this had been a "flagrant violation" of Hitler's orders.
The professor disagreed, arguing that telegrams from Berlin did not say the Jews were not to be liquidated. Rather, the matter was left in the hands of the SS.
Source: Jewish Chronicle (London, England), Feb. 25, 2000
An Interesting Factoid
During the trial testimony for the week of Feb. 21 the court learned that Hitler's dietician, Marlene Exner, was Jewish, as was Hitler's onetime chauffeur, Emil Maurice. -M.H. II
London lawyers request Eichmann journals for Holocaust denial suit; Israeli Attorney General wants to cooperate
"...the (Israeli) attorney general attributes cardinal importance to the struggle against Holocaust denial."
Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein will hold an urgent meeting today to discuss a request from defense lawyers in a Holocaust denial defamation suit in London. The lawyers have asked the State of Israel to supply copies of writings by Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann months before his 1962 execution in Israel.
The defamation trial has been brought by controversial British historian David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, a scholar in modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University who branded Irving a "dangerous spokesman in the service of Holocaust deniers." Irving is suing Lipstadt, and Penguin Books publishers who released her volume "Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Irving alleges that Lipstadt's book caused irreparable harm to his reputation as a historian, causing him considerable financial damage.
Irving denies that millions of Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis. He claims that Hitler didn't know about the genocide until the final stages of the Second World War.
Lipstadt's defense attorney, Richard Rempton, asked Rubinstein last week for a copy of Eichmann's journal entries. These are documents written by Eichmann while imprisoned in Israel, waiting for the verdict in his trial. The documents have been kept at Israel's state archives.
Transcript copies of the Eichmann diaries are near completion; and should a decision be reached today during the attorney general's consultations to assent to the requests forwarded by Lipstadt's defense, a transcript will be dispatched urgently to London.
Legal sources estimated last night that Rubinstein is inclined to agree to Lipstadt's request, as the attorney general attributes cardinal importance to the struggle against Holocaust denial. While serving in the past as Cabinet Secretary, Rubinstein chaired a public forum which kept track of anti-Semitism around the globe.
According to the sources, Rubinstein regards the Eichmann document request as an opportunity to play a constructive part in effort to combat Holocaust denial. In recent weeks world Jewish organizations have been critical of Israel's silence during the Irving defamation trial.
The discussion today will apparently involve authorities with whom Rubinstein has consulted in the past in connection with the Eichmann documents. These include Prof. Avatar Friesal (from the state archives), Holocaust scholar Prof. Yehuda Bauer, former Supreme Court President Moshe Landau, retired Supreme Court judge Gabriel Bach (who worked with the prosecution during the Eichmann trial), and others.
The Eichmann journals divide into three parts. Eichmann devotes the first section to self-defense, distancing himself from the final solution. In the second section, entitled the "false idols," Eichmann perorates about responsibility for the murder of Jews, concluding that the Nazi regime is to blame, writing that "ultra-nationalism is the largest catastrophe known to all peoples." The third, short section involves "philosophical reflections."
Former Supreme Court Justice Bach, who read the Eichmann documents in their entirety, says that they include no special, or new, material. He says that the journals do not deny the Holocaust. They are, according to Bach, an attempt on Eichmann's part to mitigate the onus of the charges made against him. Bach adds that Eichmann made a similar effort while on the stand in the trial, so the written journals do not convey any new evidence. Fragments from the documents were published in the past in a book by Gideon Housner.
Source: Ha'aretz, February 27, 2000
In Prison Memoirs, Eichmann Called Holocaust the Biggest Crime in History
JERUSALEM (AP)-- Overseer of Nazi death camps Adolf Eichmann described the Holocaust as the biggest crime in history, but portrayed himself as only a small cog who had no choice but to follow orders, according to his prison memoirs released today by Israel.
Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who historians say played a key role in the genocide of 6 million Jews, penned the 1,300-page manuscript in the months leading up to his 1962 execution by Israel. It was titled "False Gods," an apparent reference to his claims that he had been blinded and led astray by Nazi ideology.
Although long reluctant to release the document, Israel relented so that it could be used as evidence in a pending libel suit against American university professor Deborah Lipstadt.
British historian David Irving says a book by Lipstadt maintains that he denies the Holocaust and distorts statistics. Irving said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths.
The case is being tried in a British court.
Leading Holocaust scholars in Israel have argued the document has no historic value because Eichmann distorted events to diminish his own role.
The manuscript had been locked up for nearly four decades in Israel's State Archives because Israeli leaders feared the writings could be misused by Holocaust deniers or that Eichmann's family could profit from its publication.
Several months ago, Israeli Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein agreed to give the manuscript to a German research institute, which was to eventually publish it with footnotes.
Rubinstein changed his mind and agreed to an immediate publication without restrictions after he was asked to help Lipstadt.
The document has already been forwarded to Lipstadt, and Israeli Justice Ministry spokesman Ido Baum said today he expected the memoirs to be entered as evidence in the case.
Israel hopes the memoirs will help bolster legal arguments about the killing process at the death camps. Baum said Lipstadt's attorneys were especially interested in passages where Eichmann is more forthcoming than in his trial on the workings of the camps.
In his introduction, Eichmann wrote that he witnesses the "gruesome workings of the machinery of the death machine; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork."
The Nazi leader, who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and brought to trial in Israel the next year, said the Holocaust "was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind," but immediately diminished his own role.
He said he felt a need to give his own account "because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver."
Today's publication of the document -- the State Archives handed out computer disks with the material -- was met with some criticism.
Amos Hausner, whose father, Gideon, had prosecuted Eichmann, questioned the wisdom of using the memoirs in court. "We still have many Holocaust survivors with us. They can testify on the gas chambers," said Hausner. "But instead of believing those people, we take the document of a Nazi criminal before he was executed."
Yehuda Bauer, head of the Holocaust research institute at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, said Eichmann changed his tune to win favor with his Israeli captors.
Bauer said that in an interview Eichmann granted five years before the trial, while still a free man, the Nazi leader said he regretted he hadn't taken harsher measures against the Jews and that the creation of the state of Israel was a catastrophe.
"There is nothing to be learned from this" document, Bauer told Israel army radio. "This is a demon who writes with a pitiful justification that repeats his claims in court."
In a separate section of papers released today, Eichmann gives instructions to his lawyer to pass on to a future publisher. Eichmann said he preferred an editor familiar with Bavarian idioms. He said he felt most comfortable with a light writing style, but that "respecting the nature of the subject," this was not practical.
He asked that his wife get 10 copies of the book, so she could pass them on to friends and his sons. The book should have the dedication, "At the request of my husband, with best wishes" and the remark, "That's the way it was," he wrote.
Source: NY Times. Feb. 29, 2000
Hoffman comments: In the headline chosen by the NY Times for this AP dispatch, it is stated, "Eichmann Called Holocaust the Biggest Crime in History." Of course Eichmann did nothing of the kind, since the word "holocaust," as hijacked by Jewish Big Brother, was not in use in this connection in 1962. "Holocaust" Newspeak was dictated to the media by Jewish commissars such as Elie Wiesel, and gained currency in the late 1970s (see the appendix to Orwell's book "1984" for more on Newspeak and thought control).
Prof. Lipstadt has compounded the fraud by coining, in 1993, the theological term "holocaust-denier," which has since been rather ominously adopted by almost the entire establishment media corps in America as a description for any skeptic who dares to question any aspect of the Jewish or Allied versions of WWII.
Let's look at how the AP quotes Eichmann. The AP story states:
The Nazi leader, who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and brought to trial in Israel the next year, said the Holocaust "was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind," but immediately diminished his own role. [end quote from the AP dispatch]
If Eichmann really said that, why then does the AP begin Eichmann's alleged quote AFTER the word Holocaust in the sentence? Because Eichmann did not use the word "Holocaust"! But the NY Times and the AP want us to believe that he did, as part of their anti-revisionist zealotry, and they are willing to misrepresent documents to accomplish this.
Notice too that Eichmann is called a "demon" by the Israeli chauvinist Yehuda Bauer. Is there any Israeli that any Gentile could ever call a "demon" and remain immune from criticism, blacklisting or attack? But the demonization of the Germans is an every day, unremarkable occurrence.
Lastly, this article does raise an intriguing point: why, if there are thousands of eyewitnesses to homicidal gassings still living and "mountains" of forensic evidence to attest to the reality of homicidal gassings -- why then is Prof. Lipstadt relying so heavily on a document written by a German officer while in captivity in a Jewish prison, who obviously was not at liberty to express himself freely?
Any historian worth his or her salt would combine this 1962 document written in captivity, with the documents containing revisionist sentiments which Eichmann expressed in Latin America, before he was kidnapped by the Mossad in 1960.
But objectivity like that is not Lipstadt's domain or that of the establishment media, for that matter. Politicized newspapers such as the NY Times believe they have a moral obligation to faithfully support Jewish omniscience and infallibility, or as they term it, to "combat 'holocaust denial."
Facts contrary to this political and religious crusade are of no interest to the Associated Press or the New York Times. That's why they only report Irving's lawsuit against Lipstadt from her point of view, with no reference to the huge cache of revisionist facts which Irving has given the court since the trial began January 11.
Beginning in mid-February, there has been a virtual blackout on reporting the details of these courtroom clashes, which have seen the revisionist historian acquit himself time after time. On Feb. 25 Irving noted: "The press clippings service confirms that there is however total silence in the British press during my cross-examination of the defence witnesses!"
This is also true of the American press.
Robots and religious fanatics all have one thing in common: they have no curiosity about the new, the exiciting, the truly different. Irving's case against Lipstadt has produced all of these -- elements which make life worth living, which give illumination to the mind of man, which challenge the biases and prejudices of the herd.
The Jewish zealots and their army of Gentile yes-men in the establishment media will have none of that. News doesn't interest them. Reinforcing indoctrination and received opinion, mainly by selective omission, is central to their game. This is pretty funny actually, because it comes at a time when the media is applauding Senator John McCain's attack on "Christian zealots," as an indicator of his having passed the litmus test for being "presidential."
Too bad there isn't a litmus test for being a journalist, independent of the requirements of Jewish supremacy and chauvinism.
[Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. You can buy his books, tapes and newsletters here: /cgi-bin/store/agora.cgi ]
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