The AJC have issued a press release on this; here is the full text of their letter to C-SPAN
March 16, 2005
Brian Lamb, Chairman and CEO
C-SPAN
400 North Capitol Street, NW, Suite 650
Washington, DC 20001
Dear Mr. Lamb:
I was stunned to learn that C-SPAN planned to show David Irving as "balance" to its proposed coverage of a lecture by Deborah Lipstadt at Harvard.
My talks have been covered a few times over the years by C-SPAN. If recollection serves me correctly, I was on twice regarding the militia movement in the mid 1990s. If someone had proposed bringing one of the racist leaders of the militia movement on as "balance," I would have surely refused. It's not that I couldn't expose their failings - but rather the appearance of a reasoned disagreement would have given them an undeserved credibility regardless of what was said. Plus, I had no desire to give them an audience.
My reluctance to appear with militia members is magnified tenfold when it comes to Holocaust deniers, about whom I have also written. Holocaust denial is not quirkiness or confusion or "another point of view," but hatred which abuses history as a vehicle. It is not about the Holocaust, but about Jews just as the medieval claim about Jews poisoning wells was about Jews, rather than about water quality.
David Irving has been found by a judge to be a pro-Nazi polemicist, a racist, an antisemite. He is a liar who twists history like a pretzel. I 'm sure you're aware of his quip about more women dying in Teddy Kennedy 's car than in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Maybe you're not aware that he used to recite ditties to his daughter, such as "I am a Baby Aryan, Not Jewish or Sectarian, I have no plans to marry an, Ape or Rastafarian." Or that he helped edit David Duke's hateful book. Or that during his trial he referred to blacks and whites as being of different "species."
C-SPAN should find better ways to use its programming than to provide an audience for such a bigot, and it certainly should not show Mr. Irving as "balance" to anyone.
Sincerely,
Ken Stern
Specialist on Antisemitism and Extremism
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2 comments:
It's really fascinating watching the power elite unite in an almost synergistic and instinctive fashion to confound those who seek to threaten it's hegemony.
Picture George Bush walking past Chertoff, head of domestic security, and Paul Wolfowitz, putative head of the world bank, whistling, "I'm your puppet". Is that bunker still open?
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