The woman who defended history - article in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Columnist Dennis Roddy discusses Irving vs Lipstadt in today's edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Here are some excerpts:

The woman who defended history

Sunday, May 29, 2005
By Dennis Roddy

British libel court is war unto the knife. Loser pays all. David Irving set out to demolish Deborah Lipstadt. One year after the trial, Irving's wife and daughter wept on a curbside as liquidators seized their house, its contents, Irving's library. By the time Irving got home, he discovered that the suit he was wearing was the only one he now owned.

"They took everything. They took my entire research archive of 35 years," Irving said. "I find it increasingly difficult to be good-humored about it."

The great irony here is that Irving was the plaintiff. He was out to destroy Lipstadt, an American historian, for criticizing his increasingly implausible suggestions about the Holocaust.

For decades, Irving frightened off his worst critics with a belligerent certainty that made him a hero to the Holocaust denial crowd, even as he protested he was not part of it. [...]

[...]

When he denied that Auschwitz had gas chambers for killing Jews, Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history, numbered him among Holocaust deniers in her 1993 book on the subject. When it was published in Britain, where libel law essentially holds a defendant guilty until proven otherwise, Irving went after her with a flair that attracted the attention of a world that quickly dubbed it "The Holocaust on Trial."

Lipstadt didn't simply win her case. She basically brought down the one historian who lent any measure of legitimacy to Holocaust denial. She comes to Pittsburgh on June 8 as keynote speaker for the American Jewish Committee's annual meeting. Holocaust survivors are constantly thanking her for saving their history, and this flummoxes her.

"I tell them, 'Wait a minute, your history would have been fine. It's not so fragile that this one guy can destroy it,' " she said.

That's hard to say. The tyranny of the clock is taking away the eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. A shocking number of people are prepared to suggest that it is possible 6 million Jews were not murdered. When C-Span, the cable public affairs network, made plans to carry a Lipstadt speech they decided to balance it with an appearance by Irving, as if there is "another side" to the near annihilation of Europe's Jews. History, in this case, needs to be saved.

[...]

When Irving sued her, Lipstadt was infuriated. Here was a man who had spoken at the Institute for Historical Review, a blatantly anti-Semitic assortment of pseudo-scholars in California. Irving's speeches in the Cleveland area were booked by Erich Gliebe, currently head of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Irving testified on behalf of Ernst Zundel, the Canadian co-author of "The Hitler We Loved and Why." This guy was suing her for defamation.

Lipstadt thinks she knows why.

"First of all, I'm a woman, and the guy is a misogynist. Second of all, I'm an American. I was far away. Maybe he thought I wouldn't take it seriously. And third of all and most importantly, I am a Jew. I am strongly identified with the Jewish community and this was his way of going after the 'traditional enemies of truth,' as he kept calling them. This guy is a bully. This guy is really a bully. He's used to getting away with it."

Irving does, indeed, have a rough streak going through him. When I wrote a column about the trial five years ago, he posted it on his Web site with an instant link for readers to send me their thoughts. The kindest read, "You are a communist jew pimp."

The 10-week trial, in which Irving acted as his own lawyer, ripped away the veneer of scholarship he had applied in careful coats starting with his first book, a devastating, though now numerically suspect, account of the allied bombing of Dresden [...]

[...]

By trial's end Irving had been cornered as a racist, an anti-Semite, a sloppy historian, a keeper of company with the jackboot-and-suspenders crowd. He lost everything: his court action, his reputation, his home, the very couch in his living room.

"He never paid me a penny," Lipstadt says today. Irving kept things tied up fairly skillfully. He was declared insolvent and, after three years, he's now untouchable, though starting over at this late date is likely to be difficult.

Both Lipstadt and Irving say they'd have gone through this mess all over again. She'd have written more harshly about him knowing now what he kept hidden in his diaries and the distortions she says have been found in virtually every one of his books. He'd had brought this action as well, he says. Why he says this, I can't tell for certain, although Lipstadt has a pretty solid theory.

"Part of it is the contrarian thing, because that is how he gets attention. If he just did ordinary scholarship he wouldn't get attention," she said. "The one thing about him is he craves attention."

So David Irving makes his own history. Some of it he writes, taking known events and giving them a backspin guaranteed to produce the craziest bounce. Some of it he generates by bringing on a libel action that destroys him so he can rise like a phoenix from the ashes of his own making. He'll be at it as long as he lives. [...]

[...]

Why else, [Irving asked regarding 9/11's Flight 93], would the seismographs that picked up the crash be four minutes off from the plane's black box. That's a four-minute gap -- time enough for someone to have shot down the plane.

I suggested that sometimes, just sometimes, clocks are set differently. The one on my kitchen wall has been in serious disagreement with the one on my microwave oven for the past 10 years. That strikes Irving as improbable.

Like Billy Pilgrim, the hero in "Slaughterhouse Five," the novel Vonnegut wrote using Irving's account of Dresden, David Irving has come unstuck in time. He's more than four minutes off. He picked a fight with a woman who neglected to be frightened.

A Great Moment in Legal History - article in N.Y. Sun

Prof. Lipstadt recently addressed participants at an American Jewish Committee celebration held in her honour. The following are some excerpts, from an article describing this event, published in today's (May 26/05) N.Y. Sun:

A Great Moment in Legal History
Knickerbocker

BY GARY SHAPIRO
May 26, 2005

Emory University Jewish Studies professor Deborah Lipstadt's triumph over Holocaust denier David Irving, who sued her and her publisher for libel in London, is "one of those great moments in legal history when truth, justice, and freedom of speech are all simultaneously served," writes lawyer Alan Dershowitz in the afterward to Ms. Lipstadt's new book, "My Day in Court With David Irving: History on Trial" (Ecco).The book describes the momentous 10-week trial in 2000 under British libel law, which (unlike its American counterpart) places the burden of proof on the defendant. At a celebration held in her honor at the American Jewish Committee this Tuesday, Ms. Lipstadt discussed the case, which stemmed from assertions made in her book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" (Free Press).

The event marked a return to New York for Ms. Lipstadt, who grew up on the Upper West Side and Far Rockaway, where her rabbis included Norman Lamm and Emanuel Rackman. AJC Executive Director David Harris, introducing the evening's program, spoke of the effort to raise money for her legal costs: "Good lawyers do not come cheap - in London or in New York." He said: "what was going to be on trial was not Deborah Lipstadt per se but the Holocaust. For generations it would shape the way people view the Holocaust. This was not her battle alone." They asked themselves "what we could do, not only as friends of Deborah but as friends of the truth."

[...]

[In discussing the case, Ms. Lipstadt] said an overall challenge was how to fight Holocaust deniers without building them up and turning them into significant people. She said she aimed to show how ridiculous Mr. Irving's arguments were, and did. She spoke of flying to London, experiencing jet lag, shuttling from her unglamorous hotel to the lawyer's office, reading documents, and even sleeping through one of the plays she attended during her stay.

Ms. Lipstadt talked about the book's themes, including the legal and forensic one: "how we managed to fight the battle." She and her legal team did not want it to be a "did-the-Holocaust-happen case." They turned the tables on Mr. Irving by making the case about what a credible historian would have done with the facts before him at the time he was writing.

[...]

The book offers insight into the intricacies of the British legal system (with its solicitors and barristers, for example), as well as unexpected incidents, such as when Mr. Irving inadvertently referred to the judge as "mein Fuhrer" instead of "my Lord." Ms. Lipstadt spoke about some tactical decisions in the case, such as going beyond the Holocaust to discuss Churchill and Dresden. The point was to show that even when he was not talking about the Jews, Mr. Irving intentionally distorted facts to show that the Nazis were not so bad. [...]

[...]

"The trial that was thrust upon her," AJC expert on anti-Semitism, Kenneth Stern, told The New York Sun, "was an important step in combating anti-Semitism." He said in the book one can learn not only "a profile in courage" but a message about fighting hatred both smartly and courageously.

"Deborah was the most reluctant author I ever published," said Adam Bellow, editor at large at Doubleday, who edited "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" when he was editorial director at the Free Press. He said she wisely chose not to debate Holocaust deniers or appear on a program with them. "People in the press think of it as the 'other side,'" he said. "But there's truth and there are lies. She ran up against the relativism of the age."

"It's not a question of choosing sides - there's really no other side," said her agent, Gary Morris, who described "History on Trial" as both a legal and personal story. Ms. Lipstadt earlier this year declined to have C-Span cover a talk of hers, since it planned to pair it with coverage of Mr. Irving. Mr. Stern told the Sun, "It's like doing a program on child-rearing and bringing in Michael Jackson as balance. It's nuts."

[...]

Ms. Lipstadt thanked Emory University not only for granting her paid leave but also, without her asking, for its president and board allocating funds to help pay her expenses in mounting her defense. She asked the audience to note how rare this kind of university support is: "cold hard cash."

Ms. Lipstadt thanked her current editor at HarperCollins, Julia Serebrinsky, as well as her former one, Mr. Bellow. Mr. Bellow told the Sun how gratifying it was to have worked with Ms. Lipstadt. He said hers was one of a handful of books he has worked on "that have really done good in the world. Most books don't do anything."

Birnbaum v. Deborah Lipstadt

Robert Birnbaum is a contributor to the online "weekday magazine" The Morning News. The editors introduce his article by noting:

Prejudice cannot be defeated entirely, but it can be fought and with courage and stamina, and with really good lawyers. Our bookish reporter in Boston Robert Birnbaum has a fascinating conversation with scholar Deborah Lipstadt about her six-year battle with Holocaust denier David Irving.

I do recommend reading the entire interview, during the course of which Birnbaum also photographed Prof. Lipstadt - and you can see the photos, too! In the meantime, here is Birnbaum's introduction to his transcription, as well as a few excerpts from their conversation:

4 May 2005 | PERSONALITIES
Birnbaum v. Deborah Lipstadt

Despite personal and familial connections (or perhaps because of such) I had, to date, not paid much attention to the pernicious movement that presumes to deny the Holocaust. This is in keeping with my conscious decision to spend as little intellectual and emotional energy as possible on lunatic fringe movements and other idiocies. Deborah Lipstadt’s six-year legal ordeal, which she compellingly narrates in History on Trial, changed that. The story begins as such: British author David Irving sued Lipstadt for libel in London after she called him a Holocaust denier and right-wing extremist in her 1994 book Denying the Holocaust.

Deborah Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and Director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. She has taught at UCLA and Occidental College in Los Angeles. She received her bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and her master’s and doctorate from Brandeis University. In addition to History on Trial and Denying the Holocaust, she is the author of Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust. She has appeared on CNN, 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Fresh Air, and The Charlie Rose Show, and is a frequent contributor to and is widely quoted in a variety of periodicals. She is currently working on a book on Jewish responses to the new anti-Semitism.

The conversation that follows ranges over a wider terrain than the riveting details of the libel trial. What seems obvious to me in the aftermath is that hateful ideologues such as David Irving, while not being defanged or declawed by intelligent and conscientious scrutiny, are less likely to be accepted as legitimate scholars. Unfortunately, even the truth seems not to derail their specious efforts. But it is not for the lack of effort by Deborah Lipstadt and others. For which we all should be grateful.

Robert Birnbaum: Is anti-Semitism a necessary condition for Holocaust denial?

Deborah Lipstadt: Yes, Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism at its heart. That’s not to say there aren’t people who are inadvertently convinced by deniers. Imagine someone who may be sitting on an airplane next to a person who is a committed Holocaust denier and they are stuck on the runway for three hours or it’s a long flight cross country and the person [eventually] is convinced by the denier. But even those people, i.e., the putative “innocent” passengers, must, in order to believe that, “Oh, the Jews invented all this and made it up”—have to have a predilection towards anti-Semitism. That have to be somewhat anti-Semitic. I am a bit wary of saying someone is “somewhat” anti-Semitic. That’s like saying someone is a little bit pregnant. But for the deniers themselves, the people who are at the core, it’s unquestionably a form of anti-Semitism.

[...]

RB: And David Irving took exception to it. [laughs] Filed suit in Britain, which is still a matter of mystery to me—how divergent the libel laws for the U.S. and the U.K. are.

DL: So absurd. Well, let me make one thing very clear. In my book, Denying the Holocaust, Irving, occupies, at most, 300 words, and probably less than that. Someone checked, and I think he is mentioned on six pages—not full pages, references. I admit that I did say some harsh things about him. I said, “He is the most dangerous of Holocaust deniers.” I said that he knows the truth and he bends it to fit his preexisting political views. And by implication, though I didn’t directly call him one, that he was an anti-Semite and a racist as well. So he sued me in England, where libel laws are a mirror image of American libel law. In the United States, if I say you libeled me, I have to prove it. In the U.K., if I say you libeled me, you have to prove you didn’t libel me. Words written are considered untrue until proven true. So if I hadn’t defended myself I would have been found guilty. I should mention that Penguin U.K., my publisher, was my co-defendant. I think that if I had not fought, that they might not have pursued the case as forcefully as they did. But they did stand by my side, to their credit.

RB: It must be noted they didn’t climb on board for the appeal.

DL: No, they left me with a $100,000 legal bill.

[...]

RB: You didn’t know British libel law then.

DL: I didn’t know British libel law but I did know that he [Irving] had called the Holocaust a legend, in a courtroom, under oath, in Canada testifying as a witness for [Holocaust denier] Ernest Zundel, who was on trial. Then in the early ‘90s, upon being asked by reporters why the Holocaust had disappeared from a recent edition of his book when it had been in the book in an earlier edition which appeared in the ‘70s, he said, “If something didn’t happen, you don’t dignify it with a footnote.” He said to a survivor who appeared with him on Australian radio, “Mrs. Altman, how much money did you make from having that number tattooed on your arm?” So I thought that in light of all the things he had said, my statement that he is a denier was no big innovation. I was not saying anything radical. But he was waiting. He was just poised to pounce. I really believe he wanted to get me.

[...]

RB: Judge Gray’s verdict is unwavering and unqualified in every way on Irving.

DL: It’s unrelenting.

RB: Irving is all the things any one could have said—and more.

DL: Much more than I said about him in my book. That’s one of the ironies of this entire case. As a result of the research we had to do to defend me, we discovered just how egregious Irving’s record is.

[...]

RB: I looked at some web site for one of those nutso, straw man groups that support Irving and they have 13 questions for you to answer, which if anyone of them [were the type of person who] had read this book, would be totally irrelevant. An amalgam of crap, slurs, half-truths posed as questions—

DL: These questions are, as you say, slurs, half-truths, and completely ridiculous. Irving keeps saying that Deborah Lipstadt took the Fifth. First of all, [laughs] there is no constitution [in Britain]. No. 2, I didn’t take the Fifth. In the United Kingdom there is no obligation for the defendant to testify. No. 3, I wrote a book, and David Irving was suing me for what I wrote. There was nothing I could add by going on the stand that was relevant to the case and, in fact, when he recently spoke in Atlanta, he said, “If Lipstadt had taken the stand, I would have asked her about views on intermarriage.” Now, what does that have to do with my calling him a Holocaust denier?

[...]

RB: Did [Irving] pay his court costs?

DL: [emphatically] No! In fact, I dropped my attempt to make him pay and now he has turned around and sued me, arguing that I should have to pay his expenses because I dropped the pursuit of him. We were in court two days ago to argue this. Each time he does this it runs up my legal bill. In the U.K., loser pays costs so, after the trial, he owed my defense fund a million and three-quarters. I paid for an independent book and document assessor who specializes in the Holocaust to go to England to assess the value of his papers. He felt that at the most they were worth $200,000 or so. We hoped to get control of them, in lieu of the cash Irving owed us, and sell them to a library or archive. But by then Irving had already run the clock up so there were $80,000 or $90,000 worth of lawyer bills and we hadn’t even gone to court. It became clear that this was a losing proposition. The lawyers’ bills would wipe out anything we would get from him. Finally, last June [2004], I said, “The trial itself was about a principle, about truth, this is about money. Leave it alone, I’m giving it up.” And I was really upset with myself even though I knew it was the right decision, from a legal and financial perspective. But he has documents that no historians have ever seen and which he should really make accessible. My actions would have made them accessible.

[...]

RB: So you were shocked that verdict was so damning?

DL: I was floored, it was so compelling. I never expected such an all-encompassing verdict. Did you see Richard Bernstein’s piece in the New York Times on the radical groups in Germany and how they are presenting themselves in a more “respectable” demeanor? I was in Germany last week, and at a press conference I said that this tactic, on the part of extremists of appearing respectable, started with Holocaust deniers. They were among the first to figure out that most people make their judgments about people based on external appearances. Therefore, if an extremist comes swaggering in to the room in high black boots with swastikas and looking like skinheads, people take one look at them and say, “Oh my God, I know what you are. And I want to have nothing to do with you.” But if the same extremists come into the room in a nice tweedy jacket, maybe with patches on the elbows and jeans or whatever, smoking a pipe, and they begin to speak rationally, people are more likely to listen. In this regard, deniers say, “Oh, I’m not an anti-Semite, I just have certain questions about the Holocaust which perplex me. And I don’t understand why Professor Lipstadt is afraid to answer those questions. I am just interested in open debate. What’s wrong with open debate?” And in Germany the far right party, the NPD, is inclined, rather than to parade in swastikas, to say, “We want to commemorate the ‘bombing Holocaust’ in Dresden. We want to give equal attention to the victims.” But what they are really doing is whitewashing the crimes of the Third Reich by engaging in immoral equivalencies.
[...]

Lipstadt Cited in Article on Holocaust Museums

Professor Lipstadt was cited in a Jerusalem Post article on Holocaust museums. Here are some excerpts:

JTA, THE JERUSALEM POST May. 4, 2005

The Holocaust is still being remembered – just not the way it used to be.

Sixty years after its end, an increasing number of cities have built architectural testimony to the Holocaust. Twenty-six cities in the United States and Canada now have Holocaust museums, and others have built monuments or established research foundations or educational centers.

Holocaust museums and memorials have shifted the nature of remembrance, moving away from the emphasis on testimony and defiance toward the teaching of tolerance and understanding, according to several Holocaust experts.

"Holocaust memorials always reflect their time. Every generation has to find its own reason for memorializing," says James Young, a professor at the University of Massachusetts and the author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Older museums marking the Holocaust, such as the original Yad Vashem, built in 1957, focused on telling the survivors' stories and conveying a "sense of hope and gratitude," Young says.

Newer memorials, such as the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, which opened in 1993, often make a self-conscious attempt to universalize messages in an attempt to make them accessible to more people, he adds.

According to Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and a consultant on the development of the Washington museum, visitors to the new museums, built roughly during the last decade, learn universal moral imperatives, such as "the importance of military ethics and of recognizing the humanity of the enemy even while undertaking action against them."

Broadening the message of the Holocaust in memorials to include the persecution of gays and lesbians during World War II or including other genocides raises some controversy.

Berenbaum worries that moving the focus away from the specific Jewish nature of the tragedy borders on "soft-core denial, by trying to call other" mass murders "Holocaust-like."

[...]

All museums want to say the Holocaust "is a terrible thing," says Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University and author of the recently published book History On Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving. If we know about it, "we have a better chance of preventing this from happening again. We are ensuring the future," she says.

[...]

The architecture of museums and memorials has changed to accompany contemporary attitudes.

Berenbaum says that the original Yad Vashem provided the first "model of an integrated institution; a museum that tells the story of the Holocaust, a research institution and archive, and an educational institution that teaches teachers and students the history of the Holocaust, its meaning and application to the new generation." When it came to the Washington museum, planners tried take a slightly different tack.

"There are corners that don't quite meet – the building is not supposed to reassure you," Young says. "It is constructed from brick and iron, a material reference to the Holocaust."

Lipstadt is pleased by the diversity of the visitors to the Washington museum, which she helped plan.

"I sit in the lobby and watch America pass by me," she says. "Every part of the country comes – the vast majority of visitors are non-Jewish."

She hopes this means that more people are getting an important message. "While it's important to know what happened, building an identity as victims is not who Jews are. A whole world of Jewish identity is lost: We should teach people to be Jews in spite of the Holocaust, not because of it. We have to teach them the good stuff, too."

History on Trial Reviewed in The Boston Globe

'Trial' digs into a Holocaust denier
By Judith L. Rakowsky, Globe Staff May 4, 2005

History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving, By Deborah E. Lipstadt, HarperCollins, 346 pp., illustrated, $25.95

The practice of media and academic programs offering microphones to Holocaust deniers for ''balance" prompted Emory University professor Deborah E. Lipstadt to write the 1993 book ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."

Polls had shown the public was not buying the anti-Semitic message, and some scholars thought it better to ignore the deniers. But she decided to chronicle the movement in hopes of shining light on the more sophisticated practitioners, such as British author David Irving, who she thought capable of sowing confusion.

Lipstadt's book devoted a few paragraphs to Irving, who calls Auschwitz ''a legend." Irving says, ''More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz."

Irving seized on Lipstadt's entries and used them to find his largest audience ever. He sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin UK, for libel, contending he was the victim of an international conspiracy to ruin his reputation.

The suit would have quickly died in US courts, where Irving would have had to prove she lied in defaming him. But British libel law required Lipstadt and the publisher to prove her words true. That is how Lipstadt and Penguin wound up making a case for gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz, and for Hitler's authorship of the ''Final Solution" to exterminate European Jewry.

Lipstadt has written a gripping account of the 10-week trial, a taut page-turner reminiscent of Jonathan Harr's ''A Civil Action," and she tightly weaves complex material through a nimble narrative.

She tells the story in strict chronology, which carries the potential for bogging down the tale in pretrial tedium. But it is that preparation phase that drives home how monumental was the trial team's task. It clearly needed money for expert analysis and raised most of the $1.5 million through businessman Leslie Wexner, head of the Limited clothing chain.

The courtroom drama quenches the American reader's thirst for the idiosyncratic details -- the wigs, robes, and Byzantine procedure. Lipstadt even writes about the luncheon conversations of the trial team, down to the vintage wine from the law-firm cellar and the crustless sandwiches.

The epic legal battle was truly a lopsided duel of evidence. Irving, in his rambling turns as inquisitor and witness, tried to argue against Nazi documents that showed Hitler had read progress reports of mobile killing squads targeting Jews, and of meticulous building plans and permits for gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz.

But while the main contest was clear cut, Lipstadt's team had a greater challenge in showing that Irving was not a bumbling scholar prone to sloppy translations and miscalculations but an ideologue intent on obfuscation and distortion. That's how the kitchen sink of evidence came in against Irving, including a ditty he sang to his infant daughter: ''I am a baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no plans to marry / An ape or Rastafarian."

Ultimately, the British judge found the evidence ''incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier."

''Irving's treatment of the historical evidence is so perverse and egregious that it is difficult to accept that it is inadvertence. . . . He has deliberately skewed the evidence to bring it in line with his political beliefs," the judge found.

But neither Lipstadt's legal triumph nor her well-written book would silence Irving, a college dropout who casts himself as a historian. Irving solicits funds on his publisher's website, where readers can order three of his World War II books, now back in print.

Ventura County Star on C-SPAN Controversy

In the April 18 issue of the Ventura County Star, columnist Beverly Kelley comments on the C-SPAN controversy. Here are some excerpts:

Some opinions don't have intellectual merit

Think about a historian specializing in slavery who, because of his ability to cite journals, transcripts and other legal documents, has acquired renown as a painstaking researcher and eminent scholar. Now imagine he reaches the conclusion that slavery never really existed and that anyone who believes otherwise is perpetrating a massive fraud.

Eventually, another historian takes a look at the first historian's research. In fact, she submits every citation to intense scrutiny. What she finds is a consistent pattern of misquotation, misinterpretation and fabrication. The second historian accuses the first, in print, of manipulating evidence "in order to reach historically untenable conclusions."

The first historian, who sues the second historian for libel, loses big time. In fact, the judge's verdict not only calls the first historian a "racist" but finds that his "falsification of the record was deliberate and ... motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence."

Hmm -- is all this just some sort of ethical "what if" game? No, Virginia, these events actually transpired -- all you have to do is substitute "the Holocaust" for "slavery." The name of the first historian is David Irving and the second is Deborah Lipstadt.

Now you have all the information you need to understand the raft of outraged phone calls, letters, and e-mail battering C-SPAN last month. It seems a producer thought she needed to "balance" Deborah Lipstadt's book interview with an appearance by the debunked Holocaust denier.

[...]

It's about time we realized that not every cockamamie opinion should be accorded equal intellectual merit. The C-SPAN debacle raises legitimate concerns -- has a journalist sought the truth if he merely cites opposing authorities? What factual backing is required for a viewpoint to make it to a "letters to the editor" page?

In a 1990 speech, Irving declared, "The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention." In 1991, he pontificated, "More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz." Irving also maintained that Adolf Hitler played no role in the Final Solution.

Holocaust deniers would have you believe that "The Diary of Anne Frank" was actually a forgery and that concentration camp gas chambers were used for delousing. With respect to genocide statistics, these folks have whittled down the generally accepted 6 million Jews to 200,000, claiming many succumbed to disease or perished at the hands of the Allies. Despite the existence of contrary evidence galore (Germans kept impeccable accounts) they allege Zionists perpetrated the Holocaust hoax to bilk Germany out of heavy-duty reparation dollars.

[...]

On his Web site, Irving argues the C-SPAN dispute is "blind censorship, that is what this country now has to fear." It might be worth noting that in "History on Trial," Lipstadt, who is Jewish, likewise opposes censorship, not just from a freedom of speech standpoint but because it might give Holocaust deniers' nonfact based vision of history a platform. She has no objection to Irving making an appearance on C-SPAN. As a matter of principle, however, she won't debate him.

"You can convince anyone of anything if you just push it at them 100 percent of the time. They may not believe it completely, but they will still use it to form opinions, especially if they have nothing else to draw on." Do you know who said that?

Charles Manson. Think about it.

-- Beverly Kelley, who writes every other Monday for The Star, is an author ("Reelpolitik" and "Reelpolitik II") and professor in the Communication Department at California Lutheran University. Her e-mail address is kelley@clunet.edu. Visit her blog spot at beverlykelley.typepad.com/my_weblog.

Evans in Claremont, CA (Apr. 18/05)

Prof. Richard Evans' Expert Witness Report was a key component of the defense arguments during the trial. As the following item from the April 15 issue of Inland Southern California's Press Enterprise notes, he will be giving a lecture on Monday:

Out & About


RICHARD EVANS, professor of modern history at Cambridge University lectures on "History, Truth and Memory: Reflections on the Irving-Lipstadt Libel Case," 12:15 p.m. Monday, Claremont McKenna College, Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, 385 E. Eighth St., Claremont, free, (909) 621-8099.

Lipstadt Speaks in Philadelphia (April 17/05)

Philadelphia's The Weekly Press has a Feature Story on Prof. Lipstadt's forthcoming appearance as the keynote speaker at Greater Philadelphia's annual memorial tribute to victims of the Holocaust:

Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia announces memorial ceremony for the six million Jewish martyrs
Featured By Harry B. Cook
Director, Philly1.com

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia is announcing the 2005 "Memorial ceremony for the six million Jewish martyrs" in Philadelphia. The community program, which is sponsored by Federation's Memorial Committee for the Six Million Jewish Martyrs of the Jewish Community Relations Council, will be held Sunday, April 17, at 1 p.m., at the Monument to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, located at 16th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The memorial ceremony is Greater Philadelphia's yearly tribute to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The theme of this year's ceremony is "60 Years Since Liberation: Remembering the Holocaust."

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and the author of "History on Trial," the story of her successful libel trial against Holocaust denier David Irving, will be this year's keynote speaker. The commemoration will include a tribute to local liberators of the concentration camps, a memorial candle-lighting ceremony, children's march and wreath-laying procession, greetings from area leaders, and musical selections by violinist Philip Kates of The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Temple Sinai Junior Choir under the direction of Cantor Stephen Freedman. Cantor Isaac Horowitz of Congregation Sons of Israel will chant the Memorial Prayer.

"History on Trial," published in 2005, is the story of Dr. Lipstadt's successful libel trial in London against David Irving, who sued her for calling him a Holocaust denier and right wing extremist. Her legal battle with Irving lasted five years. The judge ruled that Irving was a Holocaust denier, falsifier of history, racist, an anti-Semite and a liar. In July 2001, Irving's appeal of the judgment against him was resoundingly rejected.

Dr. Lipstadt has served as a historical consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and on its Memorial Council. From 1996-1999 she was a member of the U.S. State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, serving as an advisor on matters of religious persecution. She has also written "Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" (1993), the first full length study of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust, and "Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust" (1986), which addressed the issue of what the American public knew about the Holocaust and when they knew it. The recipient of numerous teaching awards and honors, Dr. Lipstadt is frequently called upon by the media as a commentator and consultant. She is a regular contributor to many newspapers in the United States and London.

In the event of rain, the ceremony will be held at Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel, 300 South 18th Street. For further information, call JCRC at 215-832-0650.
[...]

C-Span's Holocaust Denier Sinks Show

Intervention Magazine, a "webzine" on "War, Politics, Culture", has an article on the C-SPAN controversy, posted on March 25. Here are some excerpts:

C-Span's Holocaust Denier Sinks Show

When C-Span decided to "balance" a scholar's lecture at Harvard University with a confirmed liar speaking in a Georgia diner, it joined the reality TV crowd by favoring sensationalism over serious reporting.

By Frederick Sweet

More than 200 college historians nationwide had sent a petition to C-Span, protesting its plan to add a Holocaust denier to its coverage of a lecture by Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University. C-Span had planned to "balance" Lipstadt's speech with one by the British writer David Irving who argues that Hitler is not responsible for the mass murder of Europe's Jews.

"Falsifiers of history cannot 'balance' histories," said the petition, delivered to Connie Doebele, the executive producer at C-Span that had been scheduled to cover Lipstadt's Harvard lecture. The petition continued, "Falsehoods cannot 'balance' the truth," as reported in the New York Times (3/18/05).

[...]


When Lipstadt learned that the cable network had planned to include a lecture by Irving along with her remarks for "balance," she refused to give C-Span permission to tape the Harvard event. "I called the producer at C-Span and told her that this [Irving] was a man who was a Holocaust denier, and this idea of using both of us made no sense to me," Lipstadt said.

Irving Loses 2000 Libel Suit Brought Against Lipstadt

In May 2000, I met Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt in St. Louis at her lecture on Holocaust deniers after she had just returned from England, exhausted from her London trial. Lipstadt was obliged to prove that she had not libeled the Third Reich-loving writer David Irving. Asked why she had decided to go through with the trial instead of settling out of court with the Holocaust denier, she simply said, "When you face evil, you have no choice."

Irving has written Goring: A Biography, The Destruction of Dresden, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich,and Nuremberg, the Last Battle that are sympathetic to his country's World War II enemies. Indeed, in Hitler's War, Irving intimates that Hitler never ordered anyone to murder the Jews. Some sort of killing may have happened to the Jews in the fog of war ... as had happened to other civilians. But, wrote Irving, nothing close to 6-million Jews had been killed, and certainly not systematically. Irving claimed his books establish him as a "published historian."

In her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Lipstadt charged Irving with knowingly lying in his writings on the Holocaust by denying that between 1940 and 1945 six and a half million Jews had been systematically robbed and then murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices following Adolf Hitler's orders. Rather than write a rebuttal to Lipstadt's expose of his writings on Holocaust denial, Irving sued her for libel in England.

This wasn't the first time Irving used the law to shake down a detractor for money with threats of a libel suit and to gain notoriety from it. Up until Lipstadt's trial, Irving's dodge had always paid off. But this time it didn't work because the scholar defended her work.

[...]

The Court ordered Irving to pay the cost of Lipstadt's defense, reportedly running over a million dollars. During the trial, a German expert on World War II history corroborated Lipstadt's criticism that Irving had falsified the record and wrongfully denied Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" while also ridiculing the victims of the Holocaust.

The German expert charged Irving with dangerously using Germany as his "playground" for furthering his political ambitions. Irving retorted that he didn't throw bombs or harm anyone; he was merely a writer of words.

The German professor accused him of being worse than a terrorist because he "throws words" that induce others to violence. And indeed, it came out at the trial that Irving recently collaborated on editing a book by the notorious American racist, David Duke, a former high-level officer of the Ku Klux Klan.

Rebuffing C-Span's Bizarre Show

Lipstadt and many of her supporters believe that adding Irving's speech on Holocaust denial to an account of her views would be like accompanying a story on American slavery with remarks from someone who insists that slavery never happened.

"I told C-Span that I assumed that if they weren't going to tape my lecture, they also wouldn't use David Irving, but they said no, they were committed to having him on," Lipstadt told New York Times reporter Lewin. "This is a man who's said that Holocaust survivors are all liars, and that more people died in Senator Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers."

[...]

Lipstadt is a distinguished Holocaust scholar who has taken it upon herself to confront the anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers with historic truth. Irving is a British court-confirmed liar who makes a living out of selling books that distort the historic record by denying that the Holocaust ever happened. The puzzler is, why did C-Span decide to "balance" the scholar's lecture at Harvard University with that by a confirmed liar speaking in a Georgia diner?

Evidently, C-Span has joined the reality TV crowd by favoring sensationalism over serious reporting.

Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your comments to fred@interventionmag.com.

lipstadt.blogspot.com and the CSpan Saga

A number of people have contacted me asking for my reactions to one or another developments in the "CSpan Saga." I have really said all that can be said about it and don't think I will be commenting further.

We will continue to post various other people's comments about the issue, whether they agree with my position or not. Generally, we will post them without comment. [We will continue our practice of providing a brief introduction and link to the source.]

And now I am going swimming.

C-SPAN: An "Ethics Dunce"

The Ethics Scoreboard has a Dunces Corner which is "Reserved for those individuals and organizations who display a complete ignorance of ethics through their persistence in, defense of, or comfort with blatantly unethical conduct."

Here are some excerpts from the Scoreboard's assessment of C-SPAN who received top billing on the list of March 2005 Ethics Dunces:

What really puts the "Dunce" in this Ethics Dunce is a seemingly obvious truth: lies do not provide balance. The laudable objective of balance in discussing public affairs or any other controversial issue is to promote fair analysis and broad-based understanding by presenting varying and legitimate points of view on the topic at hand. Lies do not promote either. Lies foster un-fairness and misunderstanding. Is it possible that C-SPAN doesn't know this? The mind boggles.

The contention that the Holocaust occurred is not controversial, any more than the contention that the Pacific Ocean is wet or that the Confederacy lost the Civil War. Since David Irving has made a reputation by claiming the Holocaust didn't happen, there is also no controversy over his legitimacy and integrity as a serious historian: he has none. He is incapable of providing balance to Lipstadt or anyone else.

A fun parlor game could come out of this, called "C-SPAN Balance." The idea would be to find the perfect balance to anyone discussing an established fact. Let's see… [...]

[...] It is too horrible to contemplate that the executives at C-SPAN actually believe that Irving's position isn't a lie, so, with a shudder, we will put that idea aside. Instead, this Ethics Dunce should write on the blackboard a hundred, no, a thousand times:

Lies aren't balance.

Maybe it will sink in.

Neiwert on Washington Post's Trial Coverage ... and C-SPAN

Journalist David Neiwert has commented a few times on the C-SPAN controversy, and the ensuing program, and we have previously highlighted some excerpts from his blog.

Neiwert has received correspondence from T.R. Reid objecting to parts of Neiwert's commentary. In concluding his response, Neiwert notes:

[...] when it comes to covering the Michael Jackson trial, the Post so far been running nearly daily reports (mostly by Libby Copeland). That too would constitute what I think most journalists and editors see as "covering the trial." I'm sure a case can be readily made that the Jackson trial is the more newsworthy and significant of the two, but I'm not sure I want to hear it.

As Yurman has noted in my comments, there are more than a few mitigating circumstances, of course: Being a foreign-office bureau chief is usually a thankless and over-assigned affair, and reporters like Reid are always being spread thin. He also had to cover proceedings in the Augusto Pinochet trial there that winter. Much as I might not have liked the Post's choices, they were at least defensible.

What's not as defensible, I think, is the relatively thin gruel that Reid served up for BookTV's national audience -- a natural result, I think, of his not having read Lipstadt's book. [...]

Reaction to CSpan

From: Edward Queen
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 10:45 AM
To: 'booktv@c-span.org'
Subject: History on Trial

I honestly must admit that my imagination could not conceive that Book TV on C-Span2 could have acted even more irresponsibly, ignorantly, and cowardly regarding its handling of Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial than it did with its initial planning for the program. As a textbook case of management and institutional response driven by a “cover yourself” mentality this event soon will find its way into my teaching, ranking with the Japanese government’s handling of the the country’s banking collapse and the Nixon White House’s handling of Watergate. This, however, will feature as an even more as pointed example of the idiocy of such behavior, since the stakes for Book TV were so low.

The entire event would be that laughable, if it weren’t for the seriousness of the issues. From the beginning Book TV has acted in a manner that demeaned, degraded, and denied the importance of Prof. Lipstadt’s work, from its initial desire to place video David Irving and Prof. Lipstadt back to back, not to provide some illustration of Irving and his work as Book TV later claimed (a point on which both Prof. Lipstadt and Irving agree), but to provide, in Connie Doebele’s own words “balance.” (And I shall avoid undue tangent’s but why did Book TV’s program with Ward Churchill not require balance?) Book TV did this when the entire premise of Prof. Lipstadt’s book and her career is that there is nothing to balance. Irving, as the British court determined, is a liar. There is nothing to balance between truth and falsehood.

When Ms. Lipstadt pointed out this fact, Book TV did not acknowledge the idiocy of its initial perspective, but threatened Prof. Lipstadt claiming it would run Irving’s talk without her. In doing so it moved from mere idiocy to immorality. Fortunately, the appropriately pointed column of Richard Cohen in the Washington Post embarrassed Book TV sufficiently to save it from itself, albeit just barely. Rather than such a stupid undertaking, Book TV went on the offensive, putting together a program that appears to have been nothing other than a hatchet job on Prof. Lipstadt. It began by interviewing itself in the person of Connie Doebele with the simple of goal of completely misleading anyone who might be watching the program about the previous events and then featuring as their main speaker, T. R. Reid, someone who had never read the book under discussion. Every excerpt it used of Prof. Lipstadt was designed to place her in a most unfavorable light, subtly trying to imply she is a difficult person, thereby validating Book TV’s refusal to deal with her.

After receiving significant fallout from this bit of offensive persona vendetta, Book TV reverted to the tactic of every tin-horn despot that exercised control over information, it proceeded to deny it ever happened. It did this by completely pulling the programming from its website. I guess we might offer one cheer to Book TV for finally acknowledging, albeit obliquely, the egregiousness of its errors, but how about a simple apology to Prof. Lipstadt, Book TV’s viewers, and, most importantly, the victims of the Holocaust whose suffering and pain Irving has done so much to dismiss. It is time for Book TV to stop denying its errors of judgment and history. Atonement must follow, however. Invite Prof. Lipstadt on to the program apologize publicly and then let her talk about her most important book and the trial. It is never too late to rectify one’s mistakes and to learn from them.

Edward L. Queen Ph.D., J.D.
Center for Ethics
Emory University

Atlanta History Center: Tonight 7:30 p.m.

"Facing History: The Past as a Guide for the Future," at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 13, at the Atlanta History Center, 130 West Paces Ferry Rd., NW, Atlanta. The event is part of the Atlanta History Center's "Hear and Now: Hot Talk About Hot Topics" series.

Emory University's Provost Earl Lewis and Professor Deborah Lipstadt in conversation about how history shapes contemporary events.

CSpan Wipes Out History [The Saga Continues]

This matter has gotten completely bizarre. After the strange events of yesterday [see previous post], we, i.e. Hilary, decided to go back to the BookTV schedule page, to get a screen capture of their April 3 programming and we discovered that the 4:30 p.m. TimeSlot for Apr. 3 has now vanished, and the "content" of the program page has changed - again. This now reads:

After Words
A Weekly Look at Selected Book TV Programs
No program has been scheduled for this category at this time.

When I wrote yesterday that CSpan had left the content of the program page blank, I described them as having pulled an "Irving, making something that happened disappear." A friend of mine felt I had pushed the boundaries at bit too far by saying that. Now that CSpan has done this, I don't feel that way anymore. After all, there was a program, a pretty shoddy one featuring someone who had not read the book in question, but a program nonetheless.

What is particularly strange is that CSpan could have pointed to the awful program that they did on April 3rd as evidence that they tried to do the "right" thing and that I was the culprit by closing my lectures to them. Now they have obliterated that possibility.

This is the strangest thing I have ever seen [and I was on trial for 3 months for libel in a court where they wore wigs and gowns for calling a Holocaust denier a denier].

CSpan Rewrites History: Again

Hilary, who has been helping post things on this site, had noticed that the content of BookTV's page on the program is now blank - except for the dates and times.

Up until last night she could still access the RealAudio via the link we had posted but now it's dead too!

Not only that, but if you search for either "Lipstadt" or "History on Trial" on the BookTV site nothing turns up. Whereas a search for T.R. Reid yields blurbs on two programs of his books!

But wait ... there's more ... If you go to their Schedule page, the item for the 4:30 p.m. Apr. 3 timeslot reads: "General Assignment: 48 Hours of Non-Fiction Books" [which is reflected on the page above, too!] So now, according to BookTV, the Apr. 3 program didn't happen.

The only "evidence" that there *might* have been a program on Apr. 3 can be found in the C-SPAN archive, which includes one of the most unflattering pictures of me that I have ever seen. It's as if they ran through the entire clip and picked the worst shot [though this is probably how they see me] they could find.

Interview
Lipstadt/Irving Libel Trial
C-SPAN
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 186164 - 04/01/2005 - 1:09 - NS

Book TV presented a look at the 2000 libel trial between World War II writer David Irving and Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt. Dr. Lipstadt's latest book, History on Trial, examined the trial. T.R. Reid of the Washington Post, who had reported on the trial, as well as historian John Lukacs were included in the program. The program also featured video clips of past remarks by Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving.

So here is how CSpan handled this whole matter:

1. They started out by insisting on "balance." [They used the word repeatedly until a storm of criticism came raining down on their heads.]

2. They were willing to put Irving on alone. [Then they said that was just a ploy to get me to agree to being filmed and then broadcast back to back with him.]

3. They issued a disingenuous statement claiming that I had "closed" my talks to them but failing to mention why, i.e. that I would not be forced into a debate with Irving by being filmed back to back.

4. They produced a program about which they informed me, despite my efforts to make contact with them, 6 hours before broadcast.

5. They asked someone to be the anchor on the show who had not read my book and who told them he had not read the book.

6. They claimed that they never intended to put Irving and me on back to back. [Irving even said this was the case.]

7. They made it sound as if I wanted to silence Irving and failed to mention that Irving's intention was to silence me and have my book pulped.

8. And now they have rewritten history so that the show never even happened.

Classical Music aficionados comment on C-SPAN coverage

[Note to readers: For some reason the content on the BookTV program page is currently blank - except for the date and time of the program, although the RealAudio recording of the April 3 broadcast is still available (but not via the BookTV program page).]

One of the members of the Classical Music Guide Forums' "Corner Pub" viewed the program and posted her impressions on Friday:

Lipstadt/Irving Trial & Book-TV

I watched Book-TV's in-house special on what happened in the recent kerfuffle about Deborah Lipstadt's libel trial. It was very interesting to finally see the contendas and put faces to names. They had Connie Diebele standing for C-SPAN and T.R. Reid of the WashPost, who covered the trial in its tedious totality, talk about the trial. They ran clips of Lipstadt's previous appearances in which she discussed the phenomenon of holocaust denial and a couple clips of Irving talking about the trial.

Reid's judgment was that the only audience for Irving was right-wing nut cases. The C-SPAN clips of him were speaking in some restaurant in the south. It wasn't as good as the real thing, but I understand there's a transcript of the trial somewhere on the web. Lite bedtime reading, no doubt.

In a later post in the thread, the same member observed:

Very interesting about Irving's control of the docs. Reid did mention that as Irving's one saving grace, that he was very good at documentation. His description of Irving acting as his own attorney was comical, like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Solomonia on C-SPAN's broadcast

Other bloggers have commented on the April 3 program. Here is an excerpt from Solomonia:

The C-Span Lipstadt Broadcast - Updated

Of course you cannot simply toss both sides out there on equal time and leave it up to the marketplace of ideas to sort out truth from fiction in a one hour program - even without commercials. It is irresponsible to put a truth-teller up against someone who has no qualms about lying with a straight face and expect even an above-average audience to sort out the truth from fiction. First of all, neither side has the time necessary to truly craft their case, nor would most people have the attention-span to focus on it even if they did. The trial took months and the issues cannot possibly be done justice to in a one hour program. Further, most people do not have the resources at hand, nor the ability at hand to fact and context-check every claim. Holocaust-deniers are masters of twisting the truth to form wholely new creations.

Given two reasonable-sounding cases, and little but the presentations themselves to recommend either, many well-meaning people will find themselves being drawn somewhere toward the center - the fallacy of the golden mean is a particularly seductive one.

Think of some controversial issue of which you are somewhat expert but that can easily be misunderstood and the public mislead when presented by someone you know to have a fringe view. Think of some court case or some disagreement you've had in which you know you were 100% right given someone taking the time to really sit down and examine your case, and how dangerous and frustrating it is if they don't - how easily a false impression can result from too little information gleaned too casually.

Lewis Regenstein: "Deniers should not go unchallenged"

Lewis Regenstein is an Atlanta writer who also attended Irving's performance at the Landmark Diner. His view, however, is that Prof. Lipstadt could have used the BookTV program as an opportunity to debunk Irving in a widely-viewed public forum. Here are some excerpts from his account of Irving's presentation, posted April 6 on JewishPress.com:

Holocaust Deniers Should Not Go Unchallenged

A few days ago I went to see Revisionist historian David Irving, who was in Atlanta for a dinner meeting and speech (taped by cable TV’s C-SPAN). It was an interesting evening, one that has created an uproar in the press and among Jewish groups, with much of the coverage being partially inaccurate, misleading, and incomplete.

The subject was Irving’s lengthy and bitter court battle with Emory professor and Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt, who declined an invitation to appear on C-SPAN in a separate program in order to avoid any association with Irving. More than 500 historians have signed a petition asking C-SPAN not to air the Irving talk.

(Last Sunday, C-SPAN aired what may be its version of a compromise, running a program that featured short excerpts from talks by Lipstadt and Irving, with commentary by others.)

In his talk, Irving did not rant and rave and engage in hate-filled speech, but rather built his case calmly and methodically. His scholarly style was impressive; indeed, this is what makes his rhetoric so dangerous, and, unfortunately, believable to many people.

Addressing a few dozen people, Irving focused on his legal battle with Lipstadt, describing in detail how she and her lawyers had, in effect, destroyed his reputation and ruined his career.

[...]

He said he is not a “Holocaust denier” but “questions certain aspects of it.” He spoke of “the great Jewish tragedy of World War II,” and acknowledged that “unpleasant things happened to very large numbers of Jews killed at the camps.” He described mass shootings of Jews on the Eastern Front, which the British learned of contemporaneously through intercepted and decoded messages from the perpetrators. But that is about the extent of his concessions that there might have been a Holocaust.

Irving makes the most of the host of misconceptions, misunderstandings, and falsehoods that have been circulated about the Holocaust.[...]

[...]

The thing that struck me about Irving’s fascinating and skillfully delivered talk was how flimsy some of his arguments and "facts" are, and how easy it would be to refute them and discredit him.

For example, Irving`s suggestion that Hitler did not order and may not have fully known about the Holocaust is literally laughable. Just mentioning this one oddity of his repertoire — based on the lack of any known written order from Hitler, who obviously did it verbally — should be enough by itself to discredit him among many people. Kick out this one flimsy prop and the whole rotten structure collapses.

I am no expert, but I could have refuted much of what he said, in a way that would have made it clear to the audience that he was not being candid with them. In fact, I tried, successfully I hope, to do so by asking a detailed, three part question at the end which disputed the veracity of some of his statements — a pebble of truth tossed into a sea of distortions.

I hate to think of all the people who come to hear him and go away with so much misinformation left unquestioned. I understand the position taken by Jewish organizations and leaders that debating or appearing with Holocaust deniers lends them respectability and helps spread their views. But since so much of what they, and Irving, say can easily be refuted, perhaps some selective exceptions to this position should occasionally be considered, such as appearing separately on C-SPAN.

I think it is important that legitimate Holocaust historians find some appropriate way to publicly and effectively counter Irving and set the record straight. But this cannot be done if the true experts pass up opportunities to go on camera, tell the truth, and discredit the misinformation that is now being fed to audiences all over America and is going largely unchallenged.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, writing about “falsehoods and fallacies,” stated that “the remedy…is more speech, not enforced silence….”

Lipstadt and her colleagues worked hard to defeat Irving in a London court. I think they could do the same in the court of public opinion.

Lewis Regenstein is a writer in Atlanta. He can be contacted at regenstein@mindspring.com.

Lipstadt at Atlanta History Center April 13th 7:30 p.m.

ATLANTA, GA (Apr. 1) - Emory University historians Deborah Lipstadt and Earl Lewis will speak about the power of history to change our future at a forum titled "Facing History: The Past as a Guide for the Future," at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 13, at the Atlanta History Center, 130 West Paces Ferry Rd., NW, Atlanta. The event is part of the Atlanta History Center's "Hear and Now: Hot Talk About Hot Topics" series.

Reservations are required, and admission is $5 for members, $7 for non-members. Call 404-814-4150. A book signing will follow the discussion. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Lipstadt, author of the recently released book, "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving," is director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory. Lewis, the author of the award winning "To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans," is Emory's provost and Candler Professor of African-American studies. Thomas D. Hills, chief financial officer of the State of Georgia, will be moderator for the event.

Lipstadt's "History on Trial" is an account of her decisive victory in a 2000 libel trial in London against a Holocaust denier. The trial was described by London's Daily Telegraph as having "done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations." Lipstadt first gained wide recognition for her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" (1993), the first full-length study of Holocaust deniers, and the book that led to the libel trial.

Lewis, who holds degrees in psychology and history, is the author or co-author of seven books, among them, "In Their Own Interests: Race, Class and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia" (1993), "Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White" (2001) and "Defending Diversity: Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan" (2004).