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David Irving has written this article at the request of AmLaw.com to answer an article by Deborah Lipstadt

 

The Lipstadt Case

 

Putting their Money on the Table

by David Irving

 

IN MY British High Court libel action against her, Emory professor Deborah Lipstadt "took the Fifth". While I offered myself for cross examination, and was put through the hoops by Britain's most fearsome and highly paid (fee: $750,000) counsel for three weeks, she ducked out of testifying on the witness stand, even though she would have had only me facing her (I could not afford counsel). Her publisher Penguin Books Ltd also decided not to venture onto the witness stand.

She is now touring the country at $25,000 a pop, addressing audiences in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and elsewhere, on how she single-handedly "slew the dragon." And good luck to her, I say; I hear she's complaining about three months' loss of income, though Emory University, it seems, gave her three months' paid leave of absence for the trial, during which she lived in a luxury London hotel.

Of course, nobody pays me for the three years I lost preparing the trial.

I had no choice, given that Lipstadt's allies had for ten times as long spearheaded a dirty war to destroy my livelihood by putting secret pressure on my publishers like The Viking Press, St Martins Press and Doubleday Inc.

Krema II roofMy pre-trial offer to Lipstadt and her publisher (twice stated, in writing) was to end the action if they confidentially paid 500 pounds ($750) to a charity for the limbless in memory of my disabled daughter. During the trial itself I furthermore twice guaranteed to end the trial and accept defeat if they would fly to Auschwitz and bring back photographic proof of the four apertures in the flat roof of the "gas chamber" (Krema II, right) through which they said the cyanide crystals were poured in. (The roof is still there; there are no such holes).

The defense lawyers fighting this action have so far spent $6m. The Washington Post, London Jewish Chronicle and Sunday Telegraph reported that the money came from the American Jewish Committee, Steven Spielberg, and Edgar J Bronfman Jr.

Since Deborah Lipstadt has recently denied that the $6m came from "the Jewish community", we must assume she paid it herself.

There certainly seems to be a lot of money on the table in this fight against the lone historical revisionists like myself -- or on one of the tables, anyway. On the day I picked up Mr Justice Gray's damning judgment against me in my libel action against Lipstadt I also received a list of the payments made to her expert witnesses. I posted them immediately on my Internet website (www.focal.org/online).

Some people must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief to see that these mediocre British and German scholars were paid upwards of $200,000 each for their testimony: they deserve medals of valor for staying neutral between the contending parties (as sworn to by law), one of whom had given them this fortune, with prospects of more -- Prof. Richard Evans has just accepted a post on the Holocaust art theft panel -- while the other had paid them nothing.

Goebbels diary microficheThe judge found, incidentally, that there were three major lies in Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust:

  • that I sit in my office under a portrait of Adolph Hitler;
  • that I am cahoots with Louis Farrakhan and the Hizbollah leaders; and
  • that I damaged the historic glass microfiches (right) containing the Goebbels diaries in the Moscow archives and broke an agreement with them.

 

Have newspaper readers been told that Judge Gray also found that I am not "obsessed with racism", and that given that Lipstadt or her allies have done their utmost to destroy my career, it can not be termed "anti-Semitism" when I criticise them for it.

Oh, and he also referred to my record as a military historian in glowing terms: the odd thing is that, in his judgment, and because he is so advised by the "experts", I suffer a monstrous and malevolent blind spot when it comes to my criticisms of Holocaust history -- the numbers, the methods, and whether Hitler ever ordered it or not.

Well, that is what the appeal courts are for. The world's press began squirting slime over me weeks before the judgment was announced. Even the British press did so, heedless of the laws on contempt. Judge Gray, a brand-new judge, had his entire career still before him; but his seniors, the judges of the appeal courts, have theirs largely behind. It may well be that Prof. Lipstadt is in for a nasty fall, and that many of those journalists around the world who scrambled onto the bandwagon will come to regret that they did not use ink of a softer hue.

 

Lipstadt Case Index

© David Irving 2000

© Focal Point 2000  e-mail:  write to David Irving