The
interviewer ends by apologising to viewers
for having inflicted me on them. I won't
be invited there again in a hurry, I fear;
with or without my
harp.
|
January
26, 2005 (Wednesday)
London
(England) JESSICA has an interview today at [...]
School, one of London's best, so the morning starts
easy. She is very stubborn about the passport sized
photo she has to bring with her; she takes one with
her cameraphone, very poor quality, and insists on
taking that. Obstinate, pig headed. I print up a
sheet of regular passport style photos for her to
take just in case. The Guardian has an article about
Auschwitz.
The sixtieth anniversary of its liberation being
tomorrow, there is a veritable tsunami of
"Holocaust" propaganda welling up on the print
horizon. I write this reader's letter to them, Your dutiful Auschwitz report today is
headed "Vast labour and death camp killed up
to 6,000 a day." Perhaps true, but it's hard
to square this with the standard Auschwitz
folklore that has the 445,000 Jews deported from
Hungary being killed there in the first three
weeks of May 1944. And small beer compared with
the bombing holocausts in Hamburg, Dresden,
Brunswick, Darmstadt, Pforzheim, etc., where we
killed tens of thousands in the space of one or
two hours each time. "Bomber" Harris told
me once that given the choice between being
gassed, or burned alive with your family by fire
bombs, he knew which he would choose every time. Not for publication, I add: "Incidentally, a
stunning photo on your front page of the RAF plane
landing by moonlight bringing back the detainees
from Guantánamo. Not easy to get a picture
like that. Pity you did not credit the
photographer." New Jersey lawyer Gary Redish 
fulminates: "Re: Congressman Tom
Lantós -- you have some nerve calling
this holocaust-survivor a rat.
[On my front page:
Historic first: As battleship slowly sinks, rats go
aboard]. He is a fine man -- you
sink lower and lower." He concludes by asking a
jeering question, whether I am looking forward to
losing yet again in the High Court on Thursday.
Yes, these folks are the architects of their own
misfortunes. 5:38 pm: I reply, "I did not know he was part of
the all-expenses-paid junket to Auschwitz. Once a
rat, always a rat. He flees to the land of the
First Amendment, then tries to get an Act of
Congress passed banning me from setting foot in the
USA. It was thrown out. Holocaust-survivor:
Official definition (by Simon
Wiesenthal Center), 'any Jewish person who was
within the confines of German domination, including
North Africa (!), at any time from 1933 to 1945.'
My definition: 'Somebody to whom not very much harm
was actually done.'" 6:25 pm: The L. school phones, one of the other
top London establishments, they are inviting
Jessica for a scholarship interview on February 5,
as she scored in the top 20 (out of 800
applicants!). I say, "I can't conceal that it would
be very welcome to us, in our circumstances."
Jessica bursts into tears of happiness when I tell
her. She has concealed the examination strain very
well up to now. January
27, 2005 (Thursday)
London
(England)  At
7:30 a.m. I take Jessica to school. Then at midday
by taxi to the High Court. Lawyers for all parties
are there, including the comely Laura Tyler
for Professor Lipstadt. What a difference
between them: chalk and cheese. Substantially more
bearable than Anthony Julius, the old soak,
anyway. Which does not mean that she has not picked
up the wiles of her evil trade.
Her strategy becomes plain shortly, when she
claims as we go in that she has not received the
Witness Statement (affidavit) in support of my
application. I show her the Xerox copies of the
covering letters -- in fact I mailed it to her firm
Mishcon de Reya three times since December,
and none of them was returned to me, so it is plain
that they did arrive: but this is their last
resort. I am asking the Court today (a) to dismiss Deborah
Lipstadt's extraordinary and greedy
claim for all my possessions to be handed
over to her, which was dated December 2003; and(b) to make an Order for her to pay my legal
costs from that date to now, if her claim
is dismissed. Tyler makes plain both outside and in the
hearing that they will not now oppose (a), but they
are adamantly against her being ordered to pay me
anything. The humiliation of it. We are talking
many thousands of pounds -- such being the kind of
fees that lawyers and barristers now charge. The judge, a Registrar, is amiable, blinks over
his spectacles a bit, sees at once that the fifteen
minutes allotted to the case will not suffice, and
the whole shooting match is postponed to the next
available date, March 4, when we can go at each
other for two hours or more. Alas, I will be on
tour in the USA by then. However, all very
satisfactory: Lipstadt's claim is finished, and the
only matter open to debate is whether she should
pay for her folly or not. The Court shall decide,
and if we get the Order -- that is when the sport
really begins. Apart from which we have something
else up our sleeve to entertain her, when the time
comes, namely [...]. Afterwards I lunch with barrister Adrian
Davies at the Argentine steakhouse. Much
ribaldry at our enemies' expenses. (Adrian picks up
the tab, though I would willingly have paid as he
did well; but he insists). In the afternoon I pick up Jessica. She is still
on Cloud Nine, but rather peeved that her mama has
opened the letter from the school today announcing
the triumph; it is however addressed to the
parents, not to her. I would have let her open it,
but Benté has got to it first. 5:18 pm K. emails to me the Library
Journal (January 15, 2005), preliminary verdict
on Deborah Lipstadt's forthcomimg book on the great
libel trial. "History on Trial: My Day in Court
with David Irving." Originally her book was to
be titled My Struggle. That might have aroused
allegations that she was passing it off as another
great world-bestseller, of course. Library
Journal has a difficult time explaining why
their heroine refused to set foot in the witness
box (to enable me to cross-examine her on her
racist beliefs and other matters): On her lawyer's instructions, Lipstadt
(Judaic studies, Emory Univ.) did not publicly
defend herself when
Holocaust denier
David Irving sued her for libel. Now Lipstadt
breaks her silence, revealing her personal
experiences while reflecting on the trial's
relationship to questions of academic freedom
and historical veracity. In recounting how she
became interested in Holocaust studies and how
the trial disrupted her life, Lipstadt
effectively blends her story with the wider
political worlds of academic publishing and
politics. Although readers know that she was
completely vindicated, Lipstadt manages to
convey the tensions of the trial. She also gives
a touching account of the outpouring of support
she received from many quarters, not all of them
Jewish. Although excessive
detail sometimes slows the narrative,
 the
book provides significant insight into how
Holocaust deniers ply their trade. Three other
books have been published so far on the
Irving-Lipstadt trial (Richard
Evans's Lying About Hitler ,
Robert
Jan van Pelt's The Case for
Auschwitz , and D.D.
Guttenplan's History on Trial )
and belong with this insider's account in all
libraries. -- Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus
Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati So she has stolen the title of Guttenplan's
immensely readable book. A typical trick employed
by parasites like her. I reply to K.: "Please look
out for more; we intend to [...] in the UK
(don't tell anybody). Library Journal is of
course largely Jewish, shares the same offices as
Kirkus
(ditto) and Publishers Weekly. Their
reviewer effectively calls her book turgid. But in
the nicest possible way, of course."
6:20 PM by taxi to the TV studio on the Albert
Embankment. The window behind me looks out over the
Thames to Parliament and Big Ben. The programme
title is Contracorrente, ("against the
stream") and is in Italian, but there is a
simultaneous English translation. The interviewer
Corrado Formigli is polite, and -- a little
ambush evidently -- there is an academic of the
conformist sort, Professor Rusconi of Turin,
to oppose me (I suppose he has been wheeled in, as
a sop to the traditional enemy, at the last
moment). His debating technique is to shoot a variety of
epithets like Nazi, fascist, anti-Semite
(i.e. somebody whom the Jewish community dislikes),
and denier from his verbal peashooter's
armory at me. He does not like it when I draw
attention to this routine weakness of the
conformists -- this penchant for smearing, rather
than reasoned debate on the documents. But the
revisionist reliance on documents is also
something he finds offensive.  There
is some debate on whether Hitler knew what was
going on. I refer to the March 1942 Schlegelberger
document, and the October 1943 Möllhausen
/ Ribbentrop telegrams about Rome. Oops, more
documents.
The program now says it will show an eye-witness
statement, which turns out to be an over-long
interview filmed with a lady who was four years old
when shipped, she says, to Auschwitz;
she describes life there in graphic though routine
detail, the mounds of bodies, death all around,
etc. I reply, after the break, by saying nobody
will deny that Auschwitz was a place of death, but
I ask the interviewer how much he can reliably
relate of his own life when aged four. "Trauma," says Rusconi, the conformist academic,
and he wades in, as I interject, with more insults
and ad hominem remarks (the Holocaust
ennui is taking its toll on my
attentiveness, and I briefly wonder if Turin
professors even know Latin). I am asked whether I believe gas chambers
existed at Auschwitz. I point out that the only
chamber they show the tourists there was built in
1948, as the Poles
themselves admit. Why not show the tourists one
of the real ones? Professor Rusconi fudges round
that answer, and says, well the others were too
derelict, so of course they have had to be
"rebuilt." All the usual arguments are there,
Fred
Leuchter, Zündel's book on Hitler,
etc. The interviewer ends by apologising to viewers
for having inflicted me on them. I won't be invited
there again in a hurry, I fear; with or without my
harp. [Previous
Radical's Diary] 
Kirkus
review of Lipstadt's book: "It has dry patches"
- like the Sahara.
|
David Irving