[images and captions added by this website] Boulder, Colorado, Thursday, September 9, 2004   Camera Talbott Holocaust denier gets help from CU DAVID Irving, one of the world's most notorious Holocaust deniers, will speak at the University of Colorado on Friday. Afterwards, he'll sign and sell copies of his pro-Nazi, Hitler-happy books. Mandatory student fees will fund his police protection. Lovely. Last Thursday, the CU Student Union Representative Council (composed of at-large representatives), approved a bill allocating more than $400 for police protection for Irving, who is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. Friday in Hellems Hall. Irving is being brought to campus by a student group calling itself Student Advocates for Free Expression. The group's leader, who identifies himself as Joshua McNair, told student legislators that SAFE has three members. The CU directory lists a Joshua McNair as a sophomore in English, but he didn't respond to an e-mail, and his phone number is disconnected. But on his Web site, http://studentadvocates.org, McNair praises "famed British historian David Irving." When the site is not extolling neo-Nazi David Duke or white-supremacist William Pierce, it criticizes CU student lawmakers: "Though the more hateful members were able to force my budget into a compromise in which they killed all funding for advertising, our request for police protection (for Irving) remained intact." McNair continues: "The politically correct can only beat us by shutting us up; if we're truly allowed equal expression, they know they'd be in hot water. They know that the facts that our future speakers and I will present to you will be just that -- facts." Facts are indeed stubborn things. They foiled Irving's lawsuit against a historian who labeled him a Holocaust denier, a "Hitler partisan wearing blinkers." In that case, credible historians noted that Irving "misstates, misquotes, falsifies statistics, falsely attributes conclusions to reliable sources, relies on books and sources that directly contradict his arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the author's objectives, manipulates documents to serve his own purposes, skews documents and misrepresents data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions." A British court agreed, finding that Irving was not only a Holocaust denier but also anti-Semitic and generally racist. CU student legislators passed the bill funding Irving's speech after two separate readings. On the first reading, before any of the legislators knew who Irving was, the funding bill passed without comment. In the intervening week, however, the students did their homework. And some balked. Eugene Pearson, legislative council president, researched Irving before the council had its final debate. "I found out and disseminated to (the) council the fact that he is a Holocaust denier," Pearson said Tuesday. Pearson has visited the National Holocaust Museum and peered into the furnaces at Dachau, and he unequivocally condemns the "annihilation that was wrought by the Nazi party during the Holocaust." But the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public allocations to student groups should be "content neutral." And Pearson believes the council was obliged to place the "right of free speech ahead of an obligation and commitment to the memory of the Holocaust." Pearson and his colleagues mean well. Let's grant them that. But nothing in the First Amendment requires that public money -- including student fees -- subsidize anyone's public lecture. And the Constitution certainly doesn't require that public money help a declared anti-Semite sell his noxious, book-length lies. The fact is, David Irving has the right to speak his mind completely irrespective of whether students pay for his personal protection. Paul Shankman, a professor of anthropology at CU who teaches a course on the Holocaust, is astonished and dismayed by Irving's appearance. "He wears these very nice suits. He's very slick and well-spoken. And he seems to be a perfectly reasonable guy, until you listen to him." Shankman adds, "Unlike the usual denier crackpots, this guy is a poster boy for Holocaust deniers." In other words, David Irving is perhaps most able to cause doubt about a non-debatable fact, the existence of a singular crime against humanity. With the help of CU student fees and under the ruse of open debate, Irving will assail truth itself. Brilliant. Here's a question: If the student lawmakers had been asked to fund a speech that argued that slavery never existed in the American South, would they open the till and hoist the banner of free speech? I don't think so. Reach Clint Talbott at (303) 473-1367 or talbottc@dailycamera.com     Controversial speaker coming to Colorado University David Irving's speaking tour | Details of Boulder function, Sept 10, 2004 Jewish attempts to stop him speaking in New Zealand Sept 2004 Origins of anti-Semitism (dossier)

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