[images and
captions added by this website] Saturday, March 19, 2005
Photo:
Prof Deborah Lipstadt exultant outside the Brtish
High Court in April 2000, surrounded by her lawyers
(far right, the Zionist zealot James Libson): they
spent $10m raised by her backers to defeat Mr
Irving's claim -- most of it on paying "experts" to
give opinions on his works.
C-SPAN Hit for
Plan to Air Holocaust Revisionist's
Views By Alina Tugend Special to The Times C-SPAN executives said Friday
that they had been reconsidering how to cover a new
book about a libel trial over the Holocaust since
author Deborah Lipstadt refused to appear on
the air with a British writer who has claimed that
Hitler did not order or approve the mass
execution of 6 million Jews. David
Irving writes to the O'Reilly Show
I DON'T like your show,
but you're said to be fair and balanced
(by yourselves, that is). If you promote Deborah
Lipstadt and her book attacking me, as the
LA Times reports today, I presume
that you will also allow me to defend
myself? After all she spent $10
million defending herself against my
lawsuit five years ago, when the dollar
was still big money. My contact details
are below: [...] LA
Times quote: "Lipstadt ... is scheduled to
be interviewed by Fox News Channel's Bill
O'Reilly on Monday night, and she said she
would still be "thrilled" to appear on
C-SPAN's "Book TV," without
Irving." | C-SPAN was hit with a barrage of criticism this
week when it became public that the producers of
the weekend program "Book TV" wanted to air a
lecture by David Irving along with one by
Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory
University in Atlanta. More than 200
[website: mostly
Jewish] historians nationwide signed
a petition opposing the cable network's decision to
put Irving on the program."He personifies Holocaust denial," said Harvard
legal expert Alan M. Dershowitz,
(below) who introduced Lipstadt when she
spoke to a packed room Wednesday at Harvard Hillel,
a Jewish organization associated with Harvard
University. "This is not about free
speech. He can stand on a street corner and rant
and rave, but C-SPAN ought to let him sell his
poison elsewhere. They shouldn't create a debate
where one doesn't exist." C-SPAN initially asked
Lipstadt, who is promoting her new book, "History
on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving," to
debate Irving, which she flatly rejected.
The producers then planned to show her speech at
Harvard Hillel, back to back with a lecture by
Irving, Lipstadt said. When she heard of C-SPAN's plans, Lipstadt said,
she refused them access to her speech. She said the
network told her it intended to air a lecture by
Irving that it filmed in Atlanta even if she chose
not to participate in the program. But C-SPAN said Friday, "We are still discussing
how to cover this book, and we don't have an
immediate timetable." Lipstadt's book focuses on a lawsuit
Irving brought against her in Britain, saying
she libeled him by calling him a Holocaust
denier. In 2000, a British high court dismissed the case
and branded Irving an "active Holocaust denier,"
noting that he has "persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical
evidence." It also said he was an anti-Semite, a
racist and associated with right-wing
extremists. "This is not to say there are not many things
about the Holocaust open to debate," Lipstadt said.
"But not whether it happened or not." C-SPAN, based in Washington, declined to make
representatives available to be interviewed but
issued a statement saying that its interest in
covering Irving was "to hear his plaintiff's side
of the story of the trial." On his website, Irving
says he has never said Jews did not die in the
Holocaust, "but there is much of the rest of the
'H-package' that I, as an historian, am not
prepared to swallow." He called the dispute over
C-SPAN's programming plans "blind censorship,
that is what this country now has to
fear." Rafael Medoff, director of the David
S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in
Washington, said historians organized a
petition urging C-SPAN not to air Irving's comments
about the mass killings of Jews during World War II
after Washington Post columnist Richard
Cohen wrote about the network's plans
Tuesday. "We specifically approached this as historians,"
Medoff said. "This is a matter of historical fact,
not interpretation." Medoff said that since the
first petition was sent to C-SPAN, at least 100
more historians internationally have signed on. C-SPAN has not responded to the petition, and
Medoff said he hoped that the television executives
would publicly
apologize rather than allow the controversy
to quietly disappear. "There is an important lesson learned from all
this, that historians are united in regarding
Holocaust deniers as bigots and frauds, and it is
wrong for television to give Holocaust deniers air
time," Medoff said. Lipstadt, meanwhile, is getting some benefit
from the controversy in the form of publicity about
her book. She is scheduled to be interviewed by Fox
News Channel's Bill O'Reilly on Monday
night, and she said she would still be "thrilled"
to appear on C-SPAN's "Book TV," without
Irving. -
Index to the
media scandal surrounding Prof Lipstadt's
attempt to silence C-Span and the history
debate
-
Dershowitz:
U.S. Needs Improved Torture Tactics:
"Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who
urged that terrorists be tortured in a Nov. 2001
column he wrote for the Los Angeles
Times, isn't backing away from his position
one bit in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal."
- ("THE DERSHOWITZ HOAX")
-
Information
about Mr. Dershowitz as a clumsy plagiarist:
The Dershowitz Hoax
-
Alan
Dershowitz Exposed: What if a Harvard Student
Did This?
-
"Dershowitz
Exposed Yet Again: The Critique of Pure
Cant"
|