November 4, 1993
Atlanta, Georgia

Left Huntsville 12 noon exactly, arrived at Atlanta, Decatur, DeKalb county courthouse at 5:30 p.m. in pouring rain; unloaded books into the courthouse in the pouring rain.

Sam said that the "traditionals" [traditional enemies of free speech] had tried to ban today's meeting, but he had obtained a Court Order from a Judge O'Kelley overruling the ban. The meeting went ahead, around sixty present, good mood (though it would have been bigger but for the rain, and if the radio interview this morning had gone ahead.)

THEN read these ... (and decide who is lying)

July 26, 1994
London

Faxed this letter to The Australian:

I see from Frank Devine (The Australian, Jul.25) that my old antagonist Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. professor of international relations (not history), has been allowed into Australia and is currently touring the land promoting the Holocaust and denigrating historians who differ as "Holocaust deniers" (an odious phrase that she herself invented).

Among other things, she states that I have a portrait of Adolf Hitler above my desk -- a weird and untrue allegation first made by Moscow's Izvestia in 1982 (not that I am suggesting that that is her source).

She and her ilk have a strange idea of historical debates: it consists of defaming from a safe distance (in this case, 12,000 miles) and refusing to debate face to face in the traditional manner.

I spoke in her home town of Atlanta, Georgia, at the old courthouse, on November 4 last year: challenged to share a debating platform with me, she refused, and fled to Boston Massachusetts. I wonder who has paid her surely not modest air fares to, and around, Australia; I strongly suspect it is the same gentlemen who have gone to such lengths to keep me out.

On August 9, 1994 The Australian printed Lipstadt's untruthful response:

Not fleeing from David Irving DAVID Irving's letter (letters, 3/8), is full of mistakes and misinformation about me and my situation. Allow me to enumerate. 1. I am a member of the Religion and History Departments at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. My courses are taken by history students. I supervise PhD students in the departments. I have never been a Professor of International Relations. Irving's claims are simply false on this point. 2. I did not create the phrase "Holocaust deniers". The phrase does, however, precisely define the efforts of David Irving. 3. Irving did not lecture at the old courthouse in Atlanta. He tried to hold a night-time rally on the steps of a courthouse in an Atlanta suburb. Virtually no one except a few neo-Nazis and deniers showed up, prompting the question, "If you hold a rally and no one comes, can it even be called a rally?" 4. On the day of the so-called rally, one of Irving's fellow deniers from Alabama showed up at my office to challenge me to appear. I had left that morning for Boston in order to fulfil a long-standing commitment to teach a history seminar. My ticket had been bought a month earlier. This hardly fulfils David Irving's wild claim that I "fled." If David Irving plays so fast and loose with contemporary information. Is it any wonder that few historians trust him to deal accurately with the facts of the Holocaust? DEBORAH LIPSTADT Department of Religion Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, USA

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