Special to AR Online
Friday, July 30, 1999 Identities
of Lipstadt's courtroom experts revealed Debate-dodgers now obliged to
face questions  London,
Jul. 30, 1999 --
THIS afternoon lawyers for
Deborah Lipstadt served on British writer
David Irving the statements drafted by the
expert witnesses they propose to call for the
defence in the Libel
action he has brought in
the British High Court against Lipstadt over
remarks in her book
Denying the
Holocaust. Although the bulk
of the defence work is undertaken by leading London
law firm Mishcon de Reya, attorneys for Lipstadt's
London publishers Penguin Ltd. are relying on the
same experts.
There are few surprises in the identities of the
experts thus revealed today. There are four: - Professor Richard
Evans
 - Professor Christopher
Browning
- Professor Peter
Longerich
- Professor Robert Jan Van
Pelt
All four are reputable historians of the highest
calibre. Evans is a well known social historian,
author of works on the history of feminism, etc. It
is understood that only Pelt is Jewish; born in
Holland, he is Professor of Cultural Histor at the
School of Architecture of the University of
Waterloo, Ontario. Mr Irving has had words of high
praise for Pelt's recent book
Auschwitz 1270 to the
Present, in which a chapter is largely
devoted to exposing the gas-chambers on display to
tourists at Auschwitz (as opposed to Birkenau) as
being a regrettable post-war fraud. Professor Pelt
has so far failed to acknowledge or answer the
lengthy
letter which Mr Irving sent to him in May 1997,
raising detailed questions of historical
importance. Ironically, Pelt, Browning, and Longerich have
hitherto all explicitly dodged debate with the
British writer, as indeed has Professor Lipstadt,
who has on several occasions publicly refused to
discuss historical issues with revisionists (she
boasts of having coined the phrase "Holocaust
deniers"): When Mr Irving rose to ask questions of
her at a public lecture in Atlanta, Georgia, in
November
1994, she had armed campus police called in to
silence him, and in March 1995 she secretly
persuaded
Britain's chief rabbi Emmanuel Jakobovits to
ensure that the Community Security Trust (a
vigilante organisation of 2,000 paramilitary thugs
in London) was on hand in case he should put in an
"embarrassing" appearance during her keynote speech
at the London Book Fair (he did not). As for Professor Browning, a regular commuter to
the prosecution witness box in trials of alleged
war-criminals and historical revisionists, both Mr
Irving and university students have on several
occasions invited him to attend the latter's
lectures on the Pacific West Coast of the United
States, and to take the stage to answer him;
Browning has either not acknowledged the
invitations or has declined them. Nor has he
answered letters
written him by Mr Irving. In October
1998 the German-born historian Professor Peter
Longerich lectured to a large audience at the
German Institute in London, where he developed the
interesting theory that Hitler took his decision to
exterminate the Jews in the first week of April
1942; he admitted that there was not the slightest
documentary evidence in support of this hypothesis.
When Mr Irving rose at question time to put to him
the genuine document which he had in his hand,
namely the Reich
Ministry of Justice memorandum recording that
at that very moment in history, the spring of 1942,
Hitler had ruled ("repeatedly") that he wanted the
Solution of the Jewish Problem postponed until
after the war, Longerich sulked and took refuge in
silence. The chairman then announced, to gasps of
astonishment, that the young professor had flatly
stated before the lecture to him that if Mr Irving
asked any question, he would refuse to answer.
IN RESPONSE to the four statements, running to
several thousand pages, Mr Irving has filed a
statement by Dr
John Fox, former editor of
The British Journal of
Holocaust Education and an expert on the
historiography of the World War II extermination of
the Jews. The statement details among other things
attempts by the international organised Jewish
community to suppress the well known books of Mr
Irving, including one
particularly shameful incident in December
1991.
UNTIL Tuesday, August 3, 1999 at 8:44
PM e-mail links to the defence experts listed
above were provided on this page, in accordance
with universal Web etiquette. These addresses
are readily available in academic directories in
the public domain. Solicitors for Penguin Books
threatened Contempt of Court proceedings, and we
have therefore removed the links. We apologise
for the inconvenience. The e-mail addresses of
Mr Irving's witnesses will remain posted. |