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Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate. |
Kelly Snowden is sceptical, Thursday, September 11, 2003, about the funding for Mr Irving's legal battles
An unbeliever comments
I HAVE regularly visited your web site since reading of the Lipstadt/Penguin trial. Frankly, I am not supportive of your position or much of what you have to say, but do agree that you have a right to your opinions and to speak freely of them. (I believe you would gain credibility overnight, however, if you would dispense with the more egregious comments and devote your website to issues of history to which you claim expertise, rather than trumpeting every conceivable anti-Jewish or anti-Israel tidbit you can find, but hey, that's your business.)
I wouldn't waste your time or mine writing to debate the central themes of your site with you. I also know that critical letters are never posted on your site, so I have no illusions that this one will be read by any but you. Nevertheless, I take time to write now only because of your response to one of your correspondents, Carl Hamilton. He asked whether the Lipstadt appeal (more correctly, your appeal) had reached a dead end.
Your response was
"I ceased to do any more on the Deborah Lipstadt front than follow that noxious person's movements and career, both past and present; no doubt to the annoyance of my enemies, I have moved on."
Come now, Mr. Irving! You do your regular readers a disservice. We all know that you posted constant updates on your appellate efforts, not to mention regularly soliciting contributions to fund the fight, until your most recent setback. Why not just admit that you fought until your last breath?
Your response suggests rather clearly that you simply chose to abandon the effort, as though that would somehow cause dismay to your "enemies." The response is, to be kind, disingenuous.
And I imagine that those who chose to contribute to that fight may be a bit nonplussed to learn that your heart wasn't in it, even though their hard-earned dollars (or pounds) went into the fighting fund.
Some related items on this website:
What
the "neutral experts" were paid by Lipstadt and her
gang: (the first tranche only -- more followed)-
Free download of David Irving's books
Bookmark the download page to find the latest new free books
David Irving comments:
YOU are not on my mailing list, so you are not kept regularly informed of the continuing legal frays in which this fight for Real History embroils us. Nor do you appreciate that the Lipstadt legal process was not the only litigation I am involved in, or may yet become involved in. Germany is still eager to get its hands on my person for violating its laws for the suppression of Free Speech; Moreover I intend to advance Down Under in the spring.
I have an unresolved action against Guardian Newspapers Ltd, the prosecution of which is hampered by the fact that the Government Trustee here has seized all my papers, archives, and files last May, 2002, including the entire legal files relating to that case and all the defendants' Discovery! There are inevitably still unpaid bills resulting from the Lipstadt action and appeals, and I am about to start action against the Government Trustee for the return of my illegally seized archives and possessions, for which -- nota bene -- the Government has of course refused me Legal Aid (as it used to be called).
I take it that you have never been involved in such a fight; you can not even dream of the snares and snags that arise, long after the main court action has ceased. Small wonder that lesser writers quail at the thought of getting involved in lawsuits. The traditional enemy of the truth threw Six Million dollars into the High Court to defeat me, and I was outnumbered forty-to-one by their lawyers and experts and assistants, or forty-one to one if you include the Judge; it is no disgrace to have failed in such circumstances.
I still marvel at the woolly-brained journalists like D D Guttenplan or Richard "Skunky" Evans, who trumpeted that I elected to take the action I did against Lipstadt in the UK because it is "so much more favourable" here than in the USA.
These geniuses have never bothered to ponder the results of the "loser pays all" rules in forces in the UK, or the "Homestead Act" in the USA which protects the residences of defeated litigants in the states of, for example, Texas and Florida. Even had I chosen to sue Lipstadt in the USA, I could not have collected a penny of any damages or costs awarded against her; the same would have held true had I tried to enforced a UK judgment against her in the USA, as US courts have always refused to enforce costs or damages awards resulting from UK actions in defamation.
David Irving