Lipstadt Jerusalem

Real History and Censorship by its Traditional Enemies The index to this Lipstadtscandal your Deborah Lipstadt index your Lipstadt Trial index [images and captions added by this website] Israel, Saturday, March 19, 2005 Photo: Prof Deborah Lipstadt exultant outside the British 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. A woman of valor by Dan Markel, The Jerusalem Post UNTIL only a few years ago, a veneer of respectability attached in some scholarly circles to the historical writings of David Irving. Famous historians such as Sir John Keegan and Professor Gordon Craig [letter, right] viewed Irving’s works as indispensable to understanding the full nature of World War II.

Nonetheless, Irving’s statement that “more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy ‘s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz,” among others, frustrated, if not outraged, all but the community of Holocaust-deniers in which Irving had ensconced himself.

In 1993, Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote [ sic. published ] Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory , a book in which, among other things, she accused Irving of writing nothing more than gussied-up anti-Semitic pap that sought to deny the truth of Hitler’s involvement in the plan to murder European Jewry. Shortly thereafter, Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin , her publisher in England, under England’s libel laws.

This choice of venue was both significant and unsurprising because, unlike the United States, England places the burden of proof upon defendants. Moreover, England, unlike the United States, did not require a public figure like Irving to prove that Lipstadt made her allegedly defamatory statements with “actual malice.” Thus, while a suit against Lipstadt would likely not have even surfaced in America, it required incredible labor on the defendant’s part in England.

As Lipstadt’s lawyer, Anthony Julius , left, described the task, the defense had to show that Irving “subordinated the truth to spread anti-Semitism and engender sympathy for the Third Reich.” Although Lipstadt’s account of the trial focuses on the many falsehoods underlying Irving’s works, she begins with a gripping narrative of her own journey into academia and the origins of this lawsuit. THE DAUGHTER of modern Orthodox parents, Lipstadt grew up in New York’s Upper West Side.

Prior to graduate school, she travelled to Israel in 1966 to study at Hebrew University. Despondent that, at that time (on account of Jordan’s closure of the border to Jewish tourists) she was unable to visit Jerusalem’s Old City, Lipstadt trekked to Greece to obtain a new passport from the American Embassy there. She eliminated all traces of the Israeli origins of her trip, and sojourned from there to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to the Old City. Upon her