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The Lipstadt Case
Putting their Money on the Table by David Irving
She is now touring the country at $25,000 a pop, addressing audiences in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and elsewhere, on how she single-handedly "slew the dragon." And good luck to her, I say; I hear she's complaining about three months' loss of income, though Emory University, it seems, gave her three months' paid leave of absence for the trial, during which she lived in a luxury London hotel. Of course, nobody pays me for the three years I lost preparing the trial. I had no choice, given that Lipstadt's allies had for ten times as long spearheaded a dirty war to destroy my livelihood by putting secret pressure on my publishers like The Viking Press, St Martins Press and Doubleday Inc.
The defense lawyers fighting this action have so far spent $6m. The Washington Post, London Jewish Chronicle and Sunday Telegraph reported that the money came from the American Jewish Committee, Steven Spielberg, and Edgar J Bronfman Jr. Since Deborah Lipstadt has recently denied that the $6m came from "the Jewish community", we must assume she paid it herself. There certainly seems to be a lot of money on the table in this fight against the lone historical revisionists like myself -- or on one of the tables, anyway. On the day I picked up Mr Justice Gray's damning judgment against me in my libel action against Lipstadt I also received a list of the payments made to her expert witnesses. I posted them immediately on my Internet website (www.focal.org/online). Some people must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief to see that these mediocre British and German scholars were paid upwards of $200,000 each for their testimony: they deserve medals of valor for staying neutral between the contending parties (as sworn to by law), one of whom had given them this fortune, with prospects of more -- Prof. Richard Evans has just accepted a post on the Holocaust art theft panel -- while the other had paid them nothing.
Have newspaper readers been told that Judge Gray also found that I am not "obsessed with racism", and that given that Lipstadt or her allies have done their utmost to destroy my career, it can not be termed "anti-Semitism" when I criticise them for it. Oh, and he also referred to my record as a military historian in glowing terms: the odd thing is that, in his judgment, and because he is so advised by the "experts", I suffer a monstrous and malevolent blind spot when it comes to my criticisms of Holocaust history -- the numbers, the methods, and whether Hitler ever ordered it or not. Well, that is what the appeal courts are for. The world's
press began squirting slime over me weeks before the
judgment was announced. Even the British press did so,
heedless of the laws on contempt. Judge Gray, a brand-new
judge, had his entire career still before him; but his
seniors, the judges of the appeal courts, have theirs
largely behind. It may well be that Prof. Lipstadt is in for
a nasty fall, and that many of those journalists around the
world who scrambled onto the bandwagon will come to regret
that they did not use ink of a softer hue. © David Irving 2000 |
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MY British High Court libel action against her, Emory
professor Deborah Lipstadt "took the Fifth". While I
offered myself for cross examination, and was put through
the hoops by Britain's most fearsome and highly paid (fee:
$750,000) counsel for three weeks, she ducked out of
testifying on the witness stand, even though she would have
had only me facing her (I could not afford counsel). Her
publisher Penguin Books Ltd also decided not to venture onto
the witness stand. 
My
pre-trial offer to Lipstadt and her publisher (twice stated,
in 
The
judge found, incidentally, that there were three major lies
in Lipstadt's book Denying the
Holocaust:
©
Focal
Point 2000 |
