Diary: February 20, 2005

Real History, Deborah Lipstadt and the InternetDocuments on the

Let us all marvel at the sweep and dive of her writing — in scansion it rivals the beauty of the iambic pentameter in Latin verse. What more can I say? I am breathtook

February
19, 2005 (Saturday)
London (England)

BOB has installed the new search engine I commissioned. I congratulate him, and he replies: “I am rather proud of it. I have been testing it quite rigorously. So far the new query algorithm seems to be working.”

Somebody warns me that an Australian
“educational” website www.teacheroz.com
which purports to be run by a harmless Oz school teacher has a headline reading, “David Irving &
The Diary of Anne Frank – revisionist history. Just convicted of fraud by high court in England.” Of course the Gutnick vs. Dow Jones case has established that libels on the Internet are libels in law. How useful.

I have written to the purported web mistress,
[email protected].
No reply. The .com is suspicious, it suggests she is not in Australia at all. I try to locate the ISP to issue a legal warning before action, but the usual source, www.whois.com, comes up blank. Well concealed, no doubt, and I Wonder Who Is Behind
That.

THE entire Axel Springer press in German is today carrying a story about my forty year long friendship with leftist playwright Rolf
Hochhuth (right, above, visiting me in London
1966): for example in Der
Tagesspiegel, “Rolf Hochhuth lobt
Holocaust-Leugner” — Rolf Hochhuth praises
Holocaust Denier. The newspaper’s editor is one
Thomas Wurster. Where do they get these names? I write to him:

“Warum fragen Sie mich nicht direkt?
Dann hätte ich die Auschwitz-Sache
ergänzen können — das dortige
Gebäude, das den Touristen als
,,Gas-Kammer” gezeigt wird, wurde nämlich
erst 1948 errichtet, wie auch die Polen
inzwischen längst zugeben. Wer hatte also
recht! ,,Holocaust-Leugner”, pfui Deibel. Sie
schreiben übrigens für einen
Springer-Blatt, nicht wahr; haben wohl auch die
berühmten sechs Punkte unterschreiben
müssen.

Interessieren dürfte
allerdings, dass alle meine Bücher in den
1970er und 1980er Jahren vom Ullstein Verlag bzw
Propyläen (damals auch Springer Konzernen)
veröffentlicht wurden, viele als
Bestseller. Wussten Sie wohl nicht, oder?”

Ins Schwarze getroffen, I hope; bull’s eye.

February
20, 2005 (Sunday)
London (England)

THE wretched “Australian schoolteacher” has now responded, — she has removed the offending statement from her website, she says, but whinges about my “bullying letter,” writing inter alia: “I am just a high school history teacher and am amazed you take the time [to] threaten people in such a rude and threatening manner.”

I reply, “Thank you for your courtesy. It has avoided very difficult consequences for you and your website provider. But you must surely be aware that to accuse somebody of being ‘convicted of fraud’ in the High Court, i.e. a criminal offence, is a very serious libel. Convicted felons are automatically disbarred entry from the US, for example. I have never been convicted of anything, worldwide, period.”

I thank Björn H. for helping me corner this female. He replies, puzzled: “Why do you write that the person is from Australia, she herself writes:
“A little bit about me: Hi! My name is Tracey. I have created this page to assist students, teachers, and all history lovers locate information on the web. I am the mother of two super children and have been married to my High School sweetheart for 24 years.

I am a violinist with the Mesquite
Symphony Orchestra and teach 9th grade Pre-AP World
Geography and 10th grade World History for a large suburban district school just outside of Dallas,
Texas.

I respond: “She camouflaged herself as a
“Teacher from Oz” in her website domain name and email address; I wonder how many other countries she has mendacious websites claiming to be a teacher in?”

I AM advised that Deborah Lipstadt now has a
Web diary, a “blog” — for a moment I though my informant was telling me that she had a
bloke, and I wondered if everybody’s speculation about her ahem, preferences, had gone way adrift.

I once remarked, having been told that an HomeBox Office film on the Lipstadt Trial was in the making — now dropped, she laments, as the scriptwriter refused to insert the fictitious passages HBO was demanding — “I wonder who will play the role of Lipstadt, now that Rock
Hudson is dead?”

As for her blog (website diary), I can only speculate on how long she will keep it up. Either you are a diarist, or you are not. Heinrich
Himmler was a diarist, of sorts; Joseph
Goebbels was; Erwin Rommel was;
Samuel Pepys was, so was my friend Alan
Clark. I have been writing a diary since 1963, or is it 1960? I forget — that is one of the diary’s advantages, you no longer have to remember.

And apart from anything else, it is a fine whetstone for the literary knife.

Lipstadt, I fear, is not a diarist. Diarists usually tend to have a command of the English language, through constant practice. But her latest book has been accused even by friends of having
“dry patches” — rather like the South Sahara, one suspects. Next to the Kalaharian works of Richard
“Skunky” Evans however she probably shines, nay, scintillates.

Two days ago she wrote this on her blog: “I have received lots of questions about Ward
Churchill. I will provide a bit more background on his attacks on me tomorrow night.”

Not done so far. Mr Churchill had compared
Lipstadt with Adolf Eichmann, which might seem unduly harsh on the Nazi mass murderer; the writer had audaciously pointed out that Lipstadt refuses to condemn the extermination of American
Indians.

“He
does remind me of David Irving,” she warbles on.
“He is not very important but peoples
[sic] such as Irving and Ward Churchill
have the ability to sow seeds of damage.
(Particularly now that Ward Churchill is seen by
many folks as a martyr on the altar of academic
freedom.)

“I am reminded,” she continues, “of what
Anthony Julius (right) said to me early in my legal battle.”

Julius, let us not forget, was the scum-sucking bottom-crawler whose law firm charged the Princess
Diana Memorial over one million pounds
[$2m] for the first year of legal services in setting up its charitable fund.

Julius to Lipstadt: ‘Fighting David Irving is like the shit you step in on the street. The shit has no importance unless you neglect to clean if off your shoes before you go into the house.’ So too with these guys.”

So that is the kind of language these nice folks, who evidently live in excrement-strewn ghettos, use amongst each other. As for the diary, what wit; what command of the nuances of the
English tongue; what mastery of prose; what subtlety of counterpoint. Let us all marvel at the sweep and dive of her writing — in scansion it rivals the beauty of the iambic pentameter in Latin verse. What more can I say? I am breathtook.

[Previous
Radical’s Diary]

Deutsche
Stimme interviews David Irving at length (in
German) about Dresden, Auschwitz, World War II
and history: “The German spirit is still
enemy-occupied territory. .

.”

Pro-Israel Springer group slams Germany’s
leading leftist playwright Rolf Hochhuth for
praising Mr Irving Der
Tagesspiegel: Rolf Hochhuth lobt
Holocaust-Leugner | Rolf
Hochhuth verteidigt Holocaust-Leugner [picture]
| Hochhuth talks about his demand
for a bombing war museum in Germany, and his
forty year friendship with David Irving

|
Vorschag
für ein Bombenkriegsmuseum; David Irving;
und Winston Churchill (all in German)

co.uk”>
David Irving