David Irving |
oouDocuments on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Tuesday, September 5, 2000
© Focal Point 2009
It reminds me of the time the same people accused me of supplying the trigger for McVeigh's Oklahoma City bomb.
September 4, 2009 (Friday)
Windsor (England)THE AMERICAN Jewish Committee have taken a vicious and cowardly swipe at me from the safety of the Internet; I must really be hurting somebody's interests:
- AJC Protests Spanish Newspaper's Portrayal of Holocaust Denier as 'Expert'
- NEW YORK, Sept. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AJC protested the decision of El Mundo, one of Spain's leading newspapers, to publish an interview with the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving this weekend, as part of its coverage of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.
- "David Irving has made a career out of lying," said AJC Executive Director David Harris. "For El Mundo to bill a Holocaust denier as an 'expert' and 'innovative thinker' heaps shame upon that newspaper."
- Following his unsuccessful libel action against American historian Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 in a British court, Irving was described by Mr. Justice Gray in his landmark ruling as a "Holocaust denier." Justice Gray also deemed Irving to be "anti-Semitic and racist. . .he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
- "Justice Gray's ruling is the definitive guide to understanding who Irving really is," said Harris. "Disturbingly, El Mundo appears content to allow Irving to lie about both the Holocaust and himself in the name of 'free speech.'"
- In February 2009, AJC condemned El Mundo for publishing an openly anti-Semitic column by columnist Antonio Gala which identified "Jewish greed" as the cause of the persecution of Jews throughout history.
- According to the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes Project, Spain has the highest level of anti-Semitism in Europe, with more Spanish respondents holding negative than positive views about Jews.
I go online and find the British press full of the same (in this case truly Jewish) lies; the journaille just copies the handouts, and makes no attempt to contact me. It is very discouraging. It reminds me of the time the same people accused me of supplying the trigger for McVeigh's Oklahoma City bomb.
The van's oil level is below low, which is surprising. I replace the oil filler cap with a new one which cost all of £4.50. The missing old one has indirectly cost me over two hundred times as much.
B. asks me if I know how to dispose of a radioactive battery. What's that about? I ask J, and she suggests: "No idea, but usually those have to go to a hazardous waste recycling place."
I suggest to B. that she mail it to somebody she dislikes. But that's probably a felony.
I tell Jae, who is back in Indiana: "That El Mundo article has sure generated a global fuss. Who'da thunk it."
A Frenchman offers me twice 4,000 euros to write a quick book on Leon Degrelle. I tell him: "Four thousand euros will not pay even one month's rent, and my books take years to write...."
September 5, 2009 (Saturday)
Windsor (England)THE global newspaper frenzy about my interview with El Mundo, due to be published today, increases. Austrian television ORF has reported it with the usual epithets. Joseph Schwanzer sends me the ORF news report: "Questioned whether he is an anti-semite, Irving answers: 'I try so hard not to be. But believe me, it's not easy.'" I think I recall saying that, and asking the interviewer whether he believes the occupants of the Gaza strip are anti-Semites yet, or the parents of Rachel Corrie? I comment to Joe: "Lustig, wie die ganze Weltpresse mit einer Stimme im Marschschritt schreit." (Curious how the entire world press marches in step, the goosestep, and screeches in one voice.)
I comment to another correspondent, K.: "AWPOW: Are we powerful or what!"
I ask a daughter living in Madrid not to forget to buy today's El Mundo. "There is a huge outcry against the editor, and the Spanish foreign minister has attacked him; he has responded robustly in today's editorial. I have not yet seen the interview in question. It all depends on how they have sliced the cake."
K. sends a thoughtful reply: "Interesting to see what pressure has been directed with a view to ensuring silence, though. One always wonders what it is that they are afraid of? What is it that they don't want us to find out? Will try to buy a paper.
I go into Eton for a coffee. Saturday's Daily Telegraph is so big and heavy, it is virtually unreadable; that's another reason why people are abandoning the printed newspaper for the Internet.
At five-thirty p.m. I email to Jae and K: "Strange thing, El Mundo has still not put the actual interview on its website, although there are now 17,000 articles about it on the Internet, and ninety readers have commented online (mostly favourably), and they have posted their own Editorial defending their decision..."
K. goes out and buys a copy in Oxford Street and scans it for me. I post the two pages [1 | 2] shortly after p.m. To my astonishment page 2 reveals that the conformist historians Richard "Skunky" Evans and Sir Ian Kershaw have also written to the editor protesting.
"Concern" among historians.
EL MUNDO/Madrid
IN addition to arousing controversy in the international press, the news that El Mundo was going to publish an interview with David Irving was not well received by some of the historians who collaborated in this newspaper's retrospective about the Second World War.In a letter to the editor, Richard Evans - interviewed in these pages last Tuesday - asserts that his colleague "is free to express his opinions, however repugnant they may be" but at the same time stated that he found it "insulting" and "degrading" that he was being treated "on the same footing as an equal to serious historians."
In another letter sent to this newspaper Ian Kershaw - interviewed last Monday - asserted that "El Mundo had the obligation to inform the other historians being interviewed that they intended to have David Irving participate in the series," asserting that "few if any would have agreed in this case to be presented at his side."
Furthermore yesterday this letter published a letter from Avner Shalev, in which the director of the Holocaust Museum expressed his "profound concern" and asserted that it was "inconceivable that a serious newspaper would provide a platform to anti-Semitism."
SO, like Israel, of which we perhaps expect no better, these worthy, medal-clanking British historians have also done all they can to prevent alternative viewpoints on history from being heard, even in a foreign newspaper.
Professor Richard Evans and his famous icon, a "skunk" (he denigrated the world's most illustrious historians in the British High Court, including Hugh Trevor-Roper and Gordon Craig)
Lest readers take them too seriously, we recall that Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans, who broke with all tradition to apply for the post of Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, which is normally in Her Majesty's gift, provided his neutral services as the chief expert witness at the Deborah Lipstadt Trial: at which he turned out not to know who Albert Speer was, and who responded when I put to him the name of Otto Abetz (Hitler's wartime ambassador in Paris) in cross-examination, "You will have to remind me who he was."
Fortunately he remembered what good old English money looks like, because he accepted over a quarter of million pounds of it in fees from Lipstadt's lawyers to render to the Court his unbiased and neutral opinions about me, and he did as was expected of him; and he failed to mention in Court that he was also signing a secret million-pound book deal with Lipstadt's co-defendants in that action, Penguin Books Ltd.
That High Court courtroom in the Strand was awash with more money than Bernie Madoff's enterprise. (When his lovely but now lonely mistress found out that he was screwing her twice over, she is said to have exclaimed: "I could have throttled him with my bare thighs").
Pinocchio: click to see what happens when you fib
As I remarked in a letter to him at the time, I do not recall seeing him sitting next to me in the KGB archives in June 1992 as I unwrapped the dusty twine for the first time since 1945 on those fifty wartime Agfa boxes of microfiches (picture below). While Evans earns his icon of a skunk, so does Kershaw earn his: Pinocchio.
No sign of Kershaw: On a table in the KGB Moscow archives in 1992, lying in front of David Irving and waiting to be unwrapped for the first time: the Goebbels Diaries, photographed in 1945 on glass plates and unopened until then.
TO BE INFORMED OF DAVID IRVING'S FALL 2009 TOUR OF THE EASTERN USA, APPLY HERE
Postscript, Sunday, September 6, 2009 : Spanish correspondents rightly point out that Ian Kershaw and others have not hesitated cite the many works of David Irving in their own books: "Es curioso, los "historiadores serios" se meten con Irving pero luego no tienen reparos en usar sus fuentes o citarlo directamente, como en el caso de Kershaw, que cita The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor y Goebbels, Mastermind of Third Reich en la bibliografía de su aclamado Hitler. La otra biografía reciente de Hitler, escrita por John Toland, también cita tres obras suyas: Breach of Security, Hitler und seine Feldherren y The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe. Qué cosas. " [source]
Our dossier on Richard "Skunky" Evans
NOW ON ONE ENJOYABLE EASY-FIND INDEX: DAVID IRVING: A RADICAL'S DIARY 2005 TO 2009
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