Lipstadt gets ovation for willing Holocaust case

Posted
Tuesday, May 30, 2000

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Lipstadt gets ovation for willing Holocaust case

Danielle Haas

JERUSALEM, May 29 (Reuters) –
Misuse of sources, lies and distortions led to right-wing author
David Irving’s downfall in the libel case he brought against her for calling him a Holocaust denier, Professor
Deborah Lipstadt said on Monday.

The American academic, who in April defeated Irving in a British court, told an audience of more than 300 people at the
Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial that Irving had indulged in “wilful misrepresentation” in his depiction of the
Holocaust.

“We took every place, every argument that Irving uses to deny the Holocaust and we followed his sources,” she said in her first speech in Israel since the trial.

“We tracked his footnotes … in every single case
… they found some form of distortion, a lie, a mistranslation, a misstatement, something inserted that wasn’t there,” she said.

Lipstadt was
given a standing ovation by the
audience that included Holocaust
scholars and survivors.

Irving, 62, brought his libel action against Lipstadt and her publisher,
Penguin books, after claiming she had libelled him in her book
“Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”

In the book, Lipstadt, of Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia, said
Irving was a Nazi apologist who distorted facts to support his claims the Holocaust did not happen.

Six million Jews perished during the
Nazi Holocaust in World War Two.

Lipstadt said Irving would “ignore any evidence that would contradict what wanted to say” and that he had tried to “bring down” the numbers killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp while “inflating” the numbers of Germans killed in the bombing of Dresden.

The British author has been told to make a down payment of 150,000 pounds ($231,000) to Penguin books by June 16
following the case.

Condemning Irving for belittling the testimonies of Holocaust survivors,
Lipstadt said that he had “danced on the graves of Holocaust survivors.”

Leading Holocaust scholar Professor
Yehuda Bauer said the trial had
“considerable impact” on Holocaust research in helping to expose the methodology of Holocaust deniers and forcing historians to focus on previously ignored details of the period.

He called Lipstadt a “brilliant historian.” “From this point of view
Irving couldn’t have chosen a worse person to attack,” Bauer said.

WHATEVER
else Judge Gray in his infinite judicial
wisdom inserted into his judgment (which
is subject to appeal) he never once used
the word “lies” or any variation on it.

He
did however find that Deborah
Lipstadt lied in writing that Mr
Irving had a portrait of Adolf
Hitler above his desk; that he was in
cahoots with Hizbollah leaders; and that
he stole or damaged the microfiches of
Goebbels
diaries from the Moscow archives. As for
Yehuda Bauer — isn’t he the person
who reprimanded Lipstadt

on November 27,
1992 (after he had paid her $25,000 to
write the book) for omitting Mr Irving
from it almost entirely? That’s what Mr
Irving revealed
in his closing speech.The
above news item is reproduced without editing other
than typographical