Lipstadt: Libel trial strengthened me

Lipstadt:
Libel trial strengthened me

By Janine Zacharia

PHOENIX, Arizona (April 4) – Deborah
Lipstadt, the US professor of Holocaust studies who is fighting a libel suit filed by
Holocaust denier David Irving in
England, told The Jerusalem Post this week she has been strengthened by the experience.

The court in London is expected to rule next
Tuesday.

Irving sued
Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, in 1996
for things she wrote about him in her 1994 book
Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. In it, she called Irving “one of the most dangerous spokesmen in the service of Holocaust denial.”

Lipstadt said she was grateful to the Israeli government for the decision, but her lawyers had not used them.
“The Eichmann papers were important. But we didn’t use them in the trial really because they came in very late,” she said.

“The whole experience has strengthened my feelings about being part of a community and the importance of doing what you do as an academic,” Lipstadt said.

Among Irving’s contentions are that Adolf Hitler
did not authorize the Final Solution and that the buildings at Auschwitz are fakes.

Asked about Israel’s decision to release the prison papers of Adolf Eichmann to help her case, Lipstadt said she was grateful to the Israeli government for the decision, but her lawyers had not used them. “The Eichmann papers were important. But we didn’t use them in the trial really because they came in very late,” she said.

She returns to London on Saturday to await the judge’s decision.

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