Lipstadt’s odd brother (Amazon review book)

Most of all, he must be financially ruined and permanently silenced.

Friday,
Saturday, August 20, 2011

Lipstadt’s heroic libel-trial memoirs reviewed on
Amazon website

A FRIEND has sent me this online review on the Amazon website of the trial memoirs of world-famous historian Deborah Lipstadt, non-tenured professor at Emory university, Georgia.
Her latest book is about the German war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Since her languages are American-English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, one wonders how she made head or tail of all those German documents.

Since copies of the book reviewed are now selling for less than one dollar it appears to be a bargain, and I do urge my readers to snap them up while there is time.

Lipstadt
scurries out of the London High Court
in April 2000 after her sensational win
over historian David Irving, who sued
her for calling him a Holocaust denier
as requested by Yad Vashem.
During
the three-month
trial,
she refused to go into the witness box
herself to avoid awkward questions. The
$13 million dollars her pals poured
into the courtroom did the trick. Mr
Irving’s memoirs will reveal the whole
dirty inside story.

Review:
History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust
Denier (Paperback)

History
on Trial: My Day in Court with a
Holocaust Denier

by
Deborah E. Lipstadt

Edition:
Paperback

Price:
$11.69

Availability:
In Stock

86
used & new from $0.81

THERE is nothing ideologues like better than a rousing food fight – hurling epitaphs at each other with reckless abandon –
endlessly seeking to score a better direct hit, and fearing only that a monitor will arrive to put an end to their foolishness.

David Irving’s life-long career as a pre-eminent and controversial WW-II historian on Nazi leadership is such a battle. Although he as written 30 books on WW-II, and unearthed an incredible amount of fresh information of the subject, he has also attracted formidable ideological foes, intent not merely on crushing him in intellectual battle, but on discrediting him in every possible personal area.

He must not only be declared a liar, a psychopath, and evil, but none of his oft ground-breaking work can be shown the slightest regard. Most of all, he must be financially ruined and permanently silenced.

Twelve questions to put to Prof.
Lipstadt the next time you see her…

One sterling example
is Irving’s Wikipedia
bio –
[and critical
responses]
a slick, professionally crafted
hatchet-job with not a single unalloyed
compliment. It is guarded day and night by
invisible zealots who immediately remove
the slightest softening alteration.

In a
summary box, Irving is not listed as being
a ” WW-II historian” but for “Holocaust
denial and negationist historical
writing.” Whew!

“History on trial” joins this chorous, but does so out in the open. It does so by taking
“text-proofing” to a high art – amassing a large corpus of Irving’s many errors, exaggerations and equivocations – and scrupulously leaving out any exculpatory evidence. This is an easy trick when applied to David Irving whose historical beliefs have sashayed in a highly ambivalent trajectory. But without a counter-balance, such “scholarship” is next to worthless.

The two major aspects of David Irving’s career as an historian are these:

1. He is an
   indefatigable researcher who has
   sought-out and discovered an
   astonishing trove of inside details
   about the Third Reich leadership and
   its actions. His ability in this regard
   is unparalleled. Yet this talent is
   never alluded to in a positive light by
   Ms Lipstadt.
2. He has clearly
   developed a high regard – an affection
   even – for many of the odious Nazi
   leadership. This affection has
   occasionally caused him to be a bit too
   quick to spring to their defense.

IRVING’S occasional special pleadings were only altered or retracted – and usually with some reluctance – when overwhelming counter-evidence was produced. But altered they eventually were. However, to his enemies his original sin can never be forgiven.

To continue today, as Ms
Lipstadt does, to accuse Irving of being a
“Holocaust denier” falls into the same black hole of dirty tricks as repeatedly claiming that Mel Gibson is one – in spite of his repeated explicit public affirmations that the Holocaust occurred, or that President Bush knew about the lack of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction when no one else in the world did either.

To ideologues, an evocative epitaph is far too satisfying to let go just because it has been utterly disproven.

Now see what the real experts said about David Irving’s books

Catalogue
of his works (pdf,
15MB)Irving terms his
opponents “the Holocaust industry,”
primarily religious zealots to whom the
Holocaust has become the central tenet of
their neo-Judaism. The other major
transgression in the eyes of this group is
any positive utterance about their
Devil-in-Chief, Adolf Hitler.

In many
countries it has become legally impossible
to hold a free discussion about Adolf
Hitler or the holocaust, without breaking
speech laws – especially in Germany and
France (and, of course, in Israel).
Although not yet illegal in the U.S., it
has become socially and professionally
unacceptable to evince any doubt on the
extent, motivation and blame of the
Holocaust.

Ms Lipstadt’s charge – that Irving was a “Holocaust denier” was deliberate hurled – not as a provable claim, but precisely in order to get the legal system to shut Irving up, to lock him up and, if possible, to bankrupt him. Ah, yes, scholarship at its finest.

The central issues of Irving’s persecution were never raised as legal issues in the trial [of DJC Irving vs. Penguin
Books Ltd and
Lipstadt].
Irving did describe in some appalling detail how Ms Lipstadt’s accusations resulted in jail time and bankruptcy. Many long-time publishers of his 30 books suddenly refused to work with him. The
London Sunday Times welched on a translation contract, its editor citing incredible pressure to shed himself of anything to do with Irving.

Pressure from whom was never questioned at the trial, much less answered.

The final insult was that Ms Lipstadt refused to confront her accuser by taking the stand herself, making a mockery of the book’s
[sub-] title “My day in court.”

The questions that must finally be asked is why we need the legal system to determine whether David
Irving “denies the holocaust.” Has the
Scopes trial taught us nothing? Why, in the academic realm of history, do intense religious convictions so effortlessly supersede scholarly debate?

What the result of Ms Lipstadt’s court room victory has brought to our attention once more (if we will only listen) is that unelected religious bigots continue to successfully force their ideology on the public with impunity. In countries that pretend to be run democratically, this is a sorry state of affairs.

Dossier
on Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah
Lipstadt: Am I my brother’s
keeper?

Her
brother’s lies are first exposed (in
Dutch): [1]
[2]

Article
in the Jewish weekly, ‘Joods Actueel’,
with TV report attached

Islam
in Europe

did not realise who his
famous sister
was

Ha’aretz: U.S.

Jew says kicked out of Belgian cafe for
wearing kippah

Scott
Smith asks who paid Lipstadt’s Libel
trial costs, and gets a very full
answer

Lipstadt
trial index

Trial
transcripts

Lipstadt’s
praise for Binjamin Wilkomirski, the
(ASSHOL) fraudster and
liar:
“Deborah
Lipstadt has assigned

Wilkomirski’s
Fragments in her Emory
University class on Holocaust memoirs.
When confronted with evidence that it
is a fraud, she commented that the new
revelations ‘might complicate matters
somewhat, but [the work] is
still powerful.'”

Twelve
questions to put to Prof.

Lipstadt the
next time you see
her…

Controversy
April 2001 over Emory’s choice of
Deborah Lipstadt as graduation speaker;
won’t get honorary
degree

The
above item is reproduced without editing other than
typographical
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Focal Point
2008 write to David
Irving