[images and captions added by this website] Friday, March 18, 2005 Photo: Prof Deborah Lipstadt exultant outside the Brtish High Court in April 2000, surrounded by her lawyers (far right, the Zionist zealot James Libson): they spent $10m raised by her backers to defeat Mr Irving's claim -- most of it on paying "experts" to give opinions on his works. Emory scholar tells C-SPAN 'no thanks' By ANDREA JONES The Atlanta Journal-Constitution AN Emory University scholar who was sued by an author who denied the Holocaust is now at the center of a national storm involving the C-SPAN television network. Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt recently wrote a book about her court battle five years ago against English historical writer David Irving. Earlier this week, she canceled a scheduled C-SPAN "Book TV" broadcast after the network told her they planned to air a lecture by Irving to "balance" her story. More than 200 historians from around the nation have signed a petition supporting her decision and criticizing C-SPAN for proposing to air Irving's views. Irving, who has claimed, among other things, that gas chambers were not used at Auschwitz and that Hitler had no role in the Final Solution, gave a recent lecture at the Landmark Diner in Atlanta that C-SPAN taped. "This is a man who lies," Lipstadt said in a telephone interview Thursday. "It is depressing to think that C-SPAN, which is supposed to be the last bastion of logic, would put someone like this on." C-SPAN was scheduled to tape Lipstadt earlier this week during an event at Harvard University, but the scholar told the station not to come. "I didn't want to give Irving a platform," she said. The petition drive supporting her was organized by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which publishes an annual report on Holocaust denial. "Presumably C-SPAN did not consider broadcasting a program about Black history that would be 'balanced' by a program featuring someone denying that African-Americans were enslaved," the petition says. "C-SPAN should not broadcast statements that it knows to be false, nor provide a platform for falsifiers of history, whether about the Holocaust, African-American history, or any other subject." In 2000, Lipstadt won a court battle against Irving, who had sued her and her British publisher, Penguin Books, over her portrayal of him in her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." The book was published in the United States in 1993 and in Britain in 1994. A British judge found that three months of testimony and documents supported Lipstadt's portrait of Irving as an anti-Semite [Website note: In fact Lipstadt had ot made this claim in the book complained of; her lawyers smuggled it into her defense] who distorted facts. C-SPAN issued this response Thursday: "Book TV was interested in Deborah Lipstadt's new book about her British libel trial. Our interest in covering David Irving was to hear the plaintiff's story of the trial. Since Professor Lipstadt has closed her book discussions to our cameras, we are still discussing how to cover this book and we don't have an immediate timetable."    Index to the media scandal surrounding Prof Lipstadt's attempt to silence C-Span and the history debate