Smith’s Report, no. 188

Deborah Lipstadt Blasts 'Holocaust-abuse' by U.S., Israeli Politicians

Jett Rucker

This Holocaust revisionist has a confession to make, and it’s worse than anything to which Bradley Smith confessed in his best-selling (?) Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist: I have become a grudging admirer of Deborah Lipstadt. Yes, the Deborah Lipstadt who in 2001 with the able assistance of her publisher Penguin-Putnam defended successfully against the libel suit brought before the Queen’s Bench by the embattled David Irving. Lipstadt had labeled Irving a “Holocaust denier” in her 1993 book about “Holocaust denial.” The book sold adequately before the trial, and considerably better during and after it. In the trial’s wake, Lipstadt became the standard-bearer in her own “Growing Assault” against revisionism, garnering bouquets and brickbats from the warring factions on either side of the subject.

For most of us who read this newsletter, Lipstadt was fully kitted out in horns and a tail.

As the jackals closed in to pick Irving’s figurative bones (the verdict ruined him financially, if not otherwise), our new celebrity Deborah Lipstadt began to show that Deborah Lipstadt she was no mere pawn of the powerful interests she chose to serve at times when—and only when— doing so struck her as the right thing to do.

As her erstwhile accuser was apprehended and imprisoned in Austria for doing the very sort of thing Lipstadt publicly accused him of doing, she came out foursquare as “a free-speech person,” and with impeccable logic, she objected to his being punished in any (criminal) way for his speech.

Studying the matter, I immediately dismissed all imaginings that Lipstadt was influenced by remorse over Irving’s partly self-inflicted fate and concluded that she really did believe in Open Debate, including of the Holocaust! I conceived admiration for this position, so unmistakably demonstrated by this particular famous person—their champion, at least where it came to attacking those who actually undertook to revise history in ways that she opposed….

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