The Irving Holocaust Trial

How the great Irving-Lipstadt libel trial in London will turn out I don't know. Neither does anyone else. But one thing is certain. Professional Holocausters have been given a black eye. They have been forced to debate what they have always refused to debate, namely, whether their version of the “Holocaust” is true.

As could be expected, Canadian coverage of this fascinating event has been abysmal. It would warrant daily reports, but we are more concerned with important matters like hockey fights. Still, you can get the news from the Internet and the international press.

Historian David Irving has been a target of Jewish invective ever since he testified for the defence in the second Zündel “false news” trial in 1988. Now, in one of the longest libel cases ever, he is suing Deborah Lipstadt (and Penguin Books) for claiming that he is “one of the world's most dangerous Holocaust deniers”, that he is a falsifier of history, that he applauds the internment of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, and much else.

Lipstadt is professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her statements on Mr. Irving were in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault On Truth And Memory.

As far as most Jews are concerned, what she has to say about Irving is a bit like Moses bringing those tablets down from the mountain. As for his being “dangerous”, he has thrown no bombs – apart from the bombs he has thrown at the profitable Holocaust Industry.

About that black eye: professional Holocausters hold to the view that the story of six million Jewish deaths at the hands of the Nazis is both self-evident and sacrosanct. Hence their refusal to discuss it except in proclamatory terms, a line that is laid down from the top and followed by the media.

An example: when Charles Maclean, lawyer and open liner, asked Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress to debate Mr. Irving on air, Farber refused. Sol (“Oliver is the hate capital of Canada”) Littman of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the rest of the Jewish prominente take the same tactic, here and in the U.S. They won't debate “the obvious”.

They must be losing some sleep now. The Atlantic Monthly magazine did a cover story entitled “The Holocaust On Trial” even before the case began. The Jewish writer, D.D. Guttenplan, while basically backing the Jewish line, pointed out a few truths right off the bat.

The story about soap being made from the fat of murdered Jews, he wrote, is now universally rejected by historians as a fabrication. Dachau had a gas chamber [it was there for delousing inmates] but he states it was never used. He also points out that there were no gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen.

I saw that place myself in 1945. The camp was captured intact and if there had been any gas chambers there they would be featured on TV every time the Holocaust is mentioned, which is practically every night. But that didn't stop the Montreal Gazette in 1993 from reviewing a book by Montrealer Moshe Peer in which he claimed to have been put through them six times when he was a child, managing to escape death every time. Miraculous!

Our media will print anything a “survivor” tells them. But I digress.

The London trial has led to enormous publicity on this issue, but one doubts that it will make any difference to the constant beating of the Holocaustomania drum by Jewish organizations and Hollywood. It may even increase it. What is important, though, is that they haven't been able to cast the Irving trial into the sea of silence, which is what they did when the second Zündel trial took place.

Headlines from the first one, like, “Gas chambers did not exist” gave them migraines. So, going along with Jewish demands, the media virtually blacked out the second one. In Britain, too, the media put their pens down during Mr. Irving's lengthy cross examination of the leading expert for the defence, during which Irving was scoring points.

In Britain, much of the coverage has been snidely anti-Irving. “Irving doesn't deserve title of historian”, etc. On the other hand, the normally “correct” BBC has asked whether there might indeed be a “Holocaust industry”, and on a related issue an Evening Standard writer stated before the trial began that “enough has been made of their Holocaust”.

That Jews and others died in their thousands in the camps is beyond question. But Irving says that the Auschwitz gas chamber story is fiction and that no order from Hitler exists for the destruction of the Jews.

I expect Irving to lose. He has the courage of a lion but is fighting the case alone and is facing twenty lawyers for the defence, which has unlimited funds. The whole Jewish establishment is arrayed against him.

That establishment has a lot riding on this trial and it would be a brave judge who came down in his favor. But whatever the outcome, the trial transcripts will be there for the world to muse on and the fight for truth and free debate will go on.

© March 7, 2000