***First of all, PLEASE watch CNN at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, tonight! Jeff Greenfield is doing a special on the David Irving Trial - about to start on Tuesday in London!***
Now I continue yesterday's ZGram commenting on the Los Angeles First Page article written by Kim Murphy, starting with the sub-heading "Confronting Deniers' Arguments Head-On":
Los Angeles Times:
Lipstadt was among the first in the American Jewish community to abandon the long-standing practice of ignoring the Holocaust deniers, choosing instead to confront their arguments head-on. Her book accuses Irving of misreading documents and distorting facts.
Zundelsite:
Untrue again! Absolutely untrue! Lipstadt does not "confront" the critics of the Holocaust. She advocates, in fact, never to debate them. She badmouths and misrepresents them and misquotes even transcripts.
Los Angeles Times:
Historians she quotes have said Irving ignores the fact that the Nazis deliberately avoided a paper trail and that it is quite plausible that Hitler would never personally have affixed his signature to the Final Solution.
Zundelsite:
Hitler had no trouble signing orders to execute Germans who turned out to have collaborated with the enemy. Why should he have hesitated signing a decree to genocide the Jews, had he intended to do so?
Los Angeles Times:
(Lipstad) cites accusations by prominent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper that Irving "seizes on a small and dubious particle of 'evidence' " and allegedly uses it "to dismiss far more substantial evidence that may not support his thesis."
"There are more people in the United States who believe that Elvis Presley is alive than who believe the Holocaust didn't happen. As an American, that's a demi-consolation," Lipstadt said in an interview. "But I see it as a clear and future danger. The future danger is when there are no people left who can say in the first-person singular, 'This is what happened to me,' it's going to be much easier to deny it."
Zundelsite:
This argument is utter nonsense! There are, at latest count, according to Jewish journalist John Sack, 85.000 Holocaust-related books on the market. If they are factual, the authors of these books are going to rebut and criticize.
Los Angeles Times:
For Irving, who is regarded in some mainstream quarters as one of the premier documentarians of the Third Reich, it is an issue of professional vindication. It is no accident, he says, that he has been banned from even entering Canada, Italy, Germany and Austria because of Holocaust denial laws in those countries. "They regard me as dangerous, and the word 'dangerous' puzzles me," he said. "I don't go around punching people in the face. . . . 'Dangerous' can only mean dangerous to their interests, either in the long term or the short term."
Zundelsite:
What are these interests? To continue to shore up a version of history concocted by the Allied powers in World War II and Nuremberg! For Israel it is to reap billions in undeserved aid - and for others it is the political benefits accruing from "victimhood."
Los Angeles Times: (Irving still being quoted)
"In the end, it isn't really a question of whether it's 6 million or only 1 million" Jews who died. "I think the figures have been inflated, and the significance of the inflation is that the Jewish community is trying to make out that their suffering is unique in its grandeur and the methods applied to achieve it. And it wasn't. It was just one of the many barbarisms committed under the cloak of war."
Some revisions in Holocaust history have been generally accepted. Stories that Jewish remains were manufactured into soap and lampshades have been dismissed as myth.
Zundelsite:
Hilberg, under oath in the 1985 Zündel trial, still would not accept that the "Jewish soap story" was out-and-out false. He said it was a "rumor." Even as we speak, the Zundelsite is being litigated against in the Toronto Human Rights Tribunal Kangaroo Court on precisely this Jewish soap story, among others, even though it has long since been discredited. The gruesome and grotesque story keeps popping up again and again as though it has never been put to rest.
Los Angeles Times:
There were, most historians now agree, no human gassings at Dachau. Deaths at Auschwitz, once estimated, based on the testimony of Nazi commanders, at up to 3 million have been scaled back to about 1.1 million. Even the widely accepted figure of 6 million Jewish dead all over Europe has been questioned in recent years by some of the world's most prominent Holocaust scholars.
Zundelsite:
Wrong again. The tablets in Auschwitz claimed for almost 50 years "four million dead." Now they falsely claim 1.6 million dead - when the figures in the Auschwitz death registers report only 74,000.
Los Angeles Times:
Raul Hilberg and Robert Jan van Pelt, two of the leading authorities, now believe the figure is probably closer to 5.1 million.
Zundelsite:
Alone in Auschwitz the figure was reduced by the Auschwitz authorities from 4 million to 1.6 million. Yet the original "six million" figure is still 5.1 million. Is this Talmudic Math?
Los Angeles Times:
Still, scholars say, the evidence of a massive extermination campaign that resulted in the deaths of millions of Jews is so exhaustive that it is irrefutable.
It includes detailed stories from camp survivors, confessions and memoirs from Nazi commandants (including Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess), testimony of Jewish prisoners who removed bodies from the gas chambers, blueprints uncovered from newly opened archives in Moscow that document construction of the gas chambers, records from the contractors who built the gas chambers and orders for large quantities of hydrogen cyanide gas, far more than would have been needed for fumigation, according to Van Pelt and others.
Zundelsite:
It seems that the scholars cannot accept that they have been conned by diabolical liars for half a century. Hoess had his "confession" tortured out of him - as had others. See Rupert Butler in his "Legions of Death" where the torture methods of the Allies are described. Or read John Sack's book, "An Eye for an Eye" to get a feel for how the Allied torturers got "confessions."
Los Angeles Times:
Revisionist Questions Limits on Inquiry
There is the sheer number of Jews who arrived at the camps and never left, far more than could have fallen victim to disease or starvation, most historians believe.
Zundelsite:
The Holocaust promoters make it easy for themselves with the slight-of-hand, bold-faced lie that the bureaucracy-ridden Germans of the Hitler era would operate like that. Ludicrous!
Los Angeles Times:
Since when, Lipstadt wants to know, does anyone in the name of academic inquiry have the right to claim there is "another side" to the Holocaust debate? And why is there even a debate?
Zundelsite:
Well, this closed-minded professor of religious (Jewish) studies will have a debate - whether she likes it or not. The outcome is important for Irving but secondary for Revisionism. Ernst Zundel lost many rounds until he won in the end - and look where Revisionism is now! The Irving Trial is a direct outcome of the two Zundel Trials. Without the Zundel trials, there would now be no Irving Trials. Ever heard of the Comet's Tail Effect?
Los Angeles Times:
To this, Rudolf, who could be called as a witness at the trial, says that no issue of history should be exempt from reexamination--even if it pains the victims. In convicting him, Rudolf says, the court took no notice of prominent German military historian Joachim Hoffman, who credited the quality of Rudolf's research and said that to suppress it would "work a powerful hindrance to legitimate striving for scientific understanding." The court apparently was moved, however, by a preface by the former Third Reich general who had commissioned Rudolf to do the research, Otto Ernst Remer, who in 1992 himself was sentenced to prison for incitement to racial hatred.
Zundelsite:
What does this say about the state of German judges, prosecutors, or even the German legal system?
Los Angeles Times:
Could a report commissioned by a man like Remer--who once joked while sniffing a cigarette lighter that he was mimicking "a Jew nostalgic for Auschwitz"--ever be a justifiable contribution to scientific literature?
Zundelsite:
So a sick joke by an old man negates scientific inquiry into the alleged death of millions? That is an amazing mindset!
Los Angeles Times:
More to the point, says Irving, should there be political limits on academic inquiry?
Zundelsite:
Exactly. That is the crux of this whole matter. Religious dogma to protect their lies with a taboo - not to be challenged by truth seekers?!
Los Angeles Times:
"I think, by the end of this case, the word 'scholarship' will come to stink," Irving predicts. "Scholars tend to award that accolade to each other. And their scholarship usually consists of sitting in libraries reading each others' books."
Irving prides himself on relying on primary sources for his biographies: interviews or diaries of the principals, radio transmission intercepts, memorandums. In the case of his book "Hitler's War," Irving interviewed in detail most of the surviving members of Hitler's staff and only used documents that would have crossed Hitler's desk.
In the process, Irving said he did not come across a single document or interview that indicated Hitler had ordered a campaign to exterminate the Jews.
Zundelsite:
Not one document! You hear?!
Los Angeles Times:
"Others who have come across with something have looser criteria than I do, like the Nuremberg trials. . . . I won't accept that. Not standing by itself," he said.
Zundelsite:
What good was a trial in a court staffed by the victors who chose the judges, the prosecutors, the interrogators, and who controlled the evidence and even wrote the ground rules, supplied the executioners, selectively published truncated versions of the transcripts and allowed no appeals from their verdicts. Some trial! Some justice!
Los Angeles Times:
Irving's numerous critics say he fails to address the fact that the extermination campaign was carried out in deliberate secrecy, without written orders. SS chief Heinrich Himmler "explicitly forbade all discussion of it, and if it had to be mentioned, it was always disguised as 'resettlement' or 'transport to the east,' " Trevor-Roper pointed out in a review of Irving's book.
Zundelsite:
We recommend that the reader check out the Zundelsite and other Revisionist websites to learn what witnesses had to say to this flimsy and unfounded claim.
Los Angeles Times:
St. Martin's Press abruptly dropped plans to publish Irving's controversial biography of Goebbels in 1996 in the wake of a storm of criticism from reviewers, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and even, according to some employees, telephone death threats against the book's editor. Thomas McCormack, chairman of the publishing house, said he read the book and found it "repellent [and] effectively anti-Semitic." When the Doubleday Military Book Club backed out as well, Irving self-published the book, calling the whole affair "the most extraordinary treatment of a historian since what the Iranians did to Salman Rushdie."
Zundelsite:
The charge of anti-semitism has been for over a century the glib answer to short-circuit any debate dangerous to those with a Jewish bent.
Los Angeles Times:
Yet Irving has his admirers as well. Christopher Hitchens, writing of Irving's work in Vanity Fair, called him "not just a Fascist historian, [but] . . . also a great historian of Fascism." Gordon A. Craig, considered the dean of German historians, acknowledged that Irving has been an "annoyance" but said: "The fact is that he knows more about national socialism than most professional scholars in his field." His book on Hitler, Craig said, "remains the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War."
Zundelsite:
Now here we smile! Finally a little even-handedness!
Los Angeles Times:
On the advice of her lawyers, Lipstadt won't discuss Irving or the upcoming trial. But she did say there is a danger in allowing what she calls Holocaust deniers to wear the mantle of legitimate revisionists--those who look at accepted history and raise new and often enlightening questions.
Zundelsite:
It is amazing! Every time people talk, their mind goes on parade! I recommend to my readers that they get Lipstadt's book - and read it!
Los Angeles Times:
"There's a definite political agenda," she said. "This is not just Looney Tunes history. These are people who want to make national socialism respectable again. And how do you make a thoroughly discredited movement respectable?"
Zundelsite:
The political agenda of the Allied and Jewish side has been to bludgeon the Germans with the Holocaust Lie. Equilibrium is what Revisionists strive to establish.
Los Angeles Times:
"First of all, you deal with moral equivalencies. You say, 'Oh yes, the Germans bombed London, but the Allies bombed Dresden. There were Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, but the Americans had camps for the Americans of Japanese descent.' But there's no moral equivalency for them to bring up about the Holocaust. So instead, they are left denying the Holocaust. And denying it in such a way that you almost hear them saying, 'It didn't happen, but it should have.' "
Zundelsite:
There is a moral equivalency which is the Bolshevik Gulag murders and the murders, massacres and expulsion of 17 million Germans from their homelands after the war, and the disgusting use and abuse of the false Holocaust claims to justify Allied barbarism.
Los Angeles Times:
Van Pelt, who is considered one of the world's leading authorities on Auschwitz, prepared an 800-page report on the death camp for the trial. "The whole idea of trying to prove the Holocaust is, for me, a kind of ridiculous exercise. But in some ways, it forces historians to show what they can do. I think the case has forced me . . . to look at things I preferred not to look at in the past," he said.
Zundelsite:
Van Pelt will come out of this trial far less cocky! Guaranteed!
Los Angeles Times:
Van Pelt now can tell you how the gas chambers operated, how the capsules of Zyklon B were dropped in the ceiling vents, how the bodies were hauled out, and how long it took human beings to die at what concentrations of gas (about 35 minutes, in most cases).
Zundelsite:
We wait with bated breath. Van Pelt's cross examination will be very revealing for future historians, who will look back in disgust at our era and its elites.
Los Angeles Times:
Van Pelt's new report has not yet been made public, and Rudolf has not responded to it. "I can deal with Himmler. I can deal with Hoess. There's a certain kind of naive honesty in what they do, however evil it is," Van Pelt said. "But the contortions and complete fabrications of these deniers is obscene."
Zundelsite:
The Zundel Trials have conclusively documented that - who fabricated the evidence in Nuremberg and in the ruins of Auschwitz, in books, films and countless false claims, in ludicrous claptrap and in absurd charges. History will render a harsh judgment on the Elie Wiesels, the Lipstadts, the Hilbergs and the van Pelts one day.
Los Angeles Times:
(Lipstadt being quoted): "What they do is take all kinds of very straightforward evidence and basically turn it upside down. And it's an incredible effort to simply sit there and take every sentence they write and compare it to the record. . . . It doesn't help you to understand anything except the contortions of their minds. And their minds are not very interesting."
Zundelsite:
The pot calling the kettle black? :)
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Thought for the Day:
". . . but please, it was more than 50 years ago and there have been so many other massacres and genocides since then.
"(I wish) that people would not be accused of anti-Semitism and racism when they merely question establishment opinions."
(Michael Coren, a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster.)
Back to Table of Contents of the Jan. 2000 ZGrams