An article about the Irving-Lipstadt Trial was published in Salon on March 1/2000, titled "Hitler's Apologist" which can be read in its entirety at < http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/03/01/irving/>
I am only citing select quotes to give you a flavor and to let you enjoy Michael Hoffman's acid reply. Hoffman, as you may remember, is a former Associated Press reporter with a special slant on how the lapdog media works.
First, the quotes:
* In a London courtroom, Holocaust denier David Irving gets to argue the details of the persecution of the Jews against the world's leading experts.
* The bland yellow courtroom in London's Royal Courts of Justice is an odd setting for a debate about the Holocaust. The questions sound like the start of tasteless jokes: How much hydrogen-cyanide gas does it take to kill a room full of people? How many corpses fit onto an elevator floor? How many people can one gassing van deliver to death in a day?
* Yet the answers have become pieces of evidence in a British libel trial that litigants on both sides hope will define the parameters of debate about what many call the greatest moral crime of the 20th century.
* Irving stands alone on his side of the courtroom, for he has chosen to represent himself in a case that both sides agree is so complicated that a judge, and not a jury, should hear it.
* Lipstadt and a representative from her fellow defendant, Penguin Books Ltd. (UK), are surrounded by a team of black-robed English lawyers and university researchers, all paging through files, leafing through books, typing notes on laptop computers and writing messages to each other on Post-it notes.
* Both sides plead their case to Justice Charles Gray, formerly a premier libel lawyer himself and a relative newcomer to the bench. Gray has given Irving great leeway in presenting his case, for fear of putting a person with no legal experience at a disadvantage. The trial, which began Jan. 11, is scheduled to last three months.
* Barrister Rampton's job -- which he does while pacing, tying the sleeves of his robe behind his back and adjusting his wig -- is to prove Irving deliberately misread, misinterpreted or missed key historical documents.
* Irving's differences with the vast body of Holocaust scholarship are not subtle. He does not think gas chambers existed for mass extermination. They were used, he says, to delouse clothes and disinfect corpses. He does not believe Hitler devised the Final Solution.
* Irving claims Lipstadt defamed him by labeling him a "Holocaust denier," marking him with "a verbal Yellow Star."
But the British author is after what he sees as a bigger enemy, as well. He says his reputation has been destroyed by an "organized international endeavor," which, upon closer inspection, comprises mostly Jewish lobby groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
* There is no "smoking gun" order from Hitler calling for the destruction of the Jews, he reminds the court often. There is no "smoking gun" blueprint for gas chambers at Auschwitz.
And, of course, he is right.
* Reporters from Germany, Israel, Australia and the United States sit nearby, filling notebooks with Irving's words and the arguments from the defense.
* Sometimes the trial is a jousting match, with historical documents and incidents as the lances.
* But the defense says Irving's "mistakes" and interpretations point in one direction only: toward the exculpation of Hitler and the denial of the systematic slaughter of the Jews because they were Jews.
* The defense has also tried to link Irving's mistakes to what it describes as his racism and right-wing ideological bent. (...)
Still, Irving thinks he is winning this case, as his Web site makes clear. He hides nothing: He posts full transcripts of the trial (until the transcript company forbade him to do so Feb. 7), he posts links to every press clipping (regardless of how unfavorable it is to him) and he writes a "Radical's Diary," in which he shares his take on the day's proceedings.
* Deborah Lipstadt refuses to debate Holocaust deniers because "it would elevate their anti-Semitic ideology to the level of responsible historiography," according to the first chapter of the book at the heart of this lawsuit.
* But through his lawsuit, David Irving has entered the ring with the world's leading Holocaust historians. He has had his day in court.
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Hoffman comments on the preceding Salon article:
At least Salon has avoided the fanatically partisan, sneering tone of similar "think pieces" on the Irving-Lipstadt trial, and conceded a few key points to Irving: that he is outnumbered by his rich and powerful adversaries, that he is right about there being no "smoking gun" implicating Hitler in genocide-by-gas-chamber, and that the word "Holocaust" is meaningless Orwellian Newspeak that obscures rather than clarifies historical realities.
But by this writer's standards, the Salon report still fails as journalism, from its very opening sentence. Irving is not a "Holocaust-denier" and pronoucing him one is the same as vindicating Lipstadt. Irving has not faced the "leading experts" in the courtroom. He has faced the leading mountebanks.
The leading expert, former Max Planck chemist and PhD. candidate Germar Rudolf, is a fugitive sought by the German government for the thought crime of denying the holy of holies. Other revisionist experts like Carlo Mattogno and Prof. Robert Faurisson were rebuffed by Irving himself, a loner who could be described in the terms Homer reserved for Daedalus.
The Salon reporter notes the presence of journalists from all over the world but fails to remark upon the anomalous fact that from mid-February until the flap over the Eichmann "diaries," (Feb. 28 onward) the various newspapers, magazines and broadcasting outlets supposedly covering the trial blacked-out almost all coverage of it.
It must be a coincidence that this was the same period when Irving had Lipstadt's defense witnesses on the ropes and was battering them quite successfully and effectively.
Salon also omits the rather embarrassing fact that American "Holocaust denial expert" Prof. Deborah Lipstadt has refused to take the stand in the trial, whereas Irving has withstood the withering cross-examination of Lipstadt's defense attorney time and again.
Salon concludes by claiming that Irving "has had his day in court." But this can only be true when the courtroom proceedings have been fairly and consistently reported in detail by the major communications outlets. This has not been the case in the Irving-Lipstadt trial. The truth about the proceedings is available only to those who attend the trial or obtain the transcript.
Since the majority of the public depend upon the media for their version of the trial, as far as the perceptions of that vast multidude are concerned, Mr. Irving has not had his day in court, because the media have not told the public even half the story of what has actually transpired at the Royal Court of Justice in the Strand.
Should the judge rule against Irving, the media will crow in boldface headlines that the case was a predictable, easy victory for the omniscient and infallible establishment side that "trounced" the "Holocaust" deniers' leading "Hitler apologist." But an opinion like that can only be sustained upon the twin pillars of ignorance and omission, the engines that drive that titanic vessel, HMS Media.
Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. He edits the hardcopy newsletter, "Revisionist History," which can be ordered online at: http://www.hoffman-info.com/bookstore.html
Today's Hoffman Wire is available on the web at: http://www.hoffman-info.com/libeltrial7.html
The Hoffman Wire is a service of Independent History and Research PO Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 USA
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Thought for the Day:
"The most charitable thing I can say about David Irving is that I suspect he finds the concept of the gas chambers so unimaginable that he can't imagine it. So he's devoted a great deal of his adult life to trying to rationalize it. But it's very alarming."
(From an interview with Naomi Gryn, co-author of a new book "Chasing Shadows" in the London Times, Thursday Feb. 24th 2000)