I understand that today, David Irving's fate will be decided, but the world will not know until next week. I am compiling some update information from his website, http://www.fpp.co.uk/ I say that it will take a Solomon to come up with a verdict that's fair - and survive, if only professionally and socially!
But we shall see. I can't say that Irving has always been overly friendly to me, but my hat is off to him. He has given them one heck of a run for the money!
DAVID IRVING is in the United States, writing, and is expected to return on April 10; Mr Justice Gray has directed that he will render his judgment to the trial of David Irving vs. Penguin Ltd & Deborah Lipstadt at 10.30, Tuesday 11 April 2000 in Court 14 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Penguin's solicitors had unsuccesfully requested a postponement until April 13, because they had arranged a conference on the eleventh. No release of the text of the judgment on the Internet will be permitted until after the hearing. [Latest trial-update 4.4.00]
Curious fact: Rampton made no use whatever of the Eichmann Papers, which he and his expensive team had finally persuaded the Israeli Government to release after forty years. Whatever they had hoped to find in the sprawling manuscript, it was not there. Mr Irving however -- whom the Judge ordered to be supplied immediately with a copy of the document -- referred in his closing speech to the fact that it reveals Adolf Eichmann, the Holocaust's "executioner in chief," as having guided tours of the Auschwitz concentration camp -- yet he was never shown a "gas chamber" by the commandant, Rudolf Hoess.
To bring my ever expanding readership up-to-date on the Irving/Lipstadt struggle, here is a letter from an Irving website reader that will shed light on the situation.
It was written by Dan McGuire and is directed at one Omry Kaplan, who writes from Israel.
Kaplan objected to David Irving's use of his transcripts on the internet to urge his readers to correct and balance the one-sided mainstream reporting.
McGuire replies and summarizes:
I think you are wrong in your assumption that visitors to Mr Irving's website do not check the transcripts before writing letters to editors of various journals reporting on the trial. I have written two letters and each time I weighed the validity of the reporting against the actual transcripts of the proceedings, and I consider myself an average reader of Mr Irving's website.
Perhaps that is one of the essential differences though between Irving supporters and Lipstadt defenders. Mr Irving and his supporters value the integrity of historical facts; Lipstadt and her ilk imbue their history with an element of religiosity which we are all expected to believe -- and to worship.
For Zionists, the history of WWII is a matter of faith closed to debate. If it ended there, fine; there are many religions that stand against historical reality. But the holocaust also serves as a political and economic weapon in the sense that it is used to extort favors and gifts for Israel and for International Jewry.
Face it, the holocaust industry has made Israel a very rich nation at the expense of non-Jews. And if Mr Irving exposes the holocaust, Zionists have much to lose, apart from any claim to historical truth. They'll lose billions of dollars in aid and in reparations payments from their Christian benefactors.
Your comparison of Mr Irving's attempts to encourage factual reporting by Miss Menasse to International Jewry's successes in blacklisting Mr Irving is odious. Mr Irving is simply trying to get Miss Menasse to report truthfully on the trial, whereas International Jewry is out to silence Mr Irving because his dogged pursuit of truth threatens so much of what holds Jews together these days, spiritually, politically, and financially.
I realize that this must be a difficult time for you and other Jews, i.e. to face history honestly and admit that so much of what you believe is utterly false. And I also understand the ancient impulse to kill the messenger, in this case Mr Irving, when one does not welcome the message, here that the Hollywood Holocaust is phoney-baloney. But you Jews cannot go on indefinitely believing a false history because truth always has a way of coming around, no matter how forcefully it is suppressed.
It took only one champion of truth, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to bring down a totalitarian regime built on lies. The smart money here is on Mr Irving, no matter how many more libels Lipstadt authors and no matter how many more Schindler's Lists Mr Spielberg films. The jig is up.
Best of luck in the future,
Dan McGuire
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Thought for the Day - quoted before but worthy of a repeat:
"Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit, and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic.
"Constantly associate those who oppose us with those names that already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind."
-Central Committee of the Communist Party, 1943, in an instruction sent to Communists around the world.