* David Irving is in fine form displaying robust fighting spirit after he lost his libel suit. Judge Gray has now ordered him to pay the first installent of his penalty for having tried to fight the label "Holocaust denier", £150,000, in six weeks. Says Irving in his dry humor: "Now that is a real prospect." Meanwhile, his Radical's Diary reports that media interest has remained unabated. By now, he must have had hundreds if not thousands of write-ups all over the world - not even counting the electronic media.
* British Holocaust scholar, David Cesarani, is quoted in several media concerning the Irving verdict as having said:
"There is a backlash against memorialising the Holocaust, a notion that society has been 'forced' to swallow too much of it. Equally, there is a backlash against political correctness. When this intemperance combines with shallow ideas about freedom to "interpret" the past, the door to Irving remains half-open."
* The Zundelsite visitor statistics are still unreliable due to technical problems, but CODOH, another premier Revisionist website, reports an astounding 500,000 hits every thirty days.
* And speaking of CODOH, webmaster Richard Widmann has had a recent article on the suppression of revisionist works anthologized in "Readings on Fahrenheit 451". The trade paperback, which was published by the Greenhaven Press and named for the admonitory Ray Bradbury novel, includes many articles that address censorship and is targeted for distribution to schools across America.
* No wonder Zion's Lackals (a Zundelsite term) are panicky. Germany's Justice Minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, is trying to get the cooperation of global Internet service providers to stop the spread of politically incorrect websites. Not only is she pitching AOL, Bertelsmann and Microsoft to join the Censorship Brigade, she wants to urge the European Union and the United States ". . . to enact laws against neo-Nazis' activities on the Internet". The United Nations, furthermore, are urged to compile ". . . a worldwide catalog of neo-Nazi sites so that a "central administrative body" can keep in eye on them. We'll see where that one goes.
* Yet another country's president did the requisite kneefall before the ever-watchful Holocaust Lobby. Argentine's President Fernando de la Rua feels it is time for Argentinos to come to grips with their past and has stated that Argentina must seek forgiveness for sheltering Nazis following World War II.
He was quoted in several AP releases as saying: "We have to seek forgiveness because Nazi criminals fleeing justice entered our country and hid among us for a long time. Some were discovered, others perhaps not."
* A Colorado couple, accused publicly of being "anti-semitic", took the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith to Court - and won a handsome $10.5 million judgment against the ADL.
It all started when Aronson-owned dog, Bear, attacked the Quigley-owned dog, Cody, and things went downhill from then on because the ADL got in the middle. The Quigleys and the Aronsons had quarreled for some time, and harsh words were believed to have said across the neighbor fence about those Auschwitz ovens. This caused the ADL to accuse the Quigleys of having launched "Operation Aronson" to run the Jewish neighbors out of town. The jury didn't see it that way, and in the end, the Quigleys won. Curtiss-Lusher, Chairman of the ADL in Colorado, gave a dejected wail: "It's horrible. Defamation is antithetical to what we're about. It's not what we do, and it's not what we believe we did here." There are many, of course, who know better from bitter past experience. These professional character assassins have recklessly called people "extremists" and other unlovely names and in the process ruined untold lives.
* Easy come, easy go. In 1997, Binjamin Wilkomirski received the Jewish Quarterly-Wingage Award for "Fragments", purported to be yet another Auschwitz memoir, widely touted as a great literary work, translated into 12 languages etc. It turned out the author had made it all up and had never set a toddler's toe, much less a foot, in the concentration camp. The Wingage Award was peevishly withdrawn.
* Germany is really going to the dogs. Owners of a certain breed of canines - attack dogs, also known as pitbulls - decided to demonstrate against a Berlin City Ban, with their dogs adorned with Yellow Stars of David to advertise discrimination and - get this! - "racism". Naturally, that idea insulted Holocaust survivors, ever on the lookout for politically incorrect sinners who ". . . trivialize the Holocaust". The demonstration was called off.
* The tension between Orthodox Jews and so-called secular Jews is deepening. A newly released book accuses the Orthodox Jews of having had "narrow goals" and "tunnel vision" in trying to save only Polish Talmudic scholars while "ignoring the suffering of millions. . . " This book, titled ''The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust,'' is being released ". . . to coincide with Israel's annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust." It claims that "the Rescue Committee extorted money from mainstream Jewish groups, employed shady practices to transfer funds to Europe and even violated the Jewish Sabbath for its cause."
The Ultra-Orthodox Jews defend themselves saying the rabbis were closest to them, and hence it was natural they would be saved over others.
* The Institute for Historical Review reports the following:
"The classic Arthur Butz title, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, has been indexed in Germany, banned in Canada, and banished from the California Library Association's banned books exhibit (!) in 1984 (!!), among other instances of suppression. Recently, a mainstream book from an influential publisher recognized The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by including it in an anthology devoted to censored books.
"100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature, by Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova, was published by Checkmark Books, an imprint of the New York publisher Facts on File, in 1999.
"100 Banned Books includes a six-page chapter devoted to The Hoax, its argument, and its censorship history. While the editors can be faulted for their less than sure grasp of The Hoax's argument, its inclusion among the Bible, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Lady Chatterly's Lover, The Origin of Species, and Mein Kampf -- to name a few of the other censored books treated -- lends the pre-eminent revisionist treatment of the Holocaust the sort of recognition without which, like it or not, many potential readers either won't know of it or won't touch it."
* Syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran, known for his magnificent power of summation, said it all with just a few words in one of his April essays:
"Holocaust deniers don't claim 'special knowledge.' They make detailed arguments from official documents and records. Whatever the merits of their case, they want to debate. It's their opponents who want to shut them up, even urging legislation to make their views punishable by imprisonment!
"But in many cases, the 'cranks' are those who disregard authority, pursue the evidence to rational conclusions, and - above all - have no stake or investment in the established orthodoxy. If that orthodoxy is wrong, they don't stand to lose money - especially government money. They are more truly independent than the scholars they oppose.
"The problem of liberal orthodoxy is compounded by the involvement of government in education, which tends to produce what might be called 'subsidized consensus.' When the 'prevailing orthodoxy' is supported by tax money, the stakes are raised enormously. The heretic becomes a grave danger to the incomes and privileges of the subsidized orthodox caste, who naturally try to cut off the 'free competition of ideas' they profess to desire.
"In short, your freedom of speech ends where my government check begins."
* Revisionists have claimed for something like a decade that the Holocaust is a temporal religion and not merely a contested historical account. This view was verified in an article by the LA Times' ***religious*** writer, Larry B. Stammer, describing a Debbie Lipstadt bash.
Along the same vein: The Jerusalem Post of May 2, 2000 ran this title: "Lipstadt recounts battle with 'Amalek'."
In that article, Lipstadt is quoted as having been forced to watch ". . . Irving dance on the graves of the Holocaust dead." Additionally, she is quoted as saying: "When I sat for three months only 10 feet away from Irving and saw a contemporary Amalek [biblical Israel's inveterate foe]. There is no compromise with such evil."
* Rabbi Hier of the Los Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Center has acknowledged that it is time to have a "Museum of Tolerance" in Jerusalem as well. The idea is to promote ". . . civility and tolerance among Jews, and between Jews and non-Jews." Is the good rabbi saying there has not been enough "civility and tolerance" before towards non-Jewish citizens of Israel?
* Dr. Mark Weinberg, president of the International AIDS society, has latched on to the "denier" label. In the past, the story goes (as reported in the May 1, 2000 issue of the Globe and Mail) Dr. Weinberg felt that "HIV deniers" were "crazy kooks who should be ignored the same way we should ignore Holocaust deniers."
Now he feels they should be jailed, just as Holocaust deniers are now being jailed in many Western countries.
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Thought for the Day:
"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed."
(Thomas Jefferson)