Thin Ice: Kevin Strom ADV Interview with Mark Weber (Part 1)

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

>
>Thin Ice: Jewish Power in a Changing World, -- Part 1
>
>David Irving, Ernst Zundel, and `Holocaust Denial' Laws
>
>Kevin Strom ADV Interview with Mark Weber 
>
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8331>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8331
>
>
>*The entire basis for the ascendancy of the Jewish power structure
>over the West is about to be shaken -- but will Western man and his
>hard-won freedoms survive the cataclysm?*
>
>American Dissident Voices broadcast for March 19, 2006
>
>Listen to the broadcast:
><http://nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8331>http://nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8331
>
>an interview with Mark Weber
>by Kevin Alfred Strom
>
>ILLUSTRATION: When he was still free -- David Irving addresses a
>large crowd in Budapest, Hungary.
>
>TODAY WE HAVE as our guest once again the writer, speaker,
>historian, and -- increasingly -- international spokesman for those
>who dare to speak freely on the vital issues of our time, Mr. Mark
>Weber, Director of the Institute for Historical Review. Welcome to
>American Dissident Voices, Mark.
>[ <http://www.ihr.org/>http://www.ihr.org/ ]
>
>WEBER: Thank you very much, Kevin; that's a very generous introduction.
>
>KAS: And a well-deserved one, in my opinion. It was good to see you
>recently in northern Virginia, Mark. I hope you'll be coming back in
>a more official capacity in the near future.
>
>WEBER: There will be an IHR meeting there in July; that's in the
>works right now.
>
>KAS: I very much look forward to hearing you speak. It's been too
>long since we last spoke on the air -- about eight months, I think
>-- and I wonder if you could briefly let our listeners know what the
>Institute has been up to during that time.
>
>WEBER: A lot of things. We're very gratified by the increasing
>popularity of our Web site. The traffic continues to grow, as does
>the number of subscribers to our News and Comment e-mail
>subscription service. We're producing a whole line of CD and DVD
>recordings, which has been very successful. This is important
>because DVDs and CDs are now replacing the older media of videotapes
>and audiotapes. Additionally, I've continued to do a lot of radio
>interviews and have made quite a few public appearances in just the
>last few weeks. Many of these have focused on the recent crackdown
>on dissidents in Europe for violations of so-called "Holocaust
>denial" laws, and I've focused especially on the case of David
>Irving. We maintain a steady program of media outreach, which is an
>important part of what we do because it's very important to reach
>people who are outside of our own circle, so to speak.
>[
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>
>KAS: Who has interviewed you recently, Mark?
>
>WEBER: In the immediate aftermath of the David Irving sentencing on
>February 20th I did a number of interviews, including one with the
>BBC in London, another with Radio Netherlands, another with the
>English-language service of Iran's short-wave external broadcasting
>system, and one with the Times of London. I also appeared as a guest
>on some radio shows that are broadcast here in the United States. As
>I mentioned, we try to maintain a steady media outreach because it's
>very important to reach people other than those who already are
>familiar with our work. We don't want to just "preach to the choir,"
>but reach those people who normally see and hear only what the
>people who control the media want us to see and hear.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8182>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8182 
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>
>KAS: It sounds like you're doing excellent work reaching out to the
>mainstream. You mentioned David Irving, who is a British historian
>and is probably one of the most widely known writers of history. If
>there is such a thing as celebrity in the field of history, Irving
>has certainly attained it. He's a best-selling author and a
>well-known scholar and investigator. And yet, this man is behind
>bars today -- and the story of his captivity is not as widely known
>as it should be. Can you tell us, briefly, what's going on in the
>Irving case right now?
>
>WEBER: David Irving is the author of more than twenty books, a
>number of which have been bestsellers, many of them highly acclaimed
>by critics. In fact, some of his books have been obligatory reading
>at Sandhurst, West Point, and at universities around the world.
>
>Irving made a visit to Austria last November to speak to a small
>meeting in Vienna. While he was there he was stopped by police and
>arrested on a warrant that was issued sixteen years ago on the basis
>of two lectures he had given. That fact by itself is amazing,
>because normally any crime committed that long ago would no longer
>be actionable under ordinary statutes of limitations.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8144>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8144 
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>
>However, because he had referred in these lectures to "mythical gas
>chambers," he was arrested and held until his trial on February
>20th, at which time he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment
>just for having uttered a couple of sentences two decades ago.
>
>No other violation of so-called Holocaust denial laws has gotten
>such international attention. In nine or ten European countries --
>and in Israel -- it's now a crime to publicly dispute the official,
>orthodox, Holocaust extermination story. There are numerous aspects
>of this situation that are really bizarre; in fact, it's hard to
>believe that such laws even exist.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8035>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8035 
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>
>In the United States and in most other countries, people are free to
>make all sorts of provocative statements about history and even
>about current affairs. You can say that it was really George Bush
>who organized the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center and you
>won't be prosecuted for it. You can advocate the return of Communism
>and the authorities will do nothing. But if you say anything that
>disputes the official Holocaust story in a number of European
>countries, you will be imprisoned, fined, or punished in other ways.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=7019>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=7019 
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>
>KAS: In those countries the Holocaust orthodoxy is protected more
>stringently that even any kind of church doctrine. In fact, I don't
>believe church doctrine is protected in those countries.
>
>WEBER: That's right. One of the important aspects of the Irving
>sentencing is that it came in the aftermath of the tremendous furor
>over cartoons that appeared first in a newspaper in Denmark, and
>later in some other countries, that Muslims around the world found
>very insulting. But almost everywhere in Europe the publishing of
>those cartoons was defended on the principle of free speech. It was
>said that even cartoons, images, or writings that offend the
>sensibilities of Christians or of Muslims are permissible, because
>the governments of European countries try to uphold the principle of
>free speech.
>[ 
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>
>But at the same time, any questioning of Holocaust orthodoxy results
>in these amazing punishments. The Irving case is certainly the most
>famous of them, but it's by no means the only one.
>
>KAS: It was reported that Irving actually decided to plead guilty in
>this case. Is that true?
>
>WEBER: Yes, it is, and he explained his reason for doing that.
>Irving said that if Austria had a law making it a crime to wear a
>yellow necktie, and he had then worn a yellow necktie while there
>and been arrested for it, he would have had to have plead guilty to
>breaking that law. Well, he did speak of "mythical gas chambers" in
>these two lectures he gave sixteen years ago. He reasoned that this
>did, in fact, violate the law, so he pled guilty. Now this is
>speculation, but many people expected or thought that because he
>pled guilty, he would be sentenced to time served or given a
>suspended sentence and allowed to leave the country. However, he and
>many other people were surprised when he was given a three-year
>prison sentence.
>
>KAS: I heard that he recanted some of his questioning of Holocaust
>orthodoxy in an interview he gave prior to the sentencing.
>
>WEBER: He said that his views on the Holocaust have changed. It's a
>little unclear exactly what his views are now because they have
>changed over time. After the sentencing, he gave two interviews in
>which he again said that he did not believe Hitler gave any order to
>exterminate the Jews of Europe, so people have been a little
>confused about exactly what his position is on some of these subjects.
>
>In any case, the reaction to his sentencing has been amazing.
>Because his books are so widely known and because he's so well known
>around the world, this particular "Holocaust denial" case received
>far more media attention than any other that has ever occurred in
>Europe. It's been very gratifying to see almost universal
>condemnation of the sentence against Irving and of the Holocaust
>denial laws in Austria and other countries in Europe under which he
>and others have been persecuted.
>[ <http://tinyurl.com/f7w8q>http://tinyurl.com/f7w8q ]
>
>The only voices expressing support for the sentencing of Irving have
>come from groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon
>Wiesenthal Center, and a few other predicable Jewish Zionist
>sources. Newspapers across the United States and Europe and around
>the world have spoken out against Austria's law, not in the least
>because it's so selective and one-sided. The Holocaust story is the
>only chapter of history that's legally protected and it's the only
>one for which people are punished for doubting.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=6218>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=6218 
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>
>KAS: What were some of the more noteworthy organs taking that position?
>
>WEBER: In Britain there were editorials in the London Times, and in
>the Guardian, but the condemnation has actually come from around the
>world. Many of the opinion pieces have pointed out the double
>standard in Europe that permits people to make statements that
>offend the religious sensibilities of Christians or Muslims, but
>punishes in this draconian way offenses against Jewish
>sensibilities. That's been a very typical reaction of newspapers and
>of intellectuals around the world.
>
>KAS: Are there any elements in the Jewish power structure that think
>perhaps these denial laws are a step too far?
>
>WEBER: Yes. Deborah Lipstadt, who is probably David Irving's most
>famous -- or infamous -- adversary, has taken that position. Even
>she, who was involved in a widely publicized libel case with Irving
>a few years ago, said that the effect of punishing him in this way
>is to make a martyr out of him. And there have been a number of
>other Jews who have expressed dismay that the effect of sending
>David Irving to prison has been to turn him into a martyr for
>freedom of speech.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=7875>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=7875 
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>
>Irving has now become the most prominent prisoner of conscience --
>or political prisoner, if you will -- in the Western world today.
>But he's not alone. Ernst Zündel has been behind bars for more than
>three years now without ever having been found guilty of any crime.
>He's currently being tried in Mannheim, Germany for violating
>Germany's so-called Holocaust denial law, and his case has gotten
>quite a lot of attention there. Europeans feel increasing
>embarrassment about these strange Holocaust denial laws, because
>they can see just how one-sided and hypocritical they really are.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8027>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8027 
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>
>KAS: What is the current status of Zündel's trial?
>
>WEBER: The trial began in November and has been moving slowly over
>the months, but just the other day a courtroom session ended in
>furor -- as it has before -- with shouting by Zündel's attorneys and
>the judge, and the trial has now been postponed indefinitely; it's
>unclear when it will resume.
>
>The defense lawyers for Zündel have been very combative and feisty
>and have put up a very spirited defense. This is dangerous for them,
>because the judge has threatened to punish them for making
>statements that express many of the same views that Zündel himself
>has expressed.
>[ 
><http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=6829>http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=6829 
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>
>I want to give your listeners some idea of just how bizarre these
>laws are. Under these European laws, people are punished for making
>even factually true statements that contradict Holocaust orthodoxy.
>David Irving was arrested and found guilty in a court in Munich some
>years ago for making a speech in 1988. In that lecture he said that
>the gas chamber shown to tourists at the Auschwitz I main camp is a
>phony postwar reconstruction. At his trial, he asked the court
>permission to call as a witness to this fact the curator of the
>Auschwitz State Museum in Poland. The court denied his request. Both
>the Auschwitz State Museum and many other historians have
>acknowledged that the so-called gas chamber at the Auschwitz I main
>camp -- that's been shown to hundreds of thousands of tourists over
>the years -- is a phony postwar reconstruction. Even though Irving's
>statement was true, the court fined him ten thousand marks. That
>fine was later increased to thirty thousand marks, and, just for
>having made this statement, he was forbidden ever to enter Germany
>again.
>
>Now under normal law, truth is an absolute defense. If you make a
>statement that's true, the truth of it should protect you from being
>punished, but that's not how things work in these bizarre
>Alice-in-Wonderland-style prosecutions for "Holocaust denial."
>
>Another case that I find even more remarkable occurred in the 1990s.
>In 1998 a German court convicted a sociology professor, Dr. Robert
>Hepp, of violating one of these laws because of a single sentence
>that he had written in a book -- one in which he referred to the
>mass-gassing story as a "fairy tale." The amazing thing about this
>is that the sentence he wrote was in Latin -- of all things -- and
>he was punished for violating a law against "popular incitement."
>How a single sentence, written as a footnote in a book in Latin
>could be considered "popular incitement" is hard to understand, but
>the court ruled that this sentence constituted dangerous popular
>incitement, so he was found guilty.
>
>Another case, in France, involved Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of
>that country's National Front party. In 1997 Le Pen was found guilty
>of violating the French "Holocaust denial" law for having referred
>to gas chambers as "a detail of Second World War history." Le Pen
>pointed out at the time that neither the multi-volume memoirs of
>Winston Churchill, the World War II memoirs of Dwight Eisenhower,
>nor the wartime memoir of Charles de Gaulle makes any mention at all
>of gas chambers. But for referring to gas chambers as "a detail of
>Second World War history," he was found guilty and ordered to pay a
>fine of fifty thousand dollars to publish the court's decision in
>French newspapers. This is just bizarre. People can make any number
>of provocative statements in these same European countries, but
>offending Jewish sensibilities is punished this draconian and
>hypocritical way.
>
>KAS: Le Pen didn't even question the orthodox version of the
>gas-chamber story. He merely said it was a detail of history.
>
>WEBER: That's right. One of the remarkable features of this
>phenomenon is that people like Le Pen and Irving are routinely
>referred to as "Holocaust deniers," but the public is never told
>what it is that they have actually said that "denies" the Holocaust.
>As you pointed out, it's not a denial of the Holocaust story to say
>that gas chambers are a detail of Second World War history. Le Pen
>didn't dispute the existence of homicidal gas chambers in German
>camps during World War II, but merely referring to it as "a detail,"
>was considered "denying the Holocaust." That fact alone points out
>the absurdity of these laws and the way they're applied in Europe.
>
>KAS: Another member of the National Front in France, Bruno
>Gollnisch, who is also a member of the European Parliament and a
>professor at the University of Lyon, lost his parliamentary immunity
>merely for saying that historians should decide the question of the
>Jewish Holocaust.
>[ 
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>
>WEBER: That's right. It's important to keep in mind the origin of
>these laws. David Irving was called a "Holocaust denier." Strictly
>speaking, the law under which he was convicted was an earlier
>version of the current Holocaust denial law in Austria. For his
>reference to "mythical gas chambers" at Auschwitz, he was actually
>convicted of violating a law that makes it a crime to "revive
>National Socialism" in Austria. His statement was construed by the
>Austrian court as an attempt to revive Nazism. This law and the
>similar laws in Germany were imposed on those countries by the
>victorious Allied powers at the end of World War II. They are
>imposed victors' laws, not normal legislation enacted by the
>people's representatives. Austria later strengthened its law to make
>it specifically a crime to "deny the Holocaust," which is now
>legally defined as downplaying or whitewashing genocidal actions of
>the National Socialist regime during World War II. That was the
>legal foundation of the case against David Irving.
>
>The existence of these laws in other countries, however, such as in
>Poland and Spain, is the result of a concerted effort by
>international Jewish organizations.
>[ 
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>
>In 1982 the World Jewish Congress announced the start of a campaign
>to persuade and pressure governments to outlaw "Holocaust denial."
>They systematically worked to get these laws enacted in one country
>after another in Europe. Prior to that time, such laws had existed
>only in Germany and Austria. Laws specifically forbidding Holocaust
>denial were not enacted by other in European countries until this
>campaign by the World Jewish Congress began to put pressure on them.
>
>The organized nature of the campaign to introduce such legislation
>can also be seen in the demands made by the International
>Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, which met in June 1998
>and announced a campaign to introduce laws of this kind in as many
>countries as possible. Now, having said that, it seems that
>Holocaust denial laws have reached their high tide, as it were. The
>international reaction to Irving's sentence and to the existence of
>these laws in general has been so negative that's it's hard to see
>how these organizations are going to be successful in promulgating
>similar laws in any other countries now.
>[ 
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>
>KAS: I understand there was recently a debate in Britain in regard
>to an effort to impose such laws there, but the effort failed.
>
>WEBER: Yes. Before Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he announced
>that if he did become Prime Minister his government would introduce
>a Holocaust denial law in Britain. After his government assumed
>power the matter was further explored, but a decision was made not
>to try to introduce such a law in Britain, probably for tactical
>reasons. It's very hard to word such a law in a way that it will not
>seem obviously hypocritical and one-sided.
>[ 
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>
>As I've said many times, justice that is applied selectively is not
>justice, it's a form of injustice. Making it a crime to question one
>official version of history or one chapter of history, but not any
>other is not justice; it's a form of injustice. Anyway, the Labour
>government decided against trying to introduce such legislation in
>Britain, and as you know, it has been having trouble even applying
>the laws that it already has on the books against fomenting and
>inciting racial hatred.
>
>KAS: How many people are now imprisoned in Europe for questioning
>the Jewish version of the Holocaust?
>
>WEBER: Most of the sentences that are handed down for Holocaust
>denial in these countries are not prison sentences. Most of them
>impose fines and this has happened in quite a few cases.
>
>In prison right now is David Irving, of course, in Vienna.
>
>Ernst Zündel is imprisoned in Mannheim.
>
>Also imprisoned in Germany is Germar Rudolf, who was punished for
>having made and published a scholarly investigation of the technical
>aspects of gas chambers at Auschwitz. He had to flee the country to
>avoid prosecution, traveling first to Britain and then later to the
>United States, where he eventually married and had a child. Our
>government, however, in its eager determination to uphold our
>immigration laws, arrested him last November and deported him to
>Germany, where he was promptly thrown into prison and where he is
>now serving the sentence that was imposed years before. He will be
>standing trial again in Germany for new violations of the law.
>
>Another person in prison is Siegfried Verbeke, a Belgian citizen who
>was extradited to Germany for violating its Holocaust denial laws
>and is currently incarcerated there.
>
>Other people in Europe have served prison sentences for violating
>these laws, but have been released. One of them lives in
>Switzerland, a man named Gaston Armand Armaudruz. Several years ago
>he wrote piece in a newsletter that he publishes in which he said
>that he didn't believe the gas chamber story, and he was arrested
>for it. His newsletter has a circulation of only a few hundred, but
>this man, who was in his eighties, had to serve a prison sentence
>for writing this.
>
>The Frenchman Robert Faurisson has also served some time in prison
>in his country. He has been released, but he has also had to pay
>very heavy fines for statements he has made about World War II and
>German policy toward the Jews during the war.
>
>Another Swiss citizen who was indicted under one of these laws is
>Jürgen Graf, a teacher and researcher who has written several books
>and who spoke at one of our conferences. He was found guilty of
>violating Switzerland's Holocaust denial law and was sentenced, but
>he fled the country and is now living abroad.
>
>* * *
>
>Free speech is under attack -- both direct attack from the Jewish
>establishment and indirect attack as we lose our freedoms as a wider
>war looms in the world. We'll be back next week to continue our
>interview with Mark Weber, Director of the Institute for Historical
>Review, as we talk about these and other vital questions on American
>Dissident Voices.
>
>* * *
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