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Politics : Middle East Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (5777)	2/2/2004 4:44:04 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6945

Judge: Historian a Holocaust Denier New York Times April 11, 2000 By The Associated Press LONDON (AP) -- A judge branded historian David Irving as an anti-Semite racist and an apologist for Hitler in a strongly worded decision Tuesday, ruling that an American scholar was justified in calling him a Holocaust denier. Jewish groups hailed the verdict against Irving, who sued Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, over a 1994 book that he said damaged his academic reputation and accused him of playing down the horrors of the Holocaust. "I had argued that David Irving was partisan and an apologist for the Nazis and anti-Semitic,'' Lipstadt said after the verdict. "The judge went further than I did in his ruling -- and called him a racist.'' Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, issued a statement saying the judge sent a message to the world "that the arguments used by Irving and others to deny and diminish the events of the Holocaust are not within the realm of acceptable or reasonable discourse.'' In his two-hour judgment delivered to a packed courtroom, High Court Judge Charles Gray found that Irving "misrepresented and distorted'' historical evidence and that he is "anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.'' "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated'' history to paint Adolf Hitler in a favorable light, the judge said. Irving, the author of nearly 30 books, including "Hitler's War,'' said he does not deny that Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. He called Tuesday's ruling "perverse'' and said he would seek to appeal. The 62-year-old Briton represented himself during the nine-week, nonjury hearing, but as the loser must pay the huge legal costs, estimated at $3.2 million, for Lipstadt and her publishers. Irving, who has been banned from Germany, Canada and Australia, maintained during the trial that he had been the victim of a 30-year international campaign to destroy his reputation. He claimed that after publication of Lipstadt's book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,'' his academic work was increasingly shunned by publishers and agents. Under British libel law, Lipstadt and Penguin had to prove not only that Irving distorted the historical record, but that the distortion was deliberate. Lipstadt, who holds the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, briefly hugged supporters after the verdict. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak sent his congratulations to Lipstadt "in the name of Israel and the entire Jewish people.'' "Her struggle and victory is the victory of the free world against the forces of darkness that would wish to obliterate from memory the (depths) humanity reached,'' he said in a statement. In an interview with Sky TV on Tuesday, Irving denied being a racist and repeated his claim that Jewish deaths during the Holocaust have been exaggerated. Gassings of Jews occurred, he said, "but on nothing like the scale that's talked about now.'' And shortly before the verdict, Irving said he had reviewed some of his theories during the trial, but his basic position remained that "the Holocaust has been grossly inflated and there has been a hell of a lot of lying by the eyewitnesses.'' Jewish groups expressed relief at the judge's ruling. "Today's decision definitely places Irving where he belongs -- not as a historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history,'' said the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based movement dedicated to victims of the Nazis. "Here is a man who carried out a serious attempt to debunk the Holocaust,'' said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center's founder. "But it is not the Holocaust that has been debunked, it is David Irving himself.'' During the trial, Israel gave Lipstadt and Penguin's lawyers the previously secret memoirs of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which contained methodical descriptions of the genocide, including timetables of death transports. "It is a victory for 6 million voices that cannot speak for themselves,'' said Rabbi Jonathan Romain, son of a Holocaust survivor and a spokesman for Reform Synagogues in Britain. ``It is a defeat for the Holocaust denial industry and the bigotry that lies behind it.'' ferris.edu Len, your defense of Holocaust denier and right wing racist David Irving is a prime example of the Red-Brown alliance.