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January 14, 2000/7 Shevat 5760, Vol. 52, No.19
London trial pits Holocaust revisionist against scholar
DOUGLAS DAVIS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LONDON - A British defense attorney gave a taste of the drama to come in the libel trial brought by a Holocaust revisionist against a Holocaust scholar when, during his opening statement this week, he addressed the plaintiff.
"To put it bluntly," Richard Rampton, who is defending Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving, told the judge Tuesday, "he is a liar."
This landmark trial, held in the august setting of London's Royal Courts of Justice, is expected to last for some three months and is likely to involve the most detailed judicial examination of the Holocaust since the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem almost 40 years ago. If Irving wins, analysts say, it could give credibility to Holocaust revisionism at a time when those who witnessed the horrors themselves are dying out.
The case centers around claims made against the British historian by Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, in her 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," published by Penguin Books.
Lipstadt has a daunting task ahead of her. Under British law, the burden of proof is squarely on her and her publisher to show that Irving is indeed a deliberate distorter of events in World War II. Irving, who is representing himself, suggested in his opening argument that beyond his claims against Lipstadt, there was an international Jewish conspiracy to destroy him.
Irving claims that Lipstadt defamed him by alleging that his writing "applauds the internment of Jews in Nazi concentration camps" and that he is "an Adolf Hitler partisan who wears blinkers and skews documents and misrepresents data in order to reach untenable conclusions."
In his opening statement, Rampton declared, "Lies may take various forms and may as often consist of suppression or omission as of falsehood and invention, but in the end all forms of lying converge into a single definition: willful, deliberate misstatement of the facts."
Irving, he contended, had employed "many different means to falsify history - invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion, manipulation and, not least, mistranslation."
Moreover, Rampton told the austere and somber courtroom, the lies that Irving had told concern the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis during World War II and Hitler's role in that catastrophe - "or, as Irving would have it, alleged catastrophe." It was, he said, "an area of history which requires any writer or researcher to be particularly careful of the truth."
Irving, he continued bluntly, is a Holocaust denier: "By this I mean he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out the systematic murder of millions of Jews - in particular, though by no means exclusively, by the use of homicidal gas chambers, and in particular, though by no means exclusively, at Auschwitz." As Irving almost visibly seethed, Rampton recalled a speech Irving had given to an audience in Calgary, Alberta, in September 1991, a speech, he said, that "conveys a message about his true views and attitudes."
"I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz," Rampton quoted Irving as saying. "It's baloney. It's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and a large number of people did die, as large numbers of people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?"
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