Reporting The Irving/ Lipstadt Case & Irving: Skinhead in scholar robes

Reporting the Irving/ Lipstadt case Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand has, since the beginning of this year, been the venue of a libel action brought by the controversial right-wing British historian David Irving against the American academic Professor Deborah Lipstadt. Irving alleges that in her book Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in 1993, “Professor Lipstadt libelled him in referring to him as a Holocaust denier, a description that, he maintains, threatens his reputation as a historian. The proceedings have been held in open court with the public gallery always full to bursting. The press has regularly reported excerpts from the proceedings, both of the evidence and of judicial interventions Irving – skinhead in scholar’s robes In Kafka’s novella In the Penal Colony a monstrous machine inscribes each prisoner’s crime on his skin. The nightmare vision proved prophetic. Within a few years of the publication of the stor)’ the Nazis reversed the process: skin scarred by the circumcision knife became automatic proof of a ‘crime’ carrying the death penalty. The few who escaped felt ever after that they had been flayed and needed to grow new skin. This was a slow process ‘Unher held back by a series of traumatic shocks: the halfhearted pursuit of their tormentors, the courts’ leniency towards the latter, and, more recently, the burgeoning myth dubbed Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is tantamount to •digging up the Shoah victims to drench their mortal remains in manure. For us it means having to live with the stench of neo-Nazi manure in our nostrils forever. With The Hon. Justice Gray’s dismissal of David Irving’s libel suit on 11 April, the rag-taggle army of Holocaust deniers lost the one ‘historian’ who conferred bogus respectability on their crazy fabrications. The judge ruled that Irving had ^or his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence. For the same reason he had portrayed Hider “1 an unwarrantedly favourable light principally in relation… to the treatment of the Jews.’ Deprived of his nimbus of a historical scholar Irving stands revealed (in the judge’s words) as ‘an active Holocaust denier, an antisemitic racist associated with rightwing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.’ The importance of this judgement is not to be underestimated. It is part of an irreversible trend that has already led to countries like Germany and Switzerland making Holocaust denial a criminal offence. This trend has, alas, not yet reached the Arab world. In recent weeks neither the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem nor the Damascus-based daily Tishrin have scrupled about charging Israel with inflating the number of Shoah victims for political purposes. In the same vein of obdurate denial of the truth, Irving himself reacted to the court’s judgement rather like Goering had done at Nuremberg. His totally unrepentant post-trial manner bespoke a confidence that wealthy backers in Germany (e.g. the publisher Gerhard Frey) and the USA will meet all his legal expenses. He also knows that the trial has given him an unprecedently high profile. Even so he, and similar Holocaust deniers, are the ultimate losers in this case, because henceforth no antisemite will be able to masquerade under the guise of disinterested scholarship.