Oxford Union: David Irving a champion of free speech? Hardly.

According to the BBC, the Independent has described David Irving as an The Independent describes him as "An inconvenient champion of free speech".

Nothing could be further from the truth. He sued me for libel to silence me. He threatened to do the same to Gitta Sereny and to John Lukacs. In fact, Lukacs had to eliminate some of most severe criticism of Irving from his book in order to get it published in the UK.

But, as I have repeatedly predicted in this blog and in other places, laws outlawing Holocaust denial turn the person against whom they are directed into martyrs.

David Irving is neither a martyr -- he chose to go to Austria even though he knew there was a warrant for his arrest -- nor a champion of free speech. To describe as such is to engage in self-delusion of the first order.

Oxford Union: Irving and Griffin to appear shortly

For my posts on the Oxford Union circus click here.

For my posts on the debate about making Holocaust denial illegal, click here.

Criminalizing Holocaust and genocide denial: An academic forum

For a round table discussion about criminalizing denial of the Holocaust and other genocides see the recent issue of FrontPage

The Guardian's report on ICA debate

For a report on the ICA debate in London on EU law's against genocide denial see today's Guardian website.

From London: Article in Spiked magazine

I have a short piece in today's Spiked about the issue to be debated tonight.

Monday 16 July 2007
Denial should be defeated by facts, not laws
In the run-up to a debate in London tonight, the American warrior against Holocaust denial explains why she’s opposed to censoring deniers.

Deborah Lipstadt

When an editor at the Washington Post heard that I oppose laws criminalising Holocaust and, by extension, genocide denial, he observed: ‘Now that’s a “man bites dog” story.’

His surprise is shared by many people who hear my view. These folks expect that, given the six-year legal battle to which British historian David Irving subjected me for calling him a Holocaust denier, I would be a strong proponent for such laws. The legal battle was exceptionally costly and it seriously disrupted my life.

Irving and his fellow deniers are liars and falsifiers of truth when it comes to the Holocaust and even to other aspects of history – for example, the bombing of Dresden. This alone makes some people think his outrageous claims should be outlawed.

Regarding Irving, who seems to me to love to say the outrageous, and his version of so-called history, the judge who presided over our legal battle – Judge Charles Gray – was unambiguous. In his judgment he used the following terms: ‘perverts’, ‘distorts’, ‘misleading’, ‘unjustified’, ‘travesty’, and ‘unreal’, and said his ‘falsification of the historical record was deliberate’.

So why not silence Irving and his compatriots? First of all, I believe in free speech. In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees people a right to make total fools of themselves. Sometimes it is painful to hear, but I would rather they had the freedom to say what they wished than the government had the power to control them.

Furthermore, I do not believe that laws against denial are strategically wise. They tend to make martyrs of the accused, arousing sympathy for them. They also render the item which has been outlawed ‘forbidden fruit’. Thus it becomes more enticing and appealing to certain segments of society – disaffected youth, for example.

Most importantly, however, genocide denial laws suggest that we do not have the facts and the documentation to prove that these people are liars. We defeated David Irving in court not with law but with facts. We followed his footnotes and demonstrated that, in the words of Professor Richard Evans, Irving’s work on the Holocaust was a ‘tissue of lies’.

Our defeat of Irving is a far more powerful commentary on his work because it is rooted in the facts and did not occur under the cover of a general law outlawing Holocaust denial. I was, of course, quite lucky in that I had a magnificent legal team and group of historical experts.

The effort was long and quite costly. (Though certainly not as costly as David Irving likes to claim it was. I recently spotted an estimate of six million dollars on his webpage. Notice, of course, his choice of number. This is complete fiction and his form of ridicule.) I was able to mount a vigorous defence. Irving’s reputation as a person with something of value to say about the Holocaust was left in tatters.

Ironically, none of this would have happened had the UK had laws outlawing Holocaust denial.

I shudder at the thought that politicians might be given the power to legislate history. They can hardly fix the potholes in our streets. How can we expect them to decide what is the proper version of history?

Let me add two caveats. I believe quite strongly that those who engage in incitement – which is often the object of denial – and lead others to engage in acts of violence should not be granted a shield of protection by the law. Some people throw stones. Others use words to encourage people to throw stones. Both are equally guilty.

Secondly, I fully understand why countries such as Germany and Austria, the countries which spawned the Holocaust, would have laws against Holocaust denial. The geographic context in which something is said is of crucial importance. The swastika or denial of the Holocaust has a different resonance in Atlanta than it does in Berlin or Vienna.

I know this may be inconsistent, but I am reminded of what the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote many years ago: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’

I write this from Sarajevo. Today, a professor, who happens to be a Serb, told me that she believes laws against genocide denial are necessary in this region: denying the horrors that took place here in the mid-1990s should be illegal, at least for the near future. She argued that this is a region in which the ‘rule of law’ has never been imposed justly, fairly, and democratically. A law outlawing denial of the genocide and crimes against humanity which occurred in this region would give people that faith and prevent them from trying to find other ways of seeking justice.

I don’t agree with these positions; however, I recognise that I say these things in the luxury of my American university or, as I will on Monday evening, in the confines of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It can be different when one has an ‘up close and personal’ perspective on these outrages.

Ultimately, our objective should be to create a society where denial of genocide is seen as so outrageous and so despicable that anyone who engages in it would be rendered a pariah.

Deborah E Lipstadt is Dorot Professor at Emory University and the author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, published by Ecco 2005.

She is speaking in the debate Should Genocide Denial Be An Offence? at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in central London at 7pm this evening (Monday, 16 July). Other speakers include David Cesarani, research professor in history at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and author of Eichmann: His Life and Crimes; Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right; and Francesca Klug, professorial research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE, and author of Values for a Godless Age. For more information, click here.

Previously on spiked

Brendan O’Neill interviewed Deborah Lipstadt about European proposals to outlaw genocide denial. Frank Furedi said that laws against genocide denial were a really bad idea. Nathalie Rothschild argued that bans on Israeli academics are censorship in disguise. Josie Appleton argued that accusations of ‘fascism’ are used to shut down debate. Brendan O’Neill said that the use and abuse of the g-word in international affairs has given rise to a new game: Pimp My Genocide. Or read more at spiked issue Free speech.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3609/

From London: Tonight at the ICA [Institute for Contemporary Art]

I shall be participating in a debate this evening at 7 p.m. at the ICA in London. From the ICA's website:

A new EU directive has made "publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" an offence which is punishable by law.

Should deniers of genocide be allowed to propagate lies and historical distortions when these distortions are designed to instigate violence? Does the proposed EU-wide legislation confuse the role of the judge and the historian, is such a ban workable, and what are the legal and philosophical implications of its passage into law?

Speakers: Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot professor of modern Jewish and holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, defendant in the David Irving vs Penguin and Lipstadt case and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier; David Cesarani, research professor in history at Royal Holloway College, University of London and author of Eichmann: His Life and Crimes; Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right; Francesca Klug, professorial research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE, and author of Values for a Godless Age.

Tickets: You can book tickets here or get them at the door.

From Sarajevo: The gassing of the Kurds... a form of denial

Today I learned something very important. I learned that I had been complicit in a form of denial.

In my talk at the meeting of the International Association of Scholars of Genocide I spoke about the relationship between study of the Holocaust and other genocides. I mentioned some of the recent post-World War II genocides, among them Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebenica, and Darfur.

A very compelling woman, Choman Hardi, whom I had met the day before came to the microphone. I knew that she was from Kurdistan, had left at the time of the gassing of the Kurds by Sadaam, moved with her parents to Germany, and then to London. She has received her Ph.D. there from the University of Canterbury and has just completed a post-doc.

She asked why was it that every time we listed various other genocides we neglected to mention the gassing of the Kurds at Anfall where countless thousands were slaughtered.

This gassing, which was made possible in measure by western corporations which sold Sadaam the raw materials he needed, is one of the great atrocities of the post-WWII period.

Yet we hardly ever mention it.

Why? I don't know but I am thinking about it..... And I have resolved not to commit this omission or, shall we say, denial in the future.

From Sarajevo: Carla del Ponte

We are gathered to listen to Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor at the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia). She is the one who prosecuted Milosevic.

She is a bit of a controversial figure here in BBosnia and Herzegovina. There are those who are upset with her that only Milosevic was charged and not the many others who participated in the tragedies in this country, including at Srebrenica

Some people, I learned last night when I appeared on Bosnia's leading news show, are upset because they allege that she received some documents which she used in the case against Milosevic but which she did not allow to be used in a subsequent case brought by Bosnia against Serbia for the crime of genocide. [Some people believe she cut a deal with Serbia.]

A Ph.D. student at the university here just challenged her on this. She denied that she did it. She said quite clearly that the decision about the use of the documents this was made by the judges not her.

She also made another point which I do understand. She said that they received all sorts of documents "under the table." She was quite clear that, since she did not know the source or could not be sure they were genuine, they could not be used in court.

Others are upset that Milosevic was charged but those who worked closely with him, e.g. Karadzic, were not. Again, she strongly asserted that this was a decision made by the Security Council and not by her.

I can't comment on the specifics of these issues but I can say that these issues -- including whether genocide happened in Sarajevo itself and not just in Srebrenica -- are burning matters here. People’s pain is palpable.

Talk about the here and now-ness of history.

And tomorrow we go to Srebrenica for a reburial of some of the bodies which have recently been exhumed.

Should deniers' books be removed from libraries?

I received the following email today. The subject line read Irving's books:

I would very much value your opinion on whether one should formally seek to have one's regional and local libraries remove all of the above books from their shelves. On the one hand and certainly on a personal level I would like to see them purged along with Irving. On the other hand should they be available for educated readers to see for themselves how history... has been the subject of misrepresentation and fraud.

Of course there will always be those who because of ignorance will read his Dresden account and not be aware of its falsity and reliance on Nazi misinformation....Best regards, Mitchell S. Toms River, N.J.

I told him that I am, in principle, opposed to removing books from libraries. I don't believe in censorship.

Furthermore, I think that is a slippery slope that can lead to all sorts of worthy books being removed from libraries, e.g. Diary of Anne Frank. A good solution would be to place denial books such as Butz’s Hoax of the 20th Century and some of Irving’s books placed in a section called Holocaust Fallacies and Falsehoods.

The Library of Congress actually does that with a category Holocaust, Jewish 1939-1945—errors, inventions, etc. John Drobnicki, a university librarian, has written a thoughtful article on the question of whether libraries should have this material in their collections.

Bottom line is that I am against censorship. Censorship is what David Irving tried to do to me when he sued me for libel. Remember he offered to settle with me if I agreed to shred my books.

EU Legislation on genocide denial: Still in flux

IN mid-April I said the proposed EU legislation had been defeated. The fact is that it is still in discussion and there is, according to Bruno Waterfield, correspondent for the Daily Telegraph [London], a fair bit of jockeying going on in various preparatory committees.

The UK pushed and got a raising of the threshold for an offence to that which exists in British legislation on race and religious hatred. The threshold includes targeting groups or using "threatening, abuse or insulting" language. It is felt that this threshold will not limit the free speech of scholars or artists.

Waterfield wrties that "The scope of legislation remained the same: the Nazi crimes as defined in the courts and any genocide as defined in (the broad) statute of the International Criminal Court."

Eventually the legislation could be extended to encompass Stalin era crimes.

EU Law to outlaw Genocide denial defeated

Reports from Brussels indicate that the attempt -- most strongly supported by Germany -- to outlaw genocide denial has been defeated.

The EU reached the following compromise: "publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" must be made a crime in each EU state. However the statement also included a concession that such prosecutions could only succeed where such conduct is likely to incite hatred or violence.

In short member states are pretty much left to themselves. This is a good thing as I have frequently argued on this blog and in various interviews. Ironically, deniers will also declare it a victory and contend that this shows Europe's doubts about the veracity of the Holocaust. It, of course, does no such thing.

My fear is that the deniers' crowing will produce a series of "oy-gevalt" emails from Jewish sources. Some people will probably link it last week's false scares about the UK dropping teaching of the Holocaust.

A different slant on Michael Ray Richardson's statements

Writing in the LA Times, Zev Chafetz provides a somewhat different slant on the Michael Ray Richardson comments. We both agree he should not be fired but for somewhat different reasons.

Something to think about: Should Imus keep his job [after all he knew exactly what he was saying and did not for a minute think he was being complimentary] and Richardson lose his [he thought he was saying something nice]???

More on Imus later....

Editor of Creative Loafing responds to me

Ken Edelstein, the editor of Creative Loafing has responded to my criticism of John Sugg's attacks on me.

Doesn't sound to me like he is giving Sugg's views a ringing endorsement....

Those of you interested in the Jimmy Carter book might be interested in Edelstein's comments about the book.

Good news from French Court: It's OK to publish the Danish Muhammed Cartoons

In contrast to the previous post in which a German judge took multia French court has shown the good sense to rule that a paper which published the Danish Muslim cartoons had every right to do so. The charges, which had been brought by the Paris Mosque and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, accused the newspaper of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion.”

As the NY Times reported, the French paper, Charlie Hebdo

published the cartoons in solidarity with the Danish newspaper and to make a point about freedom of expression in France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe.

The Times also noted that the French paper published an original drawing by the French cartoonist Cabu depicting a crying Muhammad with his head in his hands, saying, “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.”

While the French court's decision is reassuring, I wonder why the NYTimes did not publish this original drawing. Are we seeing the chilling effect of the Muslim protests???

A correspondent from Sarajevo reflects on genocide denial laws

Received the following email from Sarajevo:

From: Dusan Babic
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 1:39 PM
To: Deborah Lipstadt
Subject: Free Speech

Dear Deborah,

After reading Brendan's article in Spiked online, I've visited your blog and read the Sugg's attack on you and your answer. He described you as "an architect of silencing debate", and you're just doing the opposite think, clearly claiming that "this kind of legislation (criminalizing genocide) could put a kabash on that (i.e., debate)".

Yesterday I was reading another Brendan's article about controversies over hate speech. In my respond, I did remind him of his article also published in the Spiked online (Dec., 20, 2005), then he was using two cases: of Orhan Pamuk and of David Irving to claim, what was put in the title itself: "Free Speech in Europe: It's All or Nothing". In brief, I've replied that Brendan is absolutizing the freedom of expression.

Simply, there is no such thing, at least for most of Europeans, after horrors of the WW 2 and the Holocaust, and the bloody Balkans wars.

In my modest view, "Mein Kampf" is the litmus test of democracy and responsibility. By far, it's the most detrimental book ever written.

Your countryman, Norman Cousins, had calculated:"for every word 125 lives were to be lost; for every page, 4,700 lives; for every chapter, more than 1,2 million lives."

European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), has been inspired by horrifying events, just as the result of the "Mein Kampf", i.e., its hate inspired language. No need to mention the shameful role the media played in inciting the violence which ended in a civil war in my country. Words are power and men are sinful. Hate inspiring language cannot be an unregulated frontier.

Regarding, possible criminalization of all genocides, only the Holocaust deniers should be prosecuted, since it was a real genocide.

Sincerely,

Dusan Babic, media expert, researcher and analyst,
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
________________________________________

More on the Armenian genocide and laws against denial

I want to elaborate on my previous post. What if a scholar said: the Turks set out to murder in as brutal a fashion as many Armenians they could lay their hands on in Turkey. What they did was immoral and a crime of major proportions. Furthermore, their failure to acknowledge their terrible wrongdoing and, even more so, their denial of it further compounds their crime.

So far so good.

What then if the scholar went on to say "but I don't think it should be termed a genocide"?

Now we have a problem. Should that person be prosecuted? According to this Swiss court it seems yes. What happens then to academic debate?

This situation reminds me of the debate that once prevailed among scholars of the Holocaust about its uniqueness. More on that later.

Swiss convict Turkish politician for denying Armenian genocide

According to today's New York Times, the Swiss have convicted a Turkish politician of denying the Armenian genocide. I am pretty sure that, given that the guy was a Turkish politician, he was a traditional Armenian genocide denier. These folks are not much different than Holocaust deniers.

However, what if the person had been an historian who, while not denying the barbarity of the Turks towards their Armenian victims, questioned whether it should be termed a genocide? [I, by the way, believe it should be.] The person might take this position because Armenians in other places in the world were safe from the Turks.

Would that person be sentenced as well? What kind of chill does this put on academic discourse? This is a dangerous Pandora's Box.

Lipstadt at University of Colorado, Wednesday 2/28: Students fear disruptions

I will be speaking at the University of Colorado on Wednesday, February 28th, in the Glenn Miller Auditorium at 7:00 [double check the time]. According to the student newspaper, this appearance has caused some concern at the university because of a faculty member who seems rather sympathetic to Holocaust deniers and whose essay won in 2004 from the white supremacist group Stormfront, an organization whose website proclaims that it is for "pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival."

While some students on the campus have expressed fear that he will disrupt the lecture, I have posted a comment on the student newspaper:

From my perspective, Mr. McNair is welcome to attend my lecture. He might actually learn something about David Irving, a man who was declared by Judge Charles Gray of the Royal High Court, to be a liar, Holocaust denier, a man with racist and antisemitic views, whose claims about history are a "travesty."

See Judge Gray's evaluation of Irving at www.hdot.org [click on Verdict and go to Part XIII].

See you this week.

Deborah Lipstadt, Ph.D.

Boston Jewish Advocate on visit of Neturei Karta rabbi to MIT

Here's the Jewish Advocate story on the visit of this so-called rabbi to MIT.

Interview in Spiked

Because some people have had trouble getting the Spiked interview on line [they have had some trouble with their server], here are some excerpts from the article:

Tuesday 6 February 2007 ‘Genocide denial laws will shut down debate’ She's one of the best-known warriors against Holocaust denial. Yet Deborah Lipstadt thinks EU plans to ban 'genocide denial' are a disaster. Brendan O’Neill ‘For European politicians, bringing in a ban on genocide denial is like apple pie. It’s what I call a freebie. They’re doing it to make themselves feel good. I mean, who could possibly be against standing up to nasty genocide deniers? Only when you get to the heart of it, this “freebie”, this populist move, could have a dire impact on academic debate. Even on truth itself.’ Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, may be one of the best-known warriors against Holocaust denial. But she has no time for the proposals currently doing the rounds of the European Union which suggest making it a crime to deny the Holocaust, other genocides and crimes against humanity in general. Last week it was revealed that Germany, current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, is proposing a Europe-wide ban on Holocaust denial and other forms of genocide denial. This would make a crime of ‘publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising…crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes [as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court].’ (1) In some European countries – most notably Germany and Austria, which formed the heart of the Third Reich – it is already against the law to deny or minimise the Nazis’ exterminatory campaign against the Jews in the Second World War. This new legislation might also make it a crime, punishable by fines or imprisonment, to raise awkward questions about the official history of conflicts that took place over the past 20 years. ‘This is so over the top’, says Lipstadt, in between sips of decaf coffee in the plush surroundings of the Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly, London. Her earthy New York accent sounds almost out of place in a building where even the doorman comes across as posh. ‘The question of genocide, the history of genocide and what you can say about it, should not be decided by politicians and judges’, she insists. Lipstadt certainly can’t be accused of being soft on deniers. Her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in 1994, meticulously exposed the lies and the underlying racist agenda of those who deny the truth of the Nazi Holocaust. Famously (or infamously) she was subsequently sued by the British historian David Irving, whom she had named in the book as a Holocaust denier. In January 2000, the 32-day trial, a showdown between an American-Jewish historian and a far-right British historian, became a legal debate about the history of the Nazis, and the nature of truth itself. Irving lost rather spectacularly. The judge branded him an anti-Semite, a racist and a Holocaust denier who had ‘deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence’. Lipstadt recounts the experience in History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. Yet this ridiculer of deniers is no fan of the idea that Holocaust denial or genocide denial should be outlawed. The current EU proposal to criminalise denial of contemporary genocides and war crimes is an affront to serious historical debate, she says. Consider Srebrenica, the massacre that took place at the end of the Bosnian civil war in 1995 in which it is estimated that 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. ‘Some people argue that, given there are only so many tens of thousands of people in Srebrenica and the Serb soldiers went after an X number of a specific group, then it is genocide. But someone else might say it’s a massacre of the X population, not a genocide – because if you’re going to use that word then you have to go back to what the Nazis did to the Jews or what was done to the Armenians [by the Turks in the First World War]’, says Lipstadt. ‘That is an entirely legitimate debate to have about Srebrenica. Are we now saying that the person who says it’s not a genocide will be fined and punished?’ Lipstadt is also worried about the way in which debate about the Armenian experience might be closed down. During the First World War, as Ottoman Turkish forces fought against the Russians, some of the Armenian minority in Eastern Anatolia sided with Russia. Turkey responded by rounding up and killing hundreds of Armenian community leaders in April 1915, and then forcibly deporting the two million-strong Armenian community in marches towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Hundreds of thousands died as a result. At the end of last year, to the fury of Turkey, France made it a crime to deny that the Armenian tragedy was a genocide, and now Germany seems to hope that the rest of Europe will follow suit by accepting its proposals to outlaw denial of all genocides. ‘This is another body-blow to academic debate’, says Lipstdadt. ‘I know serious historians who do not deny for a minute what happened to the Armenians, who do not deny the severity or the barbarity of what happened to them. But they question, they ask intellectually, “Was this a genocide, or was it a horrendous massacre?” They don’t ask that question on ideological grounds; they don’t have a shred of allegiance to Turkey. They ask it intellectually, because they want to get to the truth.’ ‘I happen to think they’re wrong’, she says. She believes the Armenians did suffer a genocide. ‘But you can, indeed you must, have a vigorous academic debate about historical events. And in the course of that vigorous academic debate you probably would illuminate weaknesses in both sides of the argument, and hopefully sharpen the arguments as a result. That is what academic debate is about. This kind of legislation could put a kabash on that.’ Last year, in its reporting of the French decision to outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide, the BBC was forced to explain why it put the word ‘genocide’ in inverted commas. ‘Whether or not the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the First World War amounted to genocide is a matter for heated debate’, it said (2). Yet if the proposed legislation is passed in the EU, then such things will no longer be a matter for heated debate; they will become legally-defined truths that you deny or question at your peril. Maybe even the BBC will find itself in the dock for putting ‘Armenian genocide’ in inverted commas. It strikes me that as well as stifling open academic debate the proposed legislation could criminalise political protest. Very often these days, Western powers justify wars of intervention abroad in the language of combating genocide. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair described their bombing crusade over Kosovo in 1999 as an effort to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s ‘genocide’ against the Kosovo Albanians. In truth, the final number of civilians killed in Kosovo – including both Kosovo Albanians by Milosevic’s cronies and Serbs in NATO air strikes – was fewer than 3,000. The Nazis were capable of killing 12,000 a day in Auschwitz alone. As Nazi camp survivor Elie Wiesel said, taking umbrage at the use of Holocaust-talk to justify the Kosovo campaign, ‘The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that Milosevic and his accomplices seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?’ (3) If EU officials, in their infinite wisdom, decide that a conflict such as Kosovo is genocide, and therefore the bombers must be sent in, will protesters who question that line be criminalised under the new legislation? Lipstadt finds today’s over-use of the genocide and Holocaust tags, to describe conflicts or political repression, disturbing and distasteful. She seems still to be reeling from an article she read in The Times on Saturday, the day before we met. Under the headline ‘We are vilified like Jews by the Nazis, says Muslim leader’, the paper reported that Birmingham’s most senior Muslim leader had compared contemporary political Britain to Nazi Germany. ‘That is ludicrous. It is stupid and ridiculous’, she says. ‘Is there fear of Muslims today? No doubt. Do some politicians play on that? Of course. But to compare Muslims in Britain to Jews in Nazi Germany…that shows an utter lack of historical understanding, not to mention sensitivity. Here, the police go out of their way to explain to Muslims what is going on. In Nazi Germany if a Jew spoke to a policeman he got hit. It was a whole government dedicated to being against you, to eliminating you. So that is a disgusting kind of analogy. It is wicked, and cleverly wicked. Sometimes it is done in a calculating fashion to further your aims by playing that victim card.’ To the ‘befuddlement’ of some of her colleagues, Lipstadt is also opposed to laws outlawing actual Nazi Holocaust denial. Such laws already exist in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, and under Germany’s proposals these will be extended to the rest of the EU and will also cover genocide and war crimes denial. She points out that there is a huge difference between those historians who legitimately debate something like the Armenian experience, and the charlatans who distort the truth in order to show that the Holocaust didn’t happen and ‘the Jews’ are all liars. Where ‘genocide denial’ laws might frustrate serious academic debate, Holocaust denial laws are only aimed at punishing weird and malicious pseudo-historians. Yet she is against the censorship of these charlatans, too. ‘I’m opposed to Holocaust denial laws for three reasons’, she says. ‘First because I believe in free speech. Governments should make no laws limiting free speech, because it is never good when that happens. Second, because these laws turn Holocaust deniers into martyrs. Look what happened to David Irving when he was released from jail in Austria – he became a media darling, given room to spout his misinformation. We should ignore them rather than chasing them down. ‘And thirdly, and most importantly, such laws suggest that we don’t have the history, the documentation, the evidence to make the case for the Holocaust having happened. They suggest we don’t trust the truth. But we do have the evidence, and we should keep on developing it and deepening it, and we should trust it.’ Ironically, given her outspoken opposition to laws against Holocaust and genocide denial, many point to Lipstadt’s legal victory over David Irving as evidence for why the courtroom is a good place to resolve historical issues and punish those who lie about or deny historic tragedies. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that’, she says. She points out that her case was not about ruthlessly pursuing Irving in order to prove the truth about the Holocaust. ‘He came after me! He sued me! I didn’t want it. I tried to stop it. Our whole legal strategy was premised on trying to make this guy go away. Only when it was very close to the case, when I saw the wealth of evidence that showed how he had lied and distorted the facts, was I glad it had come to court. Aside from that, I can think of no other instance where history has benefited from courtroom adjudication.’ ‘Politicians should not be doing history’, she says. ‘They have a hard enough time doing politics right and doing legislation right. Let them not muck up history, too.’ Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving is published by Harper Perennial. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)). Visit her website here. The photographs of Professor Lipstadt were taken by Sasha Frieze who blogs at Sashinka. (1) EU plans far-reaching ‘genocide denial’ law, Bruno Waterfield, Daily Telegraph, 4 February 2007 (2) Q&A: Armenian ‘genocide’, BBC News, 12 October 2006 (3) Quoted in ‘Exploiting genocide’, Brendan O’Neill, Spectator, 21 January 2006 reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2824/