Thank you....your kind thought is much appreciated, especially as we lost our home and everything on March 20, as a result of Austria's kidnapping me. But now that nightmare is over.

I just checked back into London a few hours ago after two days still held in a police jail in Vienna after being released from the main Vienna prison when our appeal was upheld on Wednesday December 21. I have the fine oratory of my 84 year old defence lawyer Dr Herbert Schaller to thank for the unexpected victory in the appeal court.

I spent over 400 days in solitary confinement in Austria's oldest prison, sentenced in February to three years' jail for an opinion I expressed in two talks seventeen years ago. Not nice.

However we shall now gird ourselves for a fresh legal battle in Austria, (1) to overthrow my deportation order, and (2) to put Austria before the UN Court of Human Rights.

The enemy are spitting with rage, and -- with one final quote uttered by me to the Agence France Presse ("Mel Gibson was right!") in a phone interview in the midst of a final police interrogation -- I was out of there and, belatedly, on a plane to London. It got in around 10 pm this evening, too late for all the TV shows that had lined up. But we have made a great dent in "their" cause, and had a real victory for Real History.

More soon, and you'll find my website back on line shortly.

David Irving (now back writing in London) pp Focal Point Publications

__________

"Deep down, I believe that a little anti-Semitism is a good thing for the Jews - reminds us who we are." --Jay Lefkowitz (NYT Magazine. Feb.12, 1995. Page 65).

--Jay Lefkowitz is now Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.

Peace.

Michael Santomauro Editorial Director 253 West 72nd street Suite1711 New York, NY 10023

<http://www.tadp.org>http://www.tadp.org 212-787-7891

Political prisoner David Irving held in an Austrian jail for the past 13 months has been released on probation. The Austrian Appeals Court cut his three year sentence for a speech delivered in 1989 questioning some aspects of the Hollywood version of World War II, to one year (time served) and two years of probation.

“The appeals court in Vienna had heard calls for both a reduction and increase in the three-year sentence. Irving was convicted in February in a case that sparked international debate about the limits of freedom of speech. In 1989 he spoke in Austria denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. … Irving on Wednesday welcomed his release and said he was "fit and well". The 68-year-old said he would urge an academic boycott of historians from Germany and Austria until the nations stopped jailing historians. ‘I was put in prison for three years for expressing an opinion 17 years ago,’ he said. … But his lawyer, Herbert Schaller, said: ‘He is free, and he can leave, and he will leave.’" (BBC News, December 20, 2006) “We're organising his press conference here in central London,” Lady Michele Renouf, the British historian’s press spokesman told CAFÉ from London this morning. “David Irving is completely free now,” she said. “We expect that his release and paperwork will processed and that he may return to London as early as tonight.”

One slight glitch, she said, was a heavy fog blanketing much of England. “Would you believe his delay is being delayed by fog? There are no domestic flights in or out of Southern England and few from the continent.”

Mr. Irving had expressed a strong desire to be home for Christmas. Sounding a sour and vindictive note was Lord Janner. The “vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and president of the Commonwealth Jewish Council, said: ‘I am sorry that he did not serve out his full term, and I hope he will remain in Austria and not return to the United Kingdom, where he will not be welcome.’" (BBC News, December 20, 2006) “Mr. Irving’s release is the result of more than a year of protests, letters to Austrian authorities, letters to the editor and protests organized by Lady Michele Renouf in London and CAFÉ in Ottawa,” said Paul Fromm,” Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression. “It’s a tribute to hundreds of free speech supporters in Canada, America, Europe and Australia who wrote those letters of protest to Austrian authorities and kept up the pressure. Equally important, I believe, the recent conference in Tehran skewered Western hypocrisy about free speech. Ironically one of the few places on earth where scholars could meet to question the so-called holocaust account of World War II was Tehran. Despite the West’s breast beating about its commitment to human rights, the outspoken Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad pointed out that writers and scholars were in Western prisons for merely questioning aspects of the new state religion of Holocaust.” Lady Michele Renouf was a featured speaker at the Tehran Conference and is on the key organizing committee planning a future conference.

David Irving says he has changed his views on the Holocaust An Austrian court has ruled that UK historian David Irving - jailed for denying the Holocaust - should be released on probation. The appeals court in Vienna had heard calls for both a reduction and increase in the three-year sentence. Irving was convicted in February in a case that sparked international debate about the limits of freedom of speech. In 1989 he spoke in Austria denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, though he later said he was "mistaken". Irving on Wednesday welcomed his release and said he was "fit and well". The 68-year-old said he would urge an academic boycott of historians from Germany and Austria until the nations stopped jailing historians. "I was put in prison for three years for expressing an opinion 17 years ago," he said. Intense debate The BBC's Kerry Skyring in Vienna said the presiding judge converted the remaining two years of Irving's jail term to a provisional sentence, upholding his appeal. The conditions of the probation are not yet known, including whether Irving will be able to leave Austria.

COUNTRIES WITH LAWS AGAINST HOLOCAUST DENIAL Austria Belgium Czech Republic France Germany Israel Lithuania Poland Romania Slovakia Switzerland

Timeline: David Irving Denying the Holocaust But his lawyer, Herbert Schaller, said: "He is free, and he can leave, and he will leave." Irving is expected to be released from custody later on Wednesday. Both the prosecution and defence had challenged the length of the sentence. The crime carries a prison term of up to 10 years. The 1992 law targets "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide". Irving's release on probation has dismayed Jewish groups. Lord Janner, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and president of the Commonwealth Jewish Council, said: "I am sorry that he did not serve out his full term, and I hope he will remain in Austria and not return to the United Kingdom, where he will not be welcome." Asked about Irving's comments about historians being put in prison, Lord Janner said: "I do not believe that he was put in prison because he was a historian. And historians should be treated in the same way as anyone else."

Irving was arrested in November last year on a motorway in southern Austria. He was visiting to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity. The conviction had sparked intense debate, with supporters saying it was fully justified but opponents arguing it undermined the right of freedom of speech. At the initial trial, Irving had said it was "ridiculous" he was being tried for expressing an opinion and that he had changed his views on the Holocaust.

VIENNA (AFP)--- An Austrian court has upheld a guilty verdict imposed on British historian David Irving for denying the existence of the Holocaust, the Austrian Press Agency (APA) reported Monday.

Another court has yet to rule on Irving's appeal of his three-year prison sentence, which he is now serving in a Vienna jail. This ruling is not expected for at least two months.

Irving, 68, has been in jail since a one-day trial on February 20 at which he pleaded guilty to a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry. But Irving insisted at the trial that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving was also on trial for saying the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews was not the work of the Nazis, but of "unknown" people who had dressed up as storm troopers, and that Adolf Hitler had in fact protected the Jews.

The first court confirmed the guilty verdict in a closed-door session August 29, APA said.

Irving was prosecuted under an Austrian law targeting those who "deny the genocide by the National Socialists or other National Socialist crimes against humanity." Austria is among 11 countries that have laws against denying the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were slaughtered by Nazi Germany during WWII.

Irving has become notorious worldwide for attempting to establish, against the evidence, that Hitler was not party to the Holocaust, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that the number of Jews slain by the Nazis was greatly exaggerated.

In 2000, Irving lost his fortune when he lost a high-profile libel case against US historian Deborah Lipstadt whom he had sued when she called him a Holocaust denier.

David Irving

David Irving, the controversial British historian, is the author of numerous books on military history and World War II, including several international bestsellers.

On November 11, 2005, he was arrested during a visit in Austria for the “thought crime” – committed in 1989 (!) – of having referred to “mythical” gas chambers at Auschwitz . Denied bail, he was held in jail until his trial on February 20, 2006, when a court in Vienna sentenced him to three years in prison for having “denied the Holocaust.”

David Irving
Gef. Nr. 70306
Justizanstalt Josefstadt
Wickenburggasse 18-20
1082 Wien
Austria

In the aftermath of the trial, newspapers, political leaders and intellectuals around the world spoke out against the sentence, as well as against the laws in Europe under which he and other dissidents have been imprisoned and fined for “Holocaust denial” (The only voices of approval were the predictable Zionist ones.)

While Irving is the most prominent “thought criminal” in the western world today, his case is by no means unique. In several European countries, as well as in Israel, “Holocaust denial” is a crime. The list of those who have been imprisoned, fined or forced into exile for expressing skepticism about the official Holocaust story is a long one, and includes Robert Faurisson, Roger Garaudy and Georges Theil in France, Siegfried Verbeke in Belgium, Jürgen Graf and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz in Switzerland, and Günter Deckert, Hans Schmidt and Fredrick Toben in Germany .

David John Cawdell Irving was born on March 24, 1938, in Essex, England, the son of a Royal Navy Commander. After education at London University, he spent a year working in a steel mill in Germany, where he perfected his fluency in the language. (He later also learned to speak very good Spanish.)

His first book, The Destruction of Dresden, was published in 1963, when he was 25 years old. This was followed by many others, including The Mare's Nest: The Secret Weapons of the Third Reich, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, The German Atomic Bomb, The War Between the Generals and The Trail of the Fox, a best-selling biography of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel.

His books have appeared in a range of languages. Several have been serialized in prominent periodicals. He has contributed articles to some 60 British and foreign periodicals including the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Express in Britain, and Stern and Der Spiegel in Germany.

Irving has a track record of uncovering startling new facts about supposedly well-known episodes of history. Much of his effectiveness has been due to his extensive reliance on primary source materials, such as diaries, original documents and so forth, from both official archives and private sources. He is disdainful of scholars who engage in what he calls inter-historian incest, and who thereby help to keep alive myths left over from Second World War propaganda.

“Most of Irving's books,” the Washington Post once noted, “are big, solid works... All are well written, exciting, fun to read, and all contain new information based on sensational discoveries.”

This fiercely independent and iconoclastic historian is widely acknowledged – even by adversaries – as an eminent authority on World War II, Hitler and Third Reich Germany . British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing in the Sunday Times of London, once declared: “No praise can be too high for Irving’s indefatigable scholarly industry.” He also called Irving one of the “few guides I would entirely trust … indefatigable in pursuit of the evidence, fearless in face of it, sound in judgment ...” Another prominent British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, wrote: “David Irving is a patient researcher of unrivalled industry and success."

Professor Gordon Craig of Stanford University, writing in 1996 in The New York Review of Books, remarked: “The fact is that he [Irving] knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933–1945 owe more than they are always willing to admit to his energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigor of his publications ... Such people as David Irving, then, have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views.”

Following the publication in 1977 of Hitler's War, probably his most important single work, he came under fire for its contention that Hitler did not order the extermination of Europe's Jews. The mass killings must have been carried out by Himmler and his cohorts behind Hitler's back, Irving concluded at that time. In 2002 a completely revised and updated deluxe edition of Hitler’s War was published under Irving’s own Focal Point imprint.

His 1981 book, Uprising!, an examination of the 1956 anti-Communist revolt in Hungary, also earned the ire of Jewish-Zionist groups because it did not ignore or whitewash the significant Jewish role in the Hungarian Communist regime. Irving’s biography of Hermann Göring was published in 1989. Churchill’s War: The Struggle for Power, the first volume of Irving’s monumental biography of Britain’s wartime leader, was published in 1987. The second volume, subtitled Triumph in Adversity, appeared in 2001.

Irving’s testimony in the Holocaust trial in 1988 of Ernst Zundel was a startling high point of that important court case. Appearing as the last of 23 defense witnesses, Irving stunned the packed Toronto courtroom by announcing that he had changed his mind about the Holocaust story. During his three days on the stand, he explained in detail why he no longer accepted that masses of Jews were killed in gas chambers during World War II, or that Hitler ordered the extermination of European Jewry.

Irving has made successful speaking tours in Germany, Canada, Australia, South Africa, the United States and other countries.

For example, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, he made triumphal speaking visits in what was still the “German Democratic Republic.” In February 1990 he addressed a large audience in Dresden on the 45th anniversary of the Allied firebombing of that once beautiful, baroque city. Large posters with Irving's picture appeared throughout the city to announce his presentation. He was greeted with flowers by Dresden’s cultural affairs director, and was interviewed on television. When he appeared on stage before the microphones, more than a thousand people gave him a standing ovation. Speaking in fluent German, he recounted Churchill's campaign to obliterate German cities. In June of that same year he returned for another speaking tour in the GDR. In spite of a ten mark admission fee, large crowds came to hear him speak in Leipzig, Gera, and again in Dresden .

On April 21, 1990, Irving was arrested in Munich after having addressed a sell-out crowd in the Bavarian city’s famed Löwenbräu beer-hall because during his talk he had referred to the “gas chamber” shown to tourists at the Auschwitz main camp as a phony postwar dummy (“Attrappe”). His arrest was followed by a spontaneous demonstration of some 250 supporters, who carried posters of Irving and two other Holocaust skeptics, Robert Faurisson and Ernst Zundel. After the crowd made its way past the historic Feldherrnhalle, police waded in and arrested several of the demonstrators.

For that remark, a German court in January 1993 fined Irving 30,000 marks (about $20,000), and later that year he was banned from the country. On the basis of that ban, he was subsequently barred from Canada, Australia and New Zealand .

As it happens, Irving’s 1990 remark in Munich was, in fact, the truth. As even the curator of the Auschwitz State Museum has since acknowledged, the “gas chamber” shown to hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site is indeed a fraudulent postwar reconstruction.

Over the years Irving has addressed several conferences and meetings of the Institute for Historical Review. For example, in an address at an IHR meeting on April 17, 2005, entitled “The Faking of Adolf Hitler for History,” he identified some of the many fraudulent historical documents that have been cited over the years by “conformist” historians of the Third Reich era.

In 1998 Irving filed a lawsuit in London against Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books. He charged that Lipstadt had libeled him in her book, Denying the Holocaust, by calling him a falsifier and a Holocaust denier. After a much-publicized trial in London in early 2000, during which Irving represented himself, the court ruled in favor of the defendants.

In a ruling made public on April 11, 2000, Judge Charles Gray praised Irving's “thorough and painstaking research into the archives,” and commended his discovery and disclosure of many historical documents. He also noted Irving's intelligence and thorough knowledge of World War II history. On balance, though, Judge Gray’s lengthy statement was a severe rebuke of Irving, whom he called an anti-Semitic and racist “Holocaust denier” who had “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.”

Irving was obliged to pay substantial costs of the trial. He lost subsequent attempts to appeal the verdict, and was forced into bankruptcy.

Political prisoner David Irving has already written 1,000 pages of a new book on his persecution. This four page excerpt was sent from his prison in Vienna.

The hand writing of the British historian is very difficult to read. This rendering owes is its existence to the reading skills of a number of people: lmr, dkk, km, and hk. A few places may be a little awkward, but the following is a good approximation of the latest work of this brave and brilliant historian of World War II.

Mr. Irving’s case – an appeal against his three year sentence – comes up in September.

CAFÉ is collecting money to assist David Irving’s defence. Send an e-mail with your VISA and expiry date or mail your cheque to Canadian Association for Free Expression, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, Canada.

(…) For many weeks I brooded on when the Poltermans Factor fitted into all this. Apart from the time eight police officers who had forced my car off the autobahn at gunpoint, they had been informed that I was a car thief – the Austrians could not have been friendlier. As word spread round Vienna’s Josefstadt jail on who I was, I received a stream of visitors. Jailers brought me magazines, mail, packets of coffee as gifts. One gave me a glass of whiskey. “Nobody must hear of this”. The enemy blubbered with fury in the national press when they learned that my books were in all the prison libraries, over a hundred as it turned out, including Hitler’s War. The ministries reassured parliament that my books had now been withdrawn. An unknown Austrian historian – nearly all Austrian historians are unknown – was appointed to check them. The books were burned. This would convince the world that Austria was not a Nazi state.

The criminal court permitted me to see a duly sanitized police file. Intelligence materials had been removed but it was still quite thick and went back sixteen years. The top transcripts were labourious and worryingly inaccurate, transcripts of my talks in Leoben (November 5, 1989) and Vienna (November 6) received by the police several weeks later. The public prosecutor in Leoben had reviewed the actual tapes and concluded that I had not broken any laws; so had the Stapo officer who actually attended. The Socialist Student society at Leoben University had kindly supplied to the Stapo their own tape of my talk. Rather anxiously, the faded, yellowing arrest warrant had been issued by the Vienna Polizeipresident, Gunther Bogl, before any of the transcripts were received, on the evening of November 8, 1989; that was the day CCH on which the Berlin wall came down – an ironic counterpoint in European freedoms. Bogl’s panic was evident – the Viennese press that morning was reporting that Jewish and Communist organizations were calling for his resignation or dismissal for having failed to silence me completely in Vienna on the sixth?

Turning the page, I came to the pivotal documents. Although they can deny it; (2006), and pretend not to have been involved, its statements to the press, here was their actual Anzeige, their formal demand for my arrest and prosecution: the Communist-front, and largely Jewish organization, Dokumenta archive des Ostereichischen Widerstand (Document Centre of the Austrian Resistance) had addressed this Anzeige to Bogl on the seventh, based solely on that mornings report in the far left newspaper Arbeiterzeitung (Worker’s Newspaper); a report which the journalist concerned, Christa Fochling, had almost immediately, partially retracted as inaccurate when sworn before a judge two days later.

Police chief Bogl had received this Documentation Centre’s arrest demand, Anzeige, at midday on the eighth as the copy in my hands showed, and had acted on that alone. There were familiar names on its letterhead, including Professor Erika Weinzierl; she still promotes hate-filled “dogmas” of Austria’s historians, and may God have mercy on them otherwise, as newspaper photographs suggest that Erika has the kind of ineffable beauty that can stop a thousand ding-ding-ding full-night-up Number 15 London buses charging pell-mell down Pall Mall. The Archive Centre’s Honorary President was Professor A. Maleta: it is not an unusual name. Maleta is not Rumpelstiltskin. Still, I confess I did really wonder if this was the same Professor A. Maleta who had sworn affidavits many years ago that he had personally seen homicidal gas chambers in operation at Dachau, Himmler’s first concentration camp? (The German Government has long ago dismissed that particular piece of nonsense history; there was no such installation at Dachau.) A lot of people served time because of Maleta’s convenient little perjury.

Deeper in this public file I came across even uglier stuff, including letters from the Israeli Woche Kulturgemeinsckaft of Austria. Their chief executive Peter Grosz was applying for a permit to demonstrate outside my Vienna lecture with a hatred-filled coalition of “three to five thousand” like-minded folks: the Vienna Gesindel was all there, in his _____ of participating bodies. There was something about this “Israelite Cultural Community”, the equivalent of our own unduly respected Board of British Deputies, that reminded me of that. Coalition for Human Dignity in Oregon, the mob-schprecher . Perhaps it was the news clipping I found in this police file reporting that Grosz, in his crowdthe thousands, had called on them to use “Gewaltmassnahmen”, violence, if necessary to stop me lecturing. My attorney (had) read that item at the time and we issued an immediate Anzeige against Grosz (* as fortune had it, my cell neighbour for the time was Peter-Paul Grosz, a major cocaine dealer; no relation.) for criminal incitement to violence, but it was soon choked off in the conduits of justice. Prosecutions are a one-way street in modern Austria. People like Grosz get special treatment; while I am reading this police file 16 years later in a Vienna prison cell.

“Gotcha!” Polterman’s people, these Lilliputian swarms , those international midgets with their buckets and ladders and threads, must have thought that they had finally got me strung down. (…) (etc.)

Here is a recent letter from historian David Irving, held on a three year sentence for questioning Austria’s new state religion of holocaust. The spirited 67-year old political prisoner continues to write his memoires.

Mr. Irving’s case – an appeal against his three year sentence – comes up in September.

GEF.V.NR. 70306 Vienna, April 12, 2006, Thursday
DAVID IRVING
JA-Josephstadt
A-1080 VIENNA

Another Thursday. I was given a radio (new) by one of the guards yesterday, which brightens the cell a lot, I must say. I found a radio station called “Radio Stephansdom”, which appears to be the local Catholic station: it plays classical music all day long, interrupted with occasional Catholic and Vatican propaganda.

I get a lot of writing done, though sometimes I nearly run out of ink. Fortunately, the Protestant chaplain visits every week and sometimes he brings ink cartridges. He explains that prisoners are not supposed to have ink in case they use it for tattooing each other. Yeah, right, I can just see me tattooing one of these gangsters.

I have got a good history institute in Munich sending me documents I need for the work on Himmler, so my time here is not completely wasted. I write about 10 pages a day. Today less, as I spent 6 hours on the 2nd floor (your 3rd) seeing my new lawyer, firing my old one, and then signing up my new one – Dr. Herbert Schaller, who will fight the appeal in 2-3 months time. We have to lodge the documents on the appeal in 10 days time and we have Easter in between. The old lawyer did not inspire me with any confidence any more. Very weak. As I was taken out of the courtroom I said, “I am shocked”, when asked by TV reporters: In fact I was shocked at how weak he had been! The old lawyer was 46; the new one almost twice as old.

My writing style if not my handwriting, has improved enormously in prison. I have read a lot of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, although in the latter books rather a lot of dames end up getting stood up, whereas Chandler just sweet talks them. … I have also read Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities – same kind of thing, with a rather fizzled out kind of ending.

9-20-04

Should Respectable Historians Attend and Speak at Conferences Hosted by

David Irving?

By Peter N. Kirstein

Mr. Kirstein is professor of history at St. Xavier University in Chicago. He is the author of "Academic Freedom and the New McCarthyism," Situation Analysis (Spring, 2004). Recently he was elected to the Illinois AAUP State Council and is secretary of his university's AAUP chapter.

Note from the Editor: This month, as he has for several years, David Irving sponsored a conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, known as "Real History, USA," which, according to the conference website, featured speakers, seminars, and the showing of some home movies of Hitler from Hermann Göring's private collection. Since Mr. Irving was branded a Holocaust denier by a British court he has become a pariah among historians. Usually, academics do not attend his conferences let alone speak at them.

When we heard that Peter Kirstein, a professor of history known for sending an email to an Air Force Academy cadet in protest of the impending Iraq war, had agreed to speak at the conference despite Mr. Irving's reputation, we asked him to tell our readers why. This is his response.

W. B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

While this reflected a poet's disconsolate mood following the Great War, should the center hold if it confers a stifling conformity and excludes radical and visionary alternatives to the current order? Should only the "better" sorts engage avidly in societal matters and the "worst" remain inert to the world around them? "Passionate intensity" is a virtue that should traverse all social classes and especially mark the marginalized and exploited. In America, if one deviates too far from the confining ideology of the oxymoronic Vital Center—the title of an Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. paean to liberalism—one is vulnerable to significant public rebuke that moves beyond mere critique towards censorship and possibly career termination.

Recently I spoke at a conference hosted by the controversial British historian, David Irving, who has written several seminal works on World War II. These include Hitler’s War and The Destruction of Dresden (later revised under the title, Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden). Sir John Keegan described Hitler’s War as one of the “half dozen most important books about” World War II, and Dresden represented a considerable historiographical triumph—despite the controversy over the numbers slaughtered by Anglo-American bombing of the undefended city—in which the revelation of civilian casualties suggested the allies were also guilty of murderous moral depravity as well. Indeed, Howard Zinn, who participated in aerial combat during World War II, recently described the immorality of strategic bombing in the Progressive (August 2004): “It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side—too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought.” In Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, Mr. Irving appropriately referred to these bombing raids as “aerial terrorism.” (502) Mr. Irving’s exploration of the targeting of German population centers was an exemplar of antiwar revisionism that suggested the allies committed war crimes including wanton destruction of cities and targeting noncombatant populations not justified by military necessity. Such insights pioneered subsequent assessments of strategic bombing such as W. G. Sebald's, On the Natural History of Destruction.

Mr. Irving’s Goebbels was withdrawn shortly before publication in April 1996 by St. Martin’s Press, and in the following month was removed as the selection of Doubleday’s History Book Club’s Book of the Month. The censorship of the work resulted primarily from stop-publication demands from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL). Abraham H. Foxman, ADL’s national director, charged in a March 22, 1996 letter to St. Martin’s that Mr. Irving was an “apologist” for Nazism, did not possess the requisite “academic credentials” to engage in historical analysis and, without citation, claimed his previous scholarship was “replete with errors, oversights, poor research and fantasy.” Mr. Foxman sardonically suggested that if St. Martin’s released Goebbels, the publisher should designate the biography as “fiction.” Even though the book had not been read by those seeking to prohibit others from exercising independent judgment, Deborah Lipstadt, Professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University, believed an author’s reputation alone could warrant the suppression of his or her work. Professor Lipstadt, whom Mr. Irving would eventually sue unsuccessfully for libel—as well as her British publisher, Penguin Books, Ltd.—told the Washington Post (April 3, 1996), “Of course the reputation of the author counts. And no legitimate historian takes David Irving’s works seriously.”

According to Mr. Irving only six copies were in the United States and all were in the possession of St. Martin’s Press (e-mail to author, July 29, 2004). Hence an unexamined biography of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, a major historical figure of the twentieth century that contained the first utilization of Goebbels’s Moscow-archived diaries, was suppressed due to rage over the reputation of its author and not the content of the work. While the censoring of any book, even if content based, raises significant questions of free speech and the public’s legitimate access to information, banning the dissemination of a historical work, for reasons other than content, should prove troubling for historians as un-American and a threat to the enterprise of historical scholarship. Imagine if the next Howard Zinn book were not published due to influential-elite opposition that claimed his prior writings were seditious and a clear and present danger to the vital interests of the United States.

Mr. Irving, however, was not without defenders on the implications of censoring history. Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair (June 1996) charged that St. Martin’s “disgraced the business of publishing and degraded the practice of debate. David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.” Raul Hilberg, who wrote The Destruction of the European Jews, told Mr. Hitchens: “I have quoted [Adolph] Eichmann references that come from a neo-Nazi publishing house. I am not for taboos and I am not for repression.” E. J. Hobsbawm was interviewed by D. D. Guttenplan, the author of The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case . The illustrious Marxist historian noted that “most historians” have political viewpoints, and that Mr. Irving’s politics are irrelevant since historians should be judged “whether they produce work based on evidence.” (New York Times, June 26, 1999) Indeed many who oppose censorship have explored vigorously this dimension in assessing Mr. Irving’s scholarship.

Another opponent of quashing Mr. Irving’s revisionist history of National Socialism is Gordon A. Craig , J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford. In a dramatic book review of Goebbels in the New York Review of Books ( September 19, 1996) he wrote: “Silencing Mr. Irving would be a high price to pay for freedom from [his] annoyance...Mr. Irving, then, ha[s] an indispensable part in the historical enterprise and we dare not disregard [his] views.” Since the tumult over the publication of Goebbels, Mr. Irving has been largely confined to publishing his works, including Goebbels, under his own imprint, Focal Point Publications.

I accepted a speaking invitation from a historian who has been castigated as anti-Semitic—a charge that Mr. Irving has consistently denied—and denounced for a falsified revisionism of Nazi Germany and the destruction of European Jewry. My mission, since my egregious suspension on Veterans Day, November 11, 2002, for an act of conscience through a harshly worded antiwar e-mail, is to demand academic freedom for university historians and no censorship of any historian for antiwar or historiographical incorrectness

As an outspoken peace activist, pacifist and war resister, which were the underlying reasons for my suspension in the twelfth week of a semester, I commend Mr. Irving’s courageous and febrile opposition to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I was not unmindful of this when I agreed to speak at his conference. If antiwar advocates can build coalitions across the ideological divide, then future degradations of the Palestinians, future Holocausts, future illegal walls of separation, future attacks on Jewish interests and future neoconservative crusades against nonthreatening Islamic nations may be averted. Of course, an acceptance of a speaking invitation does not connote uncritical acceptance of the host’s ethos. While disagreeing profoundly with Mr. Irving on the importance of racial diversity and the value of embracing ardently multiculturalism, I would neither stifle his speech nor banish his provocative and intrepid revisionism of World War II.

I believe historians should welcome the opportunity to address any audience that is willing to listen and respond to their ideas. I stand in solidarity with all historians and other academics who have suffered for their views due to an intolerance of unpopular or infuriating speech. Any McCarthyite suppression of historiography or radical antiwar speech—no matter how offensive to some—must be challenged and condemned as anti-intellectual and antithetical to the advancement of knowledge in an open society.

Without hectoring or condescending to an attentive and receptive audience of history buffs, I articulated my views on racism and war at Mr. Irving’s “Real History Conference.” In my remarks, “Historians v. American Militarism: Resisting Censorship,” I averred:

I denounce anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic bias. History flows with rivers of blood from ethnic and cultural intolerance. The genocide against indigenous peoples and the Trail of Tears, the mass killings of Armenians at the hands of the Turks during World War I, the war crimes of Nazi Germany, the atomic butchery of noncombatant Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Jim Crow-apartheid system that only ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the evil and criminal Vietnam War—where debate should explore the ethics of serving in a dishonorable war and not the circumstances by which individuals are awarded medals for killing within it. The destruction of the “cockroach” Tutsis in Rwanda and the killings in Darfur are equally odious. All acts of genocide, discrimination and violence against individuals or groups that are predicated on racialism and ethnocentrism diminish us all, imperil the dream of peace and justice and hinder international reconciliation.

It is ironic that Mr. Irving, who is accused of uncritical adulation of National Socialism—a charge that is refuted by his writings—is a victim of group-identity protest that is quite nationalistic in its repression of historical revisionism. When those who claim appropriately a historical legacy of victimization and persecution attempt to delimit inquiry of the events that gave rise to such a tragic legacy, the threat to democracy in exercising a hegemonic control over the past is more damaging than the pain and fear that revisionist history may inflict upon an aggrieved group.

Revisionism is the sine qua non of historical analysis. The ideological right, including President George W. Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, has used the term in a dismissive political manner to undermine and excoriate antiwar criticism of Mr. Bush’s decision to wage war against Iraq. James McPherson, when president of the American Historical Association, responded: “[t]here is no single, eternal, and immutable 'truth' about past events and their meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding the past—that is, 'revisionism'—is what makes history vital and meaningful.”

While Professor McPherson condemned 1970s Holocaust-denial history—which some (Hitchens, Roni Stauber) differentiate from Holocaust-revisionist history—as “misrepresenting the past for nefarious ends,” the general thrust of his article was to champion revisionism and insulate it from politicization and intimidation.

Nation-states denying entry to controversial, independent-thinking scholars is increasingly common. The United States has fallen prey to such retrogressive actions as the revocation of a visa for the renowned University of Notre Dame visiting Islamic scholar, Tariq Ramadan. The politics of historical revisionism in the case of David Irving has similar baleful consequences for the unrestricted dissemination of nonconformist ideas. Mr. Irving is banned from Germany, Australia, Canada, Italy and New Zealand due to criticism of his scholarship and public utterances concerning World War II. The New Zealand decision, while literally applying its immigration law barring the entry of persons previously deported from third countries, has generated a nationwide debate whether Mr. Irving should be prohibited from lecturing on the historiography of World War II before the National Press Club. David Zwartz, president of the New Zealand Jewish Council and honorary Israeli consul in New Zealand, has led the campaign for exclusion. He described Mr. Irving as an “organism—even a two-legged one—that attacks our people.” (New Zealand Herald, July 26, 2004) Mr. Zwartz also claimed that denying entry to Mr. Irving had nothing to do “with suppressing his ideas” because his oeuvre is “available to anyone who wishes to access them.” (e-mail to author, August 3, 2004) The New Zealand Herald courageously demurred and editorialized in favor of freedom for historians. ( July 22, 2004)

Mr. Irving's lot is that of all historians—to constantly re-appraise the events of the past. No event should be out of bounds. If, as in this case, the conclusions are palpably wrong, that is no reason for preventing their presentation—and their challenging by more profound scholarship. The only counter to flawed views is informed debate. Opinions that during this process are shown to be devoid of worth, wisdom or accuracy will quickly be discarded.

If one becomes a public figure due to widespread opposition to one’s speech—whether written or verbal—there are two choices: Fight or flight. If one determines upon reflection to maintain one’s commitment to principled beliefs, then one must avoid flight. Indeed if faced with an ideologically inspired auto-da-fé that threatens one’s occupation and livelihood, bending to the forces of conformity with their armamentarium of suspensions, reprimands, press releases, censorship and aroused public indignation, merely encourages additional coercion. One of the ironies in confronting the consensus orthodoxy of the Vital Center is when the offending rhetoric transmogrifies into protective armor and bestows a fierce commitment to stay the course and resist the firestorm. There emerges a heightened sense of self-worth and renewed dedication to one’s basic values. Recantation is not an option. Surrendering one’s ethics and core beliefs is not an option. Evolving and articulating different viewpoints are possible, and perhaps laudable, but not while under assault by Inquisitions in modern dress that substitute the Internet or economic intimidation for stake burnings.

Father Arthur Terminiello had a reputation for racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Communist epithets. The Birmingham, Alabama priest, who ministered to tenant farmers in Alabama and Florida, was known as the Father Coughlin of the South. Father Terminiello was arrested in Chicago in 1946 for haranguing against a threatening and disorderly mob that sought to disrupt his speech before Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Veterans of America. His detention granted his protagonists a Heckler’s veto, whereby a speaker is silenced merely due to protest against the event. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court reversed an Illinois judge’s jury instructions that Chicago’s breach of the peace ordinance proscribed any utterance that “stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest, or creates a disturbance. ” Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the majority in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), affirmed free speech is essential for a free people:

Free speech…may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger…That is why freedom of speech though not absolute…is nevertheless protected against censorship and punishment…For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas by...dominant political or community groups. [Emphasis added.]

Hopefully Justice Douglas’s stirring reaffirmation of the importance of free speech for a democratic society will dissuade those who wish to abridge it and embolden those who wish to exercise it.

Reproduced gratefully from: http://hnn.us/articles/7259.html History News Network George Mason University

Political prisoner David Irving, a world famous historian now serving three years in an Austrian prison for denying Austria’s new state religion of holocaust, has fired his old lawyer and taken on a real fighter.

Lady Michele Renouf reports: “Good news is that David Irving has dumped his left-wing lawyer Dr Kresbach who had issued no protest about the inhuman ban on Irving making any phone calls, even to his family, as punishment for giving press interviews, unless he submits the telephone number and his request to the prison authorities at least a week in advance.

Even so, his elder brother waited in all day for such a pre-arranged call Easter Sunday and got that call when he was out, one week later! There are urgent family, serious legal and business matters about which we need Mr. Irving's authorisation and imput to act in his family and future interests. Michele

Mr. Irving has replaced Kresbach with Dr Herbert Schaller, the veteran (80 years old) Austrian lawyer he had in the 1980s (and who Ernst has, though Judge Meinerzhagen wanted him thrown out as "too old"!). Good man. He was in the public gallery during David Irving's trial.”

By all accounts Dr. Schaller is a real alte kampfer – an old fighter, just the sort of scrapper a scrapper like David Irving needs.

Mr. Irving’s case – an appeal against his three year sentence – comes up in September.

British actress and free speech campaigner and, now, videographer, Lady Michele Renouf attended a conference in Cairo in late March. Trying to promote her new DVD on the Occupation of Palestine, entitled Israel in Flagrante, she attended a Palestinian solidarity conference.

Despite having broken her toe and come down with food poisoning, she managed to get an invitation to appear on prime time television in Cairo for a half hour interview. She outlined the sordid campaign in Europe of jailing dissident writers and historians who dare challenge the new state religion of holocaust.. “I also added that I believed that Hams was correct in rejecting demands that it accept Israel’s right to exist” and occupy Palestinian land, she told CAFÉ in a recent interview.

The official Iranian news agency was also interested in the Cairo interview and is translating it into Farsi for broadcast in Iran.

On her way back to London, Lady Michele stopped in Vienna to visit political prisoner historian David Irving, sentenced to three years in prison for allegedly denying the new state religion of holocaust when, in 1989, he denied that gas chambers had been used for extermination, as opposed to delousing, purposes. She charmed hre way in to see Mr. Irving for a 50 minute interview. She’d originally been granted only half an hour – foreign visitors are supposed to get an hour – but the turnkey was reluctant to give her more time than locals get (half an hour). Strictly speaking under harsh new punitive measures imposed on the 67-year old historian, Irving isn’t supposed to have any visitors.

She reports: “Irving was in fine fettle. He hopes to emerge from prison, as have many imprisoned writers in the past, with three books completed. Already, he has completed 1,000 handwritten pages of Irving’s War, an autobiographical book about his free speech struggles.”

His case – an appeal against his three year sentence – comes up in September.

Political Prisoner David Irving,
Held in Solitary, is Unrepentant on WW II Views

It’s hard to believe, but 68 year old David Irving, now a political prisoner in Austria, is being held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. The author of over 30 books that have sold millions of copies, Mr. Irving is a non-violent scholar and writer. Yet, in the grim world of minority thought control, idea men are far more dangerous that muggers, robbers and murderers.

The Times of London (February 28, 2006) reports that the vindictive Austrian thought police seek an even longer term: “Austrian prosecutors are seeking to extend to 10 years because of Irving's ‘special importance to rightwing radicals.’" This comment demonstrates that Irving’s treatment is political persecution pure and simple.

The British author remains defiant and seems to have recanted or clarified what may have seemed a backing away from some of his previously held views at last week’s trial. The Times report continues: “An unrepentant David Irving today maintained his denial that Adolf Hitler oversaw an organised attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews. Speaking from jail in Austria, where he was sentenced to three years imprisonment last week for denying the Holocaust, the … right-wing historian questioned whether the Nazis could have really intended to wipe out all the Jews held in concentration camps if, as he claimed, so many had survived the experience.

‘Given the ruthless efficiency of the Germans, if there was an extermination programme to kill all the Jews, how come so many survived?’ he said, in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.’” Why not let the Austrian Embassy know what free men and women think of a country that imprisons dissident thinkers.

CAFÉ is collecting money to assist both Ernst Zundel’s and David Irving’s defence. Send an e-mail with your VISA and expiry date or mail your cheque to Canadian Association for Free Expression, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, Canada. Indicate to which of these political prisoners you wish your donation directed.

Irving vents Holocaust denial in jail cell interview BY TIMES ONLINE AND AGENCIES

Irving today repeated his central thesis from his book, Hitler's War, that the Fuhrer did not know of the Final Solution (EPA)

An unrepentant David Irving today maintained his denial that Adolf Hitler oversaw an organised attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews. Speaking from jail in Austria, where he was sentenced to three years imprisonment last week for denying the Holocaust, the disgraced right-wing historian questioned whether the Nazis could have really intended to wipe out all the Jews held in concentration camps if, as he claimed, so many had survived the experience.

"Given the ruthless efficiency of the Germans, if there was an extermination programme to kill all the Jews, how come so many survived?" he said, in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. During his one-day trial in Vienna last week, when he pleaded guilty to denying the Holocaust in two speeches made to Austrian neo-Nazis in 1989, Irving acknowledged that he had made a mistake in denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, the most infamous Nazi camp. He claimed that he personally had identified two small buildings where gassings occurred - but he pointedly ignored the weight of historical evidence that points to mass executions in an enormous purpose-built crematorium where victims were first gassed then their bodies burned. Today, the British academic repeated his assertion that the number of Jews killed at the camp was relatively small, and certainly much smaller than the figure of 1.1 million that is generally accepted by Holocaust historians. "There were these two small buildings where gassings were done, but I think we can be very argumentative about the scale of it," he said. "Certainly, anybody who suggests that this was the heart of the Nazi programme is way off track." Irving said he accepted that 1.4 million Jews were killed at the so-called Reinhard extermination camps of Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka, but he insisted Auschwitz was different: "You can say millions died, but not at Auschwitz." The story of Anne Frank, according to Irving, backs up his argument: "The Anne Frank family wasn’t gassed, although they were in Auschwitz," he said. "When they fell ill, they were looked after by SS doctors, and two of them survived. The whole Anne Frank story is proof that I am right." He also questioned the responsibility of Hitler for the 20th century's greatest crime. Asked whether he believed that Hitler had overseen the Holocaust, Irving replied: "No. That is absolutely wrong and nobody can justify that. "Adolf Hitler’s own involvement in it has a big question mark behind it." Irving, 68, was shocked to receive a three-year sentence at his trial under Austria's stringent Holocaust denial laws last week. He is spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement at the start of his punishment, which Austrian prosecutors are seeking to extend to 10 years because of Irving's "special importance to rightwing radicals". Irving is also planning to appeal. But today's outburst is unlikely to help his claim to have recanted some of his most extreme beliefs about the Holocaust. He said this morning that his conviction was the result of a "show trial" and he promised to continue writing history. Irving is the author of more than 30 books, but his reputation as a trustworthy historian was destroyed by a High Court libel trial in 2000 that showed that he had distorted and willfully misunderstood sources relating to the Holocaust.

Please support CAFE in our efforts: CAFÉ, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, Canada or e-mail us your VISA number and expiry date.

A Few More Voices Being Raised for Freedom of Speech Dear Free Speech Supporter: It's encouraging to see a few voices in Canada beginning to speak up for freedom of speech. The sight of 67 year old historian David Irving in an Austrian jail has proven just a little much for a number of people. Does freedom of speech mean anything, they're wondering? Kevin Parkinson, in the first article below, touches the issue of the new state religion of "Holocaust" - my phrase not his. In many European countries, questioning the Hollywood version of WW II, as it applies to the Jews, is a crime. Anything else may be questioned or challenged. As the case is now being presented, there must be laws against questioning the new state religion because such questions spread hatred of Jews. By the same token, would those, including those in the Church, who decided that St. George had only been a legend, be accused of spreading hatred against Christians and Englishmen? Paul Fromm Director CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION

It's hard to believe that in the year, 2006, that a well-known historian and author, David Irving, could be sent to jail for 3 years by the Austrian government, for questioning the 6 million figure of the Jewish Holocaust. Furthermore, he made the statement in 1989 while giving a speech in that country.

The sentence is an outrage. Punishing someone for expressing his opinion about a historical event is a step backwards to the justice system of the Middle Ages. The sentence is not only fiercely undemocratic, but is blatantly hypocritical. Cartoonists and writers mock and insult the sensibilities of Muslims and Christians with the blessing of country leaders. Our own prime minister, Stephen Harper used the 'free speech' defense for publishers of cartoons that were insulting to Muslims. However, the moment that anyone criticizes the Jewish official story of WW2, free speech is ignored and the 'hate crimes' legislation is trotted out. Any questions about the accuracy of the Holocaust reporting are considered to be a defamation of the Jewish dead. Currently in Canada, there are several people who have been accused of 'hate crimes,' one of whom is Ernst Zundel, a landed Canadian immigrant who has never been convicted of a crime in this country. Yet our government took the cowardly way out, and instead of releasing Zundel, deported him to his native Germany, where he is being tried in the same manner as David Irving. In Germany it is a crime to deny the holocaust or question any of the historic details. The conviction of Irving is a chilling wake-up call that 'hate crimes' legislation is not going away. After WW2, it was the forces of the Anti Defamation League and B'nai B'rith in Germany and Austria that changed government legislation to make it a crime to deny 'holocaust reality.' However, holocaust denial laws violate ancient and universal standards of justice. The principle of free speech means that everyone has the right to express alternative viewpoints, particularly about history. It means listening to views that may be distasteful but that is the legacy of 'free speech.' 'Holocaust denial' laws are inherently unjust because they are selective and one sided. They prohibit dissent about only one chapter of history. Laws criminalizing dissent about other chapters of history, such as the treatment of the North American Indian or the Irish in the 19th century, would be considered outrageous. I agree with Voltaire (1906) when he said: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it" I think we need to revisit the so-called 'hate laws' in this country, since it is apparent that they lead to selective prosecutions based on the whims of those who wield power. We already have lots of laws on the books to deal with criminals. In '1984,' George Orwell warned that society would eventually punish 'thought crimes' in a totalitarian state. The David Irving case has been a flashpoint that should make us all stop and think about where 'democracy' is headed. Free speech, acceptable speech, fundamental Islam Punishing silly sentiments by Klaus Rohrich Wednesday, February 22, 2006 http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/klaus022206.htm

What does the enlightened, freedom-loving, tolerant and inclusive West have in common with fundamental Islam? Both are overwhelmingly repressive in what they consider to be "acceptable" speech. The latest evidence of this is the conviction and sentencing of David Irving, whose denial of the Holocaust earned him three years in an Austrian jail.

This is an interesting case in that Irving, a British "historian", denied the Holocaust during a visit to Austria back in 1989 and as a result was charged by Austrian criminal authorities. Austria, as well as many other Western countries, has criminalized Holocaust denial, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison for anyone convicted of that "crime".

The judge hearing this case threw the book at Irving, despite Irving's profession that he had changed his views since 1989 when the "crime" was alleged to be committed. Irving pleaded guilty to having made the statements and informed the court that since then he has changed his mind and now believes the Holocaust actually occurred. In sentencing Irving, Judge Peter Liebetreu stated, "the court did not consider the defendant to have genuinely changed his mind. The regret he showed was considered to be mere lip service to the law." I find this statement every bit as bizarre as the statement made by the Islamic cleric who said that an apology for the Danish cartoons of the Prophet was not enough, than only war would satisfy him.

What makes us, meaning the West, any different from a country like Saudi Arabia that imprisons, tortures and even kills its dissenters, if we imprison those who have a different view? While David Irving is clearly misguided and might even be a raving anti-Semite, in my opinion that isn't enough to send him to prison. The best punishment for someone like Irving is ridicule, as it puts his views in the proper light. Sending him to prison, lends a certain power to those views that ultimately will achieve the opposite of what was intended in the first place.

We have long deluded ourselves that we have rights and freedoms that allow us to think and say whatever we believe. Irving's trial, conviction and imprisonment belie those rights and render them meaningless. What good is the right of free speech if when it is exercised it results in imprisonment?

If you think that David Irving's travails are restricted to countries like Austria and Germany, think again. These silly and horribly repressive laws have found their way into North America and are collectively known as "hate laws." The implication of so-called hate laws is that certain groups within our society need protection from those who dislike, disapprove or hate them.

Two names readily come to mind. The first is Ernst Zundel, who was recently deported from Canada to his native Germany, where he is being tried for Holocaust denial, and Jim Keegstra, the former high school teacher and Mayor of Eckville, Alberta. Zundel had lived in Canada for 43 years and was the object of orchestrated persecution for his anti-Semitic views, being denied Canadian citizenship on the basis of his being a Holocaust denier.

Keegstra, who taught high school for over 14 years and was finally fired from that job as a result of his espousing some truly "wacko" ideas, including the presence of a centuries-old, world wide Jewish conspiracy to his students. After having lost both his job as a teacher and his position as Mayor of Eckville, Keegstra was prosecuted in 1984 under Section 281.2 under the Criminal Code for "willfully promoting hatred".

Convicted, Keegstra took his case before the Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld his conviction and Keegstra was imprisoned.

As a civil libertarian, I am concerned that repressive legislation governs the right to free speech. It seems that most people agree with the legislation and with the prosecution of people like David Irving and Jim Keegstra, as their views are clearly objectionable. Trouble is that while these laws serve to restrict the use of speech that most of us deplore, they also serve as a double-edged sword. When we restrict the civil liberties of those with whom we do not agree we accomplish two things. We give credence to the ideas espoused by them by turning them into martyrs and we place potential restrictions on our own right to free speech, as the opinions we hold today, may someday fall into disfavor with the powers that be.

In that regard there is very little difference between us and the medieval minded Islamic clerics that call for the death of those Danish cartoonists. To read other News items or Columns by Klaus Rohrich, please click here

Klaus Rohrich is an author and columnist for Canada Free Press. He can be reached at Letters@Canadafreepress.com You can read your Letters to the Editor here.

Please support CAFE in our efforts: CAFÉ, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, Canada or e-mail us your VISA number and expiry date.

A few years ago I had lunch with David Irving, now sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison for the crime of what in this country is called exercising free speech. Wouldn’t you know it, the Holocaust came up. He joked that in America, Holocaust memorials were sprouting up “like McDonald’s.” He added seriously, “I’m not a Holocaust denier. I’m a Holocaust skeptic.”

I’ve seen Irving several times since then, twice speaking at conferences he’d arranged, and never heard him say anything close to “Holocaust denial,” the crime he has pled guilty to. The plea spared him a full ten-year sentence.

It has become routine to refer to him as “Holocaust denier David Irving,” but nobody ever seems to quote him actually uttering a thought crime. In court the other day he confessed the “mistake” of saying “there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz,” but added, “In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis.”

And what if he really had denied it? Ten years in prison for an opinion? His lawyer called the proceedings “a message trial.” Actually, of course, it was a blasphemy trial.

The rationale, such as it is, for the Holocaust-denial laws of Austria (and several other countries) is that if people are allowed to deny that it happened, it may happen again. By this logic, the Holocaust is most likely to recur in the United States, since we have no such laws here. Freedom of speech could lead to a second Holocaust! Thomas Jefferson has a lot to answer for.

Does that sound just a wee bit hysterical? It reminds me of the incredible uproar over Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, which, we were assured (in advance, by people who hadn’t seen it), would cause hatred of Jews and even “violence” against them.

Now that was a pretty clear test case of this peculiar theory of historical causation. And the result? Though the movie was a huge hit, it resulted in not a single incident of violence against anyone. Even one such incident would have made headlines. “See what we told you?”

But when no pogroms occurred, nobody expressed surprise, relief, or the disappointment a prophet of doom experiences when things turn out all right. Mel Gibson made a lot of money, Abe Foxman made a lot of money, nobody got hurt. You’d think everyone would be contented with the outcome.

Even the people who predicted violence didn’t really believe it, of course. Nobody in his right mind expected violence. We are so used to prophecies of violence against minorities, especially Jews, that we don’t bother keeping track of them, any more than we keep track of astrologers’ predictions. In the real world, things don’t happen that way. Predicting another Holocaust is like predicting another Reichstag fire.

Deep down, we know this sort of talk is usually absurd. But we also know that it can be risky to say so. So we let the blowhards blow. That’s how they exercise their freedom of speech.

Nobody says, or thinks, that what Irving may have said in Austria in 1989 — the site and date of his alleged “crime” — caused any violence to occur. Some rabble-rouser. He may have expressed his skepticism with rude bluntness (that would be just like him), but that wouldn’t even have tended to inspire harm. It may have inspired more skepticism, but why is that a crime?

Because to some people, on some subjects, skepticism is blasphemy, and the Holocaust is one of those subjects. Austria’s law is aimed at “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves, or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast, or [in] other media.”

Whew! That gives the prosecutor a lot of discretion, and the whole premise of the law — that expressing an opinion of a calamity can cause the same calamity to recur under entirely different conditions — is screwy.

No doubt Irving’s lawyer advised him to cut a deal in exchange for a show of contrition. He avoided ten years in the slammer, but from now on he will be, in the media, not just a “Holocaust denier,” but a “convicted” Holocaust denier or “confessed” Holocaust denier. Not much hope of “reformed,” “repentant,” or “recovering” Holocaust denier, I suppose.

Meanwhile, the Holocaust Prevention Confederation can claim another triumph. Over freedom of speech.

Will the European governments that ban any talk about the Nazis not having murdered 6 million Jews start rounding up the newspaper editors who published the Muhammad cartoons and start putting them on trial for crimes against Islam? European governments and their media mouthpieces appear to use the mantle of free speech to justify publishing supposed insults against Muslims. But what about the free speech rights of people who dare to go against conventional thinking of Nazi atrocities committed against Europe’s Jews?

These Holocaust deniers, revisionists and skeptics don’t have any rights to free speech in many European countries (and Canada), unlike their brethren who dare to publish images of the Prophet Muhammad but don’t face criminal charges. David Irving now must spend the next three years in prison for giving two speeches in Austria in 1989. Ernst Zundel faces up to five years in prison for publishing his opinions on the Zundelsite website while living in Canada.

Should people who downplay the Confederate States of America’s treatment of slaves and the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans face criminal charges? Should the people who publicly contend that the U.S. government was justified in killing hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki face criminal charges? Should the people who deny the wickedness of the U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Iraq faces criminal charges? Should the people who deny the wickedness of Israel’s conduct against Palestinians face criminal charges? Of course not!

We are dealing with a simple yet extremely dangerous case of nation-states gone wild. Instead of addressing their complicity in modern-day atrocities—such as providing either unabashed logistical support for or tacit approval of the U.S. government’s crimes around the world—these governments arrest people for public speech.

Irving, Zundel and others who face criminal charges of “denying the Holocaust” have not committed violence against anybody. They have not given orders to soldiers to invade and occupy another country. They have not given orders to police or soldiers to arrest and imprison individuals without charges. They have not given approval to secret police, soldiers or prison guards to torture individuals.

Irving, Zundel and others have expressed their opinions about one of the most despicable periods in our world’s history. These expressions might anger people. But these people are not in positions of power today that would give them the means to implement policies that mimic the conduct of the Nazis.

Today, the leaders of liberal democratic governments are the ones with the authority (and police and military firepower) to mimic selected policies of the Nazis and the policies of other notorious regimes in our world’s history without fear they will face the consequences of their deadly actions.

If one does not like what some people might say or write about the Holocaust, then that person should ignore it. If one does not like images of the Prophet Muhammad published in newspapers, then that person should ignore them.

What we should not ignore is when nation-states, with their monopoly on violence, lock up people for expressing their opinions about government atrocities committed 60 years ago. More important, we should not ignore the fact that the governments that are locking up individuals for speaking their mind about the actions of the Nazis are the same governments aiding and abetting (or refusing to denounce and stop) the atrocities committed today by the world’s only superpower and its confederates. -Mark Hand

The following is a letter received by a good supporter of political prisoner David Irving, now languishing under a three year sentence in an Austrian jail. His crime – in 1989, “denying the holocaust” – the new secular religion of much of the West.

This letter was written just before Mr. Irving went on trial and explains his intentions to plead guilty.

I have received around 600 letters, but yours was one that I was looking out for!

In twelve days time, they will hold the trial. (I have been in a 2 X 2.5m metal box for the last 100 days after being forced off the road by several carloads of police and arrested at gunpoint. So much for the land of “The Sound of Music”!)

It will be a difficult trial because the world’s press will be there (February 20 and perhaps 21) which adds to the macabre theatre. I have to plea guilty, there is no alternative: if a crazy police-state enacts a law against wearing brown neckties, and an unwitting Englishman came 17 years ago wearing a (gasp!) brown necktie, then of course he is going to find himself arrested at gunpoint (8 9 mm Glock pistols pointed at my head!) when he comes next time 17 years later. There is now no way of pleading innocent to that. I refuse to allow any foreign government to dictate to me what (new ink cartridge just inserted) I may think, say,or write. That is what this is all about. To Americans this whole situation must appear totally remote from reality. I have had to explain to Jessica (12) that I am in prison because of an opinion I expressed 17 years before I ever met her mother.

As for the other details, you will appreciate there is a lot I would like to say in a letter but cannot because all mail to and from me is read by prison censorship. I suspect I was lured to Austria as a trap, an ambush. There is a lot of evidence pointing in that direction. I have not heard a single word from Olympia, the student body which (seemingly) invited me to come and lecture on November 11; no letter, no visit, nothing! I warned them in e-mails that I would not talk about the “Holocaust” even if their members asked questions.

Anyway, I have so far been able to get a lot of work done, on memoirs, the “Himmler” biography, and “Churchill”. This whole situation is a disaster for the reputation of Austria, because many intellectuals around the world, including left-wingers have openly criticised my arrest.

I am in fine spirits, and not about to go down. In the exercise yard the murderers, rapists, cocaine-dealers and robbers ask, ”What you in for!’ and I feel such a wimp saying it is because of an opinion I expressed on history seventeen years ago. “Oh, right then!” they say, and go shuffling off looking for a real criminal to walk round the yard with.

Wait until you see the outcome of February 20, so you can see what address to reply to. I am hoping it will not be here. The cost to me has already been around $100,000 in lost contracts, and the like.

Please support CAFE in our efforts: CAFÉ, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, Canada or e-mail us your VISA number and expiry date.

These Holocaust deniers are very slick people. They justify everything they say with facts and figures." Chairman, New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education (Newark Star-Ledger, 23 Oct. 1996, p 15)

As we did write in our prior issue David Irving was arrested in Austria on the 11th of November, 2005. Since the beginning of his arrest Irving was kept isolated from the outside world. For the first six days the Austrian government did not notify the world about his arrest. The news came out into the open when Irving’s own web page presented it. Based on the best available information Irving crossed the border to Austria from Switzerland and he was planning to deliver a lecture at the Olympia, a university fraternity group in Vienna. The subject of the lecture was: “the secret negotiations between Adolf Eichmann and the Jewish leaders in Budapest, Joel Brand and Rezsö Kasztner, the so-called "trucks for Jews" deal, and British knowledge of the scheme from codebreaking” (From Irving’s own web site.)

While traveling with a car he and the guests at the student club both recognized that plain clothes detectives were hanging around, so Irving started to drive toward the Southern border and he was arrested on the roadside near the town of Hartberg in the Province of Styria.

Irving believes that he was tracked by the police, prior to his arrival: “Despite precautions, the Austrian political police are believed to have learned of the visit by wiretaps or intercepting e-mails.”

After the arrest he was taken to Graz and a few days later to Vienna where he is held at 11 Landesgericht Strasse almost totally segregated from the outside world.

On the 18th of November I called the offices of Judge Dr. Peter Seda who is prosecuting Irving. The clerk gave assurances about a permit to visit Irving. When I arrived on the morning of the 23rd of November the written permit was issued by the prosecutor’s office but I was not permitted to see Irving by the deputies, in the same building. Their excuse was that Irving already received a visitor for a thirty minutes visit that week.

Judge Dr. Seda is a veteran champion for the cause of the Austrian Jews. He is on record for tracking internet thought criminals for at least ten years for “anti-Semitic expressions”, “denial of the Holocaust” and “spreading revisionist literature”. He is also a choice of the local establishment for politically sensitive cases: He handled the Austrian investigation into the poisoning of Victor Yuschenko, then a candidate in the elections of The Ukraine, who was poisoned and was treated in Vienna. (2004) Judge Dr. Seda seems to be a dream come through for the not to popular Jewish community in Vienna.

Irving was already forbidden to travel to Austria, Canada, Germany and Australia. Germany fined him $6,000 in 1992 for stating that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a hoax. He lost his apartment in London when he lost a trial against Deborah Lipstadt a Holocaust advocate and the judge labeled him “an active Holocaust denier”. He was already arrested in Austria in 1984. The present charges were generated after two speeches in the country in 1989. (Vienna and Leoben) The arrest was received as great news by the international cabal of Jewish organizations: Shimon Samuels from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Lord Greville Janner the Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Fund of England, David A. Harris executive director of the American Jewish Committee, The South Poverty Law Center, ADL, etc. Only BBC’s legal affairs analyst Jon Silverman expressed some concern: “He remains a showman and may well relish the opportunity to grandstand before a wider audience if put on trial.”

There were several revisionist historians, scientists, free speech advocates arrested, prosecuted recently indicating a worldwide crackdown on those who refuse to tow the party line on the Holocaust. Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudof were both arrested in the US and extradited to Germany to face lengthy prison sentences. Both of them were married to American citizens and Rudolf also had a child from this marriage. For the deportation of Rudolf, Deborah Achim field officer takes the credit proudly on the web page of ICE. (Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)) *2

A Dutch court extradited Siegfried Verbeke to Germany, one of the founders of the Belgian Vlaams Blok Party. (Vlaams Belang) Vincent Reynouard, Jerome Bourbon, Camille-Marie Galic, Rene-Louis Berclaz, all Europeans, all in jail or under indictments for heresy. A member of the European Parliament Dr. Bruno Gollnisch lost his immunity and possible will go to prison for simply stating that historians should have the right to debate the Holocaust issues. His fairly innocent statements on the protection of free speech were used against him by a future political opponent who plans to run against him: Justice Minister and later Transport Minister Dominique Perben. Gollnisch is second in line behind Le Pen’ at the National Front.

There are already eight countries with laws against Holocaust denial: Austria, Belgium, Czech republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland. A most dramatic development on November 1st, 2005: ALL 191 nations of the UN – unanimously and without a vote – adopted an Israeli-drafted resolution declaring January 27 the “International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust”. The resolution “rejects any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, either in full or part”. The UN resolution is providing unheard, exorbitant privileges to a miniature minority group on this planet. This was Israel’s first successful draft resolution in the history of the UN! The resolution also mentions a mysterious American citizen by the name of Willis A. Carto as the only responsible party for the present dramatic circumstances who started the revisionist movement about three decades earlier. Meanwhile the news of Irving’s arrest spread faster than wild fire around planet earth. Thanks to electronic communications within hours everybody received the news. Irving is a very popular historian and a forceful writer. On the 22nd of November the first demonstration took place in Ottawa, Canada at the front of the Austrian Embassy. Chances are that we will see far more if Irving is kept in jail for a longer period of time and every indication is that this is the case.

On the 25th, Friday there was an important hearing for Irving in Vienna. The prosecutor decided to formally to charge him and they also denied his bail offer of $10,000 to $20,000. The decision indicates that those who are pulling the strings from the background want to lock up Irving for a longer time, possible for years. David Irving’s attorney Dr. Elmar Kresbach in Vienna stated on the 25th: The court refused to release Mr. Irving on bail because he can easily go to England and England will not extradite him. The case will go to a “jury trial” with three judges and eight citizens as jury members. The trial will last probably a single day and the citizens’ only and most likely role will be to rubber stamp the decision. The trial will take place in January at the earliest and Irving will be sitting in his isolated jail cell in the meantime.

Attorney Dr. Elmar Kersbach also issued statements in the name of his client that his prior beliefs are “not really worthwhile to hold up” and “Irving is correcting himself”. It is difficult to see Irving backing away from his prior statements like: “more women died on the backseat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz”. In civilized countries it is a common practice to disregard all testimonies that were coerced under pressure, torture, threat of violence, etc. Threatening a 67 years old man with a prison term that would last for the rest of his natural life, that is what I would consider the ultimate threat.

Anything stated or signed by Irving under these circumstances while cut off from the rest of the world and his supporters – is meaningless. Irving has written close to thirty books and his value as an original researcher is undeniable. From the beginning of his career he traveled around the world to seek out original documents, sources. He interviewed a large number of people who were never touched by the “court historians”. He realized early on that there was a huge void in the history of WWII that was not exposed or touched by others because of fear. He did fill this void, the job is mostly done, there is nothing that can be done about it, his work can not be destroyed.

The history of the whole argument on the existence or nonexistence of the gas chambers very much resembles the days of the inquisition. All the presently available instruments of modern science say that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. The Holocaust Dogma, just like the 10,000+ pages operational manual of the IRS became a liquid, ever changing fluid mass of information. Any individual who is pressured today to believe in the Dogma can rightfully ask: “Which version should I believe in?” Right after 1945 wild accusations were spread by the international media and the Holocaust crowd. The deaths were reported to be as high as 14 million, Jews were supposedly processed into industrial soap and lamp shades. One book, published by Vasziliy Groszman: The Hell of Treblinka claimed over ten million victims only at the Treblinka camp in Poland. A whole industry grew out of these lies and sometimes in the 1960’s and 1970’s a “soft landing” approach was initiated by the Holocaust gurus. The total death rate was gradually lowered, first to 6.5 million and later to 6.0 million. The Auschwitz death toll was lowered from 4 million to 1.1 million where it stands today and Jean-Claude Passac who is an organic part of the Industry tells us that the true number is more likely to be in the 300,000 to 500,000 range. Needless to say: There is no arrest warrant out against Passac and he still resides in his own home unlike David Irving and many others.

The soap and lamp shade stories were dismissed as minor historical mistakes. We were simply supposed to forget about the prior miscalculations. While all these modifications were going on nothing ever happened to those who did the recalculations – as long as they were Jews. A special privilege was created for the Holocaust that was not extended to any other event of world history. Anybody can research the victims of genocide in the Soviet Union, in Cambodia or the Ukraine and express just about any opinion and remain a free man.

To keep Mr. Irving in jail with a possible twenty years jail term hanging over his head is a harsh treatment, even if measured by the yardstick of the medieval times. Galileo Galilei did not spend time in jail for crashing head on with the religious establishment of his own time. It is time for us to follow the simple logic of our elders: If we want to know who rules, we will have to take a look at those whom we are not allowed to criticize.

CAFÉ and Paul Fromm is collecting money to assist David Irving’s defense. Donations will be passed on to Irving’s Austrian attorney. Send an e-mail with your VISA and expiry date or mail your check to Canadian Association for Free Expression, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, Canada. paul@paulfromm.com

British historian David Irving, world's top expert on WWII, arrested; global Jewish leadership demonstrating attitude: 'If you can't refute them, imprison them.'

This roundup of revisionist activists and honest holocaust scholars seems so telling and contrary to Jewish strategic interests that it woul