Holocaust denier Irving turns to friends in US

[T_i_B]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article329582.ece

David Irving's recent life has made him look more like an outlaw than an historian. Broke, shunned and declared "persona non grata" across half the planet, it's been quite a comedown for the world's most notorious Holocaust denier. The 67-year-old writer and polemicist - who, in his younger days won lavish praise from mainstream historians for his exhaustive study of the Second World War from Hitler's point of view - essentially rolled the dice and lost by daring to visit Austria, one of a handful of countries to put him on notice that he risked being arrested on sight.

Denying the existence of the Nazi Holocaust is serious business in the country of Hitler's birth, and what was initially intended as a below-the-radar visit to a far-right student group in Vienna has turned into a legal nightmare. Not only was Mr Irving arrested and charged on two counts of Holocaust denial following a brief game of cat-and-mouse with the Austrian police on the road between Vienna and Graz but on Friday a judge in Vienna also denied him bail pending trial.

Even his trips to the States have been less than comfortable. In 2003, a restaurant in rural Idaho chose to cancel an event of his and close down for the day after finding out who he was and what sort of people his local fans might be. This summer he received a rare invitation to address a left-wing group in Alabama, the Atheist Law Center, only to provoke outrage among the membership and, this week, the resignation of the group president, Larry Darby.

Mr Darby described Mr Irving to his membership only as "an expert on World War Two, the Nazi era and the erosion... of free speech". In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mr Darby made some pointed remarks about Jews and suggested that attacking them was consistent with his general anti-religious worldview. "I think it's easy in this country to speak out on Christianity and even Islam," he said. "I think it's more difficult to speak out on things of a Jewish nature."

[UpInArms]

1. also from your link:

But in Austria, perhaps in recognition of the gravity of the charges he faces, he has taken a different tack. His Viennese lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, insists he has changed his mind about "the views he is so famous for" after an examination of Soviet archives led him to accept the Nazi gas chambers existed.

That line of argument may surprise Mr Irving's white supremacist friends in the United States, more accustomed to his view that "more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz". They have extended numerous invitations and organised frequent books sales for him in the past few years.

Faced with 20 years in prison for being a propagandist, he attempts to backpedal.

I wonder who his "friends" were/are?

[T_i_B]

2. Also from the article

Among his Stateside sponsors, according to the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center, have been the former Ku Klux Klan leader and one-time candidate for the Louisiana governor's office, David Duke, as well as the leading US neo-Nazi organisation, the National Alliance.

That much is not suprising. The bit I took about the Atheist Law Center is suprising though.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

3. Jeff Rense, perhaps? n/t

[rooboy]

4. I once had a tape of a speech given by David Irving...

to an audience in Australia, circa 1990. Interestingly, the position he took in that speech was that he did not dispute the events of the Holocaust, nor did he dispute the numbers of Jews killed. His position at the time was that he could find no documentary proof that Hitler knew about it. If I recall correctly, he had some sort of offer of a thousand pounds to the person who could prove Hitler's knowledge.

Now the emergence of the Hess document in Russia subsequent to this speech does prove a link between Hitler and the camps. So as far as him having taken a position which was later disproved by the Russian document, I can tell you that Irving isn't backpedalling - it was a position I heard him take.

Irving's undoing, however, is that he has probably taken 10 different positions depending on who his audience is. I have little doubt that he is a Nazi sympathizer, and his recent humiliation in the British defamation case left him completely discredited. This guy got 10 years' more mileage than he should have because stifling his books and free speech meant there could be no proper debate in which to destroy him. Ironically, his own bringing of a defamation case finally put him face to face with an historian who showed his falsifications for what they were.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

6. Willis Carto & the "Institute for Historical Review" for one

The IHR is probably the world's leading Holocaust denial organization and has hosted Irving as well as published him in their in-house journal (the "Journal of Historical Review"). See, for example, their glowing biography of him (which, amoung other thing, completely ignores the Lipstadt trial):
http://www.ihr.org/other/authorbios.html

The IHR was founded by Willis Carto who is a **** of a man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto

[WearyOne]

5. pointless jailing this guy..makes him into a matyr for neo-nazis