Deborah Lipstadt
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Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947, New York City) is an American historian and author of the books Denying the Holocaust and The Eichmann Trial. She is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. She received her BA from City College of New York and her MA and PhD from Brandeis University.
Lipstadt was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994, she was appointed by Bill Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, on which she served two terms.
Contents
Irving sues for libel
Main article: Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt
David Irving sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in an English court, after she characterized some of his writings and public statements as Holocaust denial in her book Denying the Holocaust. Lipstadt's legal defence team was led by Anthony Julius of Mishcon de Reya while Penguin's was led by Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman of Davenport Lyons. Both defendants instructed Richard Rampton QC while Penguin also instructed Heather Rogers as junior counsel. The expert witness for the defence was Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, assisted by Christopher Browning, Robert Jan van Pelt and Peter Longerich.
Although English libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff, Lipstadt and Penguin won the case using the justification defence, viz. by demonstrating in court that Lipstadt's accusations against Irving were substantially true and therefore not libelous. The case was argued as a bench trial before Mr Justice Gray, who produced a written judgment 334 pages long detailing Irving's systematic distortion of the historical record of World War II. The Times (April 14, 2000, p. 23) said of Lipstadt's victory, “History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.”
Free speech
Despite her acrimonious history with Holocaust denier David Irving, she has stated that she is personally opposed to the three-year prison sentence of Irving in Austria for two speeches he made in 1989, during which he allegedly claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz, as minimizing the atrocities of the Third Reich is a crime punishable with up to 10 years imprisonment in Austria. “I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens…Generally, I don't think Holocaust denial should be a crime. I am a free speech person, I am against censorship.”
The Holocaust, denial and abuse
In February 2007, Lipstadt used the neologism “soft-core denial” at the Zionist Federation's annual fundraising dinner in London. Referring to groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain, reportedly she stated: “When groups of people refuse to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day unless equal time is given to anti-Muslim prejudice, this is soft-core denial.” According to Paul, “She received huge applause when she asked how former United States President Jimmy Carter could omit the years 1939-1947 from a chronology in his book”; referring to his recently-published and controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, she said: “When a former president of the United States writes a book on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and writes a chronology at the beginning of the book in order to help them understand the emergence of the situation and in that chronology lists nothing of importance between 1939 and 1947, that is soft-core denial.”
Along the same lines, Lipstadt has criticized the German philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte for engaging in what she calls “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust, arguing that Nolte practises an even more dangerous form of negationism than the Holocaust-deniers. Speaking of Nolte in a 2003 interview, Lipstadt stated:
“Historians such as the German Ernst Nolte are, in some ways, even more dangerous than the deniers. Nolte is an anti-Semite of the first order, who attempts to rehabilitate Hitler by saying that he was no worse than Stalin; but he is careful not to deny the Holocaust. Holocaust-deniers make Nolte's life more comfortable. They have, with their radical argumentation, pulled the center a little more to their side. Consequently, a less radical extremist, such as Nolte, finds himself closer to the middle ground, which makes him more dangerous”.
In late 2011, Lipstadt attacked American and Israeli politicians for what she called their invocation of the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes, something she thought mangled history. She rebuked Republican party presidential candidates for speeches that ‘pandered’ to the Evangelical constituency, as much as it did to the Republican Jewish Coalition.. She also judged Howard Gutman's remarks on causal links between Muslim anti-semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as ‘stupid.’ She decried:
'the “hysteria” and “neuroses” of many Jews and Israelis who compare the current situation in Europe and in the Middle East to the Holocaust era. “People go nuts here, they go nuts. There’s no nuance, there’s no middle ground, it’s taking any shade of grey and stomping on it. There are no voices of calm, there are no voices of reason, not in this country, not in Israel."
In the same interview, she argued that:
If anti-Semitism becomes the reason through which your Jewish view of the world is refracted, if it becomes your prism, then it is very unhealthy. Jewish tradition never wanted that.
Criticism of the Catholic Church
In 2009, she strongly criticized the lifting of the excommunications on the bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X, especially that of Richard Williamson, saying that the Vatican “has made itself look like it is living in the darkest of ages.”
Awards
In 1997 Lipstadt received the Emory Williams teaching award for excellence in teaching.
Bibliography
Lipstadt, Deborah E. (1986). Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-02-919161-0.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. (1993). Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Plume. ISBN 0-452-27274-2.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. (2005). History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. New York: ECCO. ISBN 0-06-059376-8.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. (2011). The Eichmann Trial. New York: Nextbook Press/ Schocken. ISBN 0-8052-4260-0.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Lipstadt
David Irving is een zogeheten reformist, een pseudogeschiedkundige die de holocaust ontkent.
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