David Irving reportedly says British Jews are “non-British” and “guests”
David Irving, the convicted Holocaust denier who has been banned from several countries, has reportedly to the Jewish Telegraph in an e-mail: “I have led groups of international tourists to the sites where the Holocaust really occurred in Latvia and Poland (like Sobibór, Treblinka and Belzec). But then Britain’s Jewish guests objected even to those tours. They are some hard-to-please people.” When we asked Irving to elaborate on ‘Britain’s Jewish guests’ comments, he reportedly responded: “The non-British Jews arrived in the years before 1938 and settled here,” refusing to comment further.
David Irving’s tour will visit 21 venues, but the exact locations will only be revealed to vetted ticket-buyers.
In 2002, David Irving was bankrupted after unsuccessfully suing historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher for libel, after she called him a Holocaust denier, a racist and a bigot in her book. Lipstadt told the Jewish Telegraph: “As Anthony Julius said to me during my legal battle, ‘fighting David Irving is like the s*** you step in on the street — it has no intrinsic importance unless you fail to clean it off your feet and you bring it into your home’. He will preach to his small choir who are convinced and will remain convinced of the rectitude of his position.”
In its ruling on Irving’s libel lawsuit, the court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist, who “for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” to distort the history of Adolf Hitler’s role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.
Irving has a long history of the most vile Holocaust denial. For example, in October 1991 Irving told a conference to ridicule Holocaust survivors, and then added: “Ridicule alone isn’t enough, you’ve got to be tasteless about it. You’ve got to say things like ‘More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.’ Now you think that’s tasteless, what about this? I’m forming an association especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try and kid people that they were in these concentration camps, it’s called the Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, ‘ASSHOLs’. Can’t get more tasteless than that, but you’ve got to be tasteless because these people deserve our contempt.”
Irving’s humiliating defeat by Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher is the subject of a new film starring Rachel Weisz, Andrew Scott and Timothy Spall due to be released in Britain in January.
