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David Irving: He's back ....

According to the Guardian, David Irving, whom it described in a headline as"Discredited" is planning a" comeback" speaking tour. [The paper also described him as a"Historian"... though I can't say why].

What Irving has to say will not make deniers happy.

First, of course, he engages in his traditional antisemitism, telling the paper that

"the Jews were responsible for what happened to them during the second world war and that the 'Jewish problem' was responsible for nearly all the wars of the past 100 years:"The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune, but that is the short version A-Z. Between A-Z there are then 24 other characters in intervening steps."

His rant reminds me of statements by someone he seems to lionize, Hitler, in that he blames Jews for every war in the last 100 years. [Korea? Iran-Iraq? Eritreia-Ethiopia? Somalia?]

But what he says about the Holocaust is really going to upset his denier pals:
"that a document, which he is 80% sure is genuine, suggests that 2.4 million Jews were killed in Poland, but goes on to claim that the gas chamber at Auschwitz was fake."

Even as he says that at Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka about 2.4 million Jews were killed by men in control of Heinrich Himmler, he whitewashes the Germans by claiming that the killers were"mostly Ukrainian mercenaries."

Pressed to say whether he now accepted that there had been a Holocaust [I am not sure why what he accepts or does not is important] he engages in one of his traditional antisemitic swipes by saying he was"not going to use their trade name."

Then apparently still finding it necessary to protect Hitler, he claims the German leaders was" completely in the dark" about the programme.

The fact is that David Irving has made so many twists and turns in his claims that even I, who is pretty familiar with them all, has a hard time keeping track of them all.

The only way he gets attention is by swerving in one direction and then the other.

I wonder if this acknowledgment would have gotten him dis-invited from the Iran denial conference had he not been in jail in Austria....

He has truly become, as I describe him in History on Trial, the court Jester.

Read entire article at Deborah Lipstadt at her blog