I have met and interviewed the Essex boy-made-bad on several occasions to explore the obscene lie that the Nazi gas chambers never existed. Irving’s one concession to the truth is that some old-fashioned massacres were committed by the Third Reich and I vividly recall him describing, with far too much relish, a terrible episode that he had researched; it involved a Nazi bigwig sexually salivating over the Jewish women he was about to have executed.
Before Irving, Holocaust revisionism was the stock-in-trade of the freaky neo-Nazi fringe, bottom-feeders who couldn’t get a girlfriend and blamed the Jews. Irving, who had had some earlier success as a dissenting WW2 historian, finally gave their derangement a veneer of creditabilty.
Quickly he became the bête noire of world Jewry, who opposed him at every turn – fearing that Holocaust denial was a precursor of some post modern pogrom – until eventually his hubris got the better of him and he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, lost and bankrupted himself.
Justice Gray neatly summed up Irving’s life’s work:
'Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.'
His next comeuppance came during a visit to Austria, ironically. It had enacted laws against Holocaust denial, in part a reaction to Irving’s globetrotting Jew-baiting. When Irving arrived in the birthplace of Hitler in 2005 he was promptly arrested and imprisoned for a year.
Now he’s back and craving more attention with his obscene stunt of leading tours of the death camps of Poland. Considering his seedy endeavours of the past 25 years, intellectually spitting on the grave of six million Holocaust victims, I would have anticipated a roar of outrage at his plan to desecrate the sites of the Jewish genocide with his presence.
But the response has been surprisingly muted. Protests have been formally lodged but it’s not like the hotline has been ringing off the hook at the 'Jewish lobby' HQ. Nor has the Jewish press raised its hackles beyond the obligatory news coverage (though one contributor to the blogosphere did suggest that Irving might give a practical demonstration of a Nazi crematorium at work, by placing himself in it).
It’s as if everyone has come round to realising that Irving’s as pathetic as he’s pathological. As one Holocaust survivor succintly put it: 'I used to really hate him but now I just think he’s a nutter.'
But the Jews now have bigger worries. While Irving the man can be dismissed, the new anti-Semitism of Holocaust denial he helped culture has now metastasised into a state-sponsored monstrosity, in the shape of Ahmadinejad’s Iran. An Iran that despises Israel and may one day soon possess the capability of unleashing a nuclear Holocaust." (source)
