Holocaust denier finds few fans here

Only about a dozen people showed up Friday evening, July 3, to hear Holocaust denier David Irving speak at the Embassy Suites Kansas City International Airport hotel. (See related story from last week.)

The Chronicle has learned that Irving, or a representative, arranged for a meeting room at the hotel just minutes before the talk was to begin last Friday evening. The event, which kicked off Irving’s month-long speaking tour of the West and Midwest, had been announced on Irving’s Web site. Prospective attendees were instructed to show up at the hotel lobby on Friday night and to call a phone number for final directions to the meeting place. Unfriendly reporters were explicitly not welcome.

Irving, a native of Britain who has written 30 books about World War II and the Nazis, apparently brought a number of books with him to sell at his local talk. A photograph taken in Kansas City, showing Irving signing books spread out on a table, surrounded by nine people in a meeting room, was posted this week on his Web site.

After Kansas City, he was on to Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, N.M., and Phoenix this week. His schedule has him in Omaha, Neb., July 30.

Earlier visits
Contrary to what local author Leonard Zeskind said in The Chronicle last week, which was that Irving’s July 3 appearance was his first in the Kansas City area, it appears Irving has spoken here before last week. The Anti-Defamation League Web site lists an Aug. 30, 2008, speech here by Irving in its “extremist events calendar.” And a search of Irving’s own Web site makes reference to an even earlier visit, as well.

And while the Kansas City Star did not cover the Irving meeting in its news columns, it did allow him to post a statement in the “press release central” portion of its Web site on June 26. The Star instituted the “PR Central” corner of its Web site two years ago, and does not charge for the privilege of posting a release there. It notes, as well, that “Postings … are not edited for content and the facts are not verified.”

Thus, Irving’s release presents him not as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, as a British court famously found in 2000, but, rather, as a “controversial … historian.”

It accurately notes that Irving has written more than two dozen books on World War II topics, many published by mainstream publishers. But that came before the devastating judgment in 2000 against Irving in his libel suit against “Denying the Holocaust” author Deborah Lipstadt.

Irving’s release says that, “Latterly he has become the object of censorship and condemnation for the conclusions he reached in Hitler’s War (The Viking Press; Macmillan; Avon books, etc.), his blockbuster biography of the wartime Nazi leader. ... The campaign against Irving climaxed in November 2005 when Austrian secret state police ambushed him and imprisoned him under the 1945 Stalin-era ‘prohibition law,’ ludicrously accusing him of ‘rehabilitating the Nazi regime’ for a speech he had given legally to university students in 1989. He spent fourteen months in solitary confinement in a six-foot square cell in Vienna before winning an appeal.

“Mr. Irving is currently writing about the chief of the infamous black-uniformed SS and the real architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler — based on diaries, private letters, and documents that no other historian has seen.”

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