Top Spanish newspaper to run “expert” interview with Holocaust denier David Irving in WWII anniversary week
David Irving, Europe’s most prominent Holocaust denier, is fond of arguing that time is on his side. “All that interests me now,” he said on his website in August, “is the question, whose books will scholars be using in a hundred years’ time — mine, or those of the conformist historians like Sir Ian Kershaw and Sir Martin Gilbert?”
But why wait a hundred years? On Saturday this week, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo is set to run an interview with Irving as part of a series of stories with “experts” for the 70th anniversray of the start of World War II. Irving, always keen to portray himself as a kind of hunted hero, gleefully reports on the controversy that the article has aroused in Israel with a headline in his online newsletter saying: “Israel’s Ambassador to Spain pleads wth Madrid’s leading daily newspaper El Mundo not to publish their major interview with British Historian David Irving.” (My italics)
It is only a matter of weeks since Sweden’s top selling newspaper Aftonbladet published a two-page spread of its own alleging that American Jews and Israeli soldiers were involved in a conspiracy to harvest the bodily organs of Palestinian children and sell them on the international black market. Is there something in the air?
I have said before that, for those who follow such matters, there is always a danger of getting too close to one’s subject. But it certainly seems that the boundaries of acceptable discourse about Israel and the Jews in Europe have widened considerably in recent months. Apartheid analogies now look routine. The attempt to compare Israel with Nazi Germany is heading in the same direction.
Events in Sweden and Spain may indicate that conspiracy theories, blood libels and Holocaust denial are on the verge of a resurgence of their own. It is too early to tell. But the general drift is surely cause for concern.
According to the Jerusalem Post, El Mundo plans to run the interview with Irving the day after an interview with Avner Shalev, the chairman of Yad Vashem. The timeline will not be coincidental. It is a standard technique in journalism to run opposing viewpoints on consecutive days in order to provide a rounded picture to readers. So, for readers of El Mundo, Friday’s edition will assert that the Holocaust did happen. Saturday’s will assert that it did not. Who knows, perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle?
The Israeli ambassador’s protests to the paper have been to no avail. As the Jerusalem Post reports it: “The paper’s response…was not to endorse Irving’s ideas, but rather to cite press freedom and the right for everyone to decide on their own.” (My Italics)
Call these isolated events if you wish. But I have a question. How many isolated events does it take before it all starts to look like a pattern?
To read Irving’s website, click here:
To read the Jerusalem Post article on the subject, click here:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804476311&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Tags: Israel
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:14 am
Look on the bright side, unlike the BBC, at least a counter point to this guys racism/anti-semitism is being run!
I know…Im clutching here!
Mailman
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
“How many isolated events does it take before it all starts to look like a pattern?”
In answer to that question, follow this link and observe the anti-Semitic cartoons produced very recently by El Mundo and various other newspapers (Page 17 onwards):
http://tinyurl.com/ndkaru
I wanted to link to some others, but there are so many it’s difficult to know which I should pick. Here are just a few:
Here a few from Pat Oliphant:
http://tinyurl.com/mq6gba
Here’s Dave Brown’s notorious blood libel cartoon from the Independent:
http://tinyurl.com/ccrrp
This one is from Petar Pismestrovic in an Austrian newspaper, Kleine Zeitung:
http://tinyurl.com/ks9×4u
A number from Montreal that have absolutely nothing to do with Israel:
http://tinyurl.com/kpu8w8
Another that has nothing to do with Israel, this time from Rutgers:
http://tinyurl.com/ndjl96
Here’s a whole slew of them I just discovered as I was about to post this:
http://tinyurl.com/lzpkep
And here Kate Clark at the BBC excuses Egypt’s anti-semitic cartoons:
1) “there is no indigenous tradition of anti-Jewish racism in the Muslim world.” [!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -- Joshua]
2) “The use of anti-Semitic imagery in the Egyptian media may seem bizarre, racist and anachronistic to outsiders.
But it is not based on any historical hatred of Jews as a race.
It has more to do with the need to be seen supporting the Palestinians, even if only in a purely symbolic way.
That means that if and when real peace comes, the Egyptian media are likely to quickly forget their anti-Semitic line.”
http://tinyurl.com/lgfjmu
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
What it means (at least as far as I see it) is that when - not if - the next Jihad against Israel begins, whether from Hamas, Hezbollah (or both) or whoever, the anti-Semitic pro-jihad-against-the-Jew-nation screeds from the Western media will reach new depths of moral depravity, bigotry and deceit, going even further in Judenhass than was the case even in the Gaza war at the beginning of the year, and the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006. This may be hard to imagine given how bigoted and deceptive the coverage from the Western media was during those respective wars, but the Judenhass is continuing to intensify, so I don’t see any limits to how low the media can go in this direction.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:15 pm
The pattern has been patently clear to all who wish to see for some time now Robin. It’s just that as time goes on and these things become more and more mainstream, journalists and others are feeling less and less need to cloud their anti-Semitism in more circumspect guises.
To Europe’s shame, only 70 years on after WW2, anti-Semitism is now a completely acceptable form of racism.
“Such is no safe abode for the children of my people. Ephraim is an heartless dove - Issachar an over-laboured drudge, which stoops between two burdens. Not in a land of war and blood, surrounded by hostile neighbours, and distracted by internal factions, can Israel hope to rest during her wanderings.”
Ivanhoe -Sir Walter Scott
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Time somebody sent an article to El Mundo titled:
The Myth of Basque Terrorism - a fiction promulgated by the Spanish.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Another possible historical article by some ‘expert’ sure to interest and inform the readers of El Mundo:
The Spanish Civil War - the war that didn’t happen.
September 4th, 2009 at 1:00 am
http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=849241&ct=6763463
El Mundo has form - as noted above
September 4th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
“El Mundo has form - as noted above”
That’s a truly shocking piece, as anti-Semitic as anything I’ve ever read (at least as regards the quotes I’ve found). Unfortunately, I can’t find a complete translation of the piece. However, I came across this fine article by Yoav Sivan about prejudices and anti-Semitism in the Spanish press. If anything, El Pais (according to Wikipedia, “the most widely-circulated daily newspaper in Spain”) seems worse than El Mundo. The article originally appeared in Haaretz:
Bias in black and white
1) ‘That’s the least of it. Consider a cartoon published [in El Pais] during the recent Gaza campaign, depicting a figure saying, “Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, not the Israelis. The Hebrew myths are false, and abuse of the weak is disgusting.” To whom a Jewish man with a hooked nose responds, “We are the people chosen by the God we ourselves invented.” ‘
2) ‘El Pais is regularly filled as well with references comparing Israel to the Nazis. When riots broke out between Jews and Arabs last year in Acre, an article entitled “Acre: An Attempted Pogrom,”
described “segregation that evokes Nazism.” The article, by Juan Miguel Munoz, the paper’s Israel correspondent, was framed as a tale in which Acre’s Jews played the role of the Nazis, while the Arabs became the Jews. An op-ed published in December 2008 read: “Every year we remember the horror of the Jewish Holocaust committed by the Nazis during World War II, but we do nothing about the genocide that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people.” ‘
3) And here’s a section about the Antonio Gala piece in El Mundo which is referred to at the link posted by Jonathan Hoffman above:
‘Consider the opinion piece by Antonio Gala, a highly regarded poet and novelist, that appeared in February in El Mundo, Spain’s second-largest newspaper in terms of circulation. With undisguised anti-Semitism, Gala justified the hardships Jews have undergone throughout history. “Just as these things happened on other occasions - pogroms, voluntary or non-voluntary ghettos, exterminations, persecutions, expulsions,” Gala wrote, “shouldn’t they [the Jews] ask themselves why they always happen the same way? Or is it the rest of the world that is mistaken?” ‘
http://tinyurl.com/csexs7
And this, from a piece entitled “Spain’s Jewish problem”, by Michael Freund:
‘Last fall, the Pew Global Attitudes Project published a wide-ranging study [referred to in the piece directly above by Yoav Sivan] on how Jews and Muslims are viewed in various countries. It found that 46 percent of all Spaniards hold negative views of Jews - by far the highest percentage recorded in any non-Muslim country. The runners-up, Russia and Poland, trailed Spain by 10 or more percentage points.
Pew also found that Spain was the only country in Europe where the percentage of those holding negative opinions of Jews exceeded those with a positive view, with just 37% of Spaniards viewing Jews favorably. By contrast, 50% of Poles, 64% of Germans and 73% of Brits have positive views of Jews.’
http://tinyurl.com/l3fzjf
September 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Robin Shepherd recently posted a piece at this blog entitled “New Guardian polemic against Israel relies on children for denigration of Jewish state”. In that piece he makes this excellent point:
‘If one tried, one could easily find white children in any European city peddling naive and derogatory opinions of blacks: ditto for Arab children about Jews, Muslim children about Christians, black children about whites.
To generalise on the basis of particular instances can only be justified if one is illustrating a broader picture whose validity is supported by convincing evidence, of the kind offered by opinion polls for example.’
Now, how about this for convincing evidence of widespread prejudice amongst children:
‘He [Israel's ambassador to Spain] cited a study performed last year [2008], in which 46 percent of secondary school students [in Spain] openly stated that they would not like to have a Jewish classmate.’
http://tinyurl.com/msfot5
Anyone see anything about this in the Guardian? No, I didn’t think so.
September 4th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Strange how newspapers will cite press freedom to run stories critical of Israel and Jews, but then practice self censorship regarding stories which for instance are skeptical about the causes of climate change or others that may offend certain groups.