The American Spectator

Reader Mail

p> RE-REPLIES br> Re: Christopher Orlet's reply to Deborah Lipstadt's letter ("Nothing Wrong With That") in Reader Mail's Irving and the Professor and Christopher Orlet's Drawing the Line : /p>

Orlet seems to forget that, rather than "ignoring" deniers, I wrote a book which was a scathing attack on them and then devoted six years to fighting the leading denier, David Irving. I did so, despite being urged by many people not to do so. I did not say the laws should not apply to Irving. I said three months in jail is enough. Any more time will turn him into the martyr he so craves to be.

Orlet has yet to explain how he could compare someone who spent a lot of time and energy fighting Irving to a Chamberlain-like figure.

His comparison of me with Chomsky also falls flat. As Edward Alexander, who has never been mistaken for a Leftist, writes in Commentary magazine (hardly a Leftist outlet):

Although Lipstadt assigns considerable blame to Chomsky for his "Voltairean" defense of the Nazis' right to free speech, she does not follow him down the winding path whereby he has moved deeper and deeper into the revisionist morass, arguing, first, that denial of the Holocaust is no evidence of antisemitism, and second, in a truly spectacular example of tu quoque, that anyone who says the Jews alone were singled out by Hitler for total annihilation is involved in "pro-Nazi apologetics."

p>If Orlet wants to attack those on the left he should not use the issue of Holocaust denial as an excuse to do so. br> -- Deborah E. Lipstadt, Ph.D.

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