50% OFF Holocaust Retried Selected GOWNS, ROBES & PAJAMAS 30% OFF All BALI, VANITY FAIR & LILY OF FRANCE BRAS SIZES 32A - 48DD Revisionist historian tells libel trial he wanted in Germany. 50% OFF Selected PANTIES DOUGLAS DAVIS Jewish Telegraphic Agency 50% OFF London Many PEIGNOIR SETS PERSONAL ATTENTION EXPERT FITTING! LuGLuVLingerfe . G Maple at Lahser (Next to Blockbuster Video) • Bloomfield Hills Open 10 - 6 Daily • 248-644-4576 Sale Ends January 31, 2000 BILL MEYER JERRY FENBY RENNIE KAUFFMAN HOT ICE FENBY-CARR SIMONE VITALE ERIC HARRIS-DJ QUIET STORM THE JERRY FENBY BAND PERSUASION PLEASE CALL FOR R FREE VIDEO APPOINTMENT SUN MESSENGERS SUNSET BOULEVARD TIM HEWITT 248-474-9966 LOVING CUP ENTERTAINMENT AGENCY BEST BANDS AND SERVICE IN TOWN An - ASTER HEATING & AIR CONDITIONING CO. RESIDENTIAL & COMMERCIAL. SERVICE • SALES • INSTALLATIONS YOUR INDEPENDENT DEALER FOR LENNOX & 1 TRANE Michael Levey In Hard 7b Stop A 7h2ne: BERKLEY 399-1800 W. BLOOMFIELD 788-9073 N. OAKLAND GROSSE POINTE 682-9090 882-4870 DISABILITIES CLINIC '• sthig,/Evalitation • Therapeutic 71ittorili g (248)545...6677 • (248)433-3323 1/21 2000 30 LYNNE MASTER, M.Ed Owner, Director Oak Park Bloomfield Hills www.idclinic.com here is scarcely a dull moment these days in London's Royal Courts of Justice, where a Holocaust revisionist is engaged in a landmark libel case against a U.S. Holocaust scholar. The latest twist came when David Irving announced to the court; just set- ding in for a protracted three-month trial, that he was anticipating his arrest by British police because a German court is seeking his extradition. The long-standing warrant for his arrest, he said, relates to his claim that thegas chambers at Auschwitz were not genuine. Irving cited the extradition as an example of the "the kind of hatred I face and the problems I face because of the repugnant allegations against me" in Emory University Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, pub- lished by Penguin Books. Irving is claiming that references to him in the book have "blackened" his name and damaged his career as a writer and historian by alleging that he manipulates data to suit his ideo- logical preferences, labeling him a dis- torter of history and portraying him as a Holocaust denier. The book, he said, had generated "waves of hatred against me. " As an example, he showed the judge a Jan. 12 article from the German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung, which reported that a court in nearby Weinheim had asked the British gov- ernment to facilitate his extradition. The extradition request stemmed from a lecture Irving gave in Weinheim in which he asserted that the gas cham- bers at Auschwitz were a fake. The lecture was given in September 1990. Irving was indicted for racial incitement in 1996, and extradition proceedings were launched in 1998. Irving said no attempt had been made to serve a warrant against him but, he declared, the British government had agreed to cooperate with Germany. He also conceded that he had been fined $24,000 and barred from Germany in 1992 for making the same statement at a meeting in Munich, also in 1990. Earlier, during five hours of testimo- ny, Irving denied that 6 million Jews had died in the Holocaust and told the High Court that it was logistically impossible for the Nazis to have killed millions of Jews in gas chambers. He also said there was no evidence that Hider had sanctioned a systematic pro- gram of extermination of the Jews. Irving, a 62-year-old author of 30 books on World War II, conceded that the SS might have undertaken gassing experiments, but he denied that mil- lions could have been killed in this way. Asked by lawyer Richard Rampton, appearing for Lipstadt, whether he agreed that 6 million had died "in one of the blackest chapters of 20th centu- ry history," Irving replied, "A lot of the numbers are very suspect." Although Irving conceded that the Jews had suffered a tragedy, he said "the people who died were not just Jews but Gypsies and homosexuals, the people of Coventry and the people of Hiroshima." Asked how many innocent Jewish people he thought the Germans had killed deliberately, Irving raised the case of Anne Frank, who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen at the age of 15. "She was a Jew who died in the Holocaust," he said, "And she wasn't murdered unless you take it in the broadest sense." Of Hitler, Irving said, "There was a time when he was on the right course, but he went off the rails. You can't praise his racial program or penal meth- ods, but he did pick up his nation out of the mire after World War I, reunified and gave it a sense of pride again." Irving said he ignored Lipstadt's book until 1996, when he found that bookstores refused to stock his own new work, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. ❑ Related editorial: page 33.