We received an email late last week calling our attention to a story on the JTA wires about a European Parliament member’s excursion into anti-Semitic publishing. Ordinarily, I would have just shaken my head sadly and moved on, because a 32-page pamphlet doesn’t quite fall under our mandate to cover the book publishing industry, but this particular story struck a chord, because just that morning, I’d seen an item at Talking Points Memo about a Georgia state representative who’d been distributing a letter to other politicians that claims evolution theory is a Jewish conspiracy, “derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.” Well, I emailed Sarah, one more of these kooks and we’ve got ourselves a trend. So she emails back, “There’s always something new going on with David Irving, I bet.”
Lo and behold, last month, after having been freed from prison and kicked out of Austria after his conviction for Holocaust denial was commuted to probation, Irving popped up on Italian television and told reporters he doesn’t believe Auschwitz had gas chambers. Oh, he’s not denying the Nazis killed millions of Jews anymore; he’s just saying they didn’t do it there, or at least not by gassing them.