Reason with C-Span? I donít see this as a viable possibility. No, we must instead embarrass them. Only the blinding glare of bad publicity will move them off the dime.

I have read most of Deborah Lipstadtís most recent HISTORY ON TRIAL: MY DAY IN COURT WITH DAVID IRVING. Unfortunately, I have yet to seriously go through her earlier works, DENYING THE HOLOCAUST: THE GROWING ASSAULT ON TRUTH AND MEMORY and BEYOND BELIEF: THE AMERICAN PRESS AND THE COMING OF THE HOLOCAUST. These two books are in my personal library and perhaps I will be able to do so sometime this week.

I am working on a letter. It is hard to know how to reason with C-Span, or if this is even possible. Basically, I think one has to point out that their position is inherently antisemitic, whether knowingly or not. But apparently this is already difficult for them to see or care. While it is plausible that there are problems with Lipstadt’s book, and that they might well seek someone to present these, the idea of giving a voice to Irving is surely motivated by a desire to question/show someone questioning the Jews’ “status” as the archetypal victims at the start of the postmodern victimary age.

At a time when every claim on victim status seeks to re-present the Nazi/Jew “model” of an unquestionable, totally one-sided victimization, this leads some to resent the archetypal model and seek to undermine its (Jewish) centrality, e.g. by “balancing” it with others’ claims on the victim status. This is why political correctness, when taken to extremes, turns antisemitic.

BTW, as people (e.g. my parents) who knew David Irving in his youth as a failed physics student testify, he has been an angry fascist since before he went into history writing. The idea that his take on the Holocaust somehow emerged out of his exhaustive archival researhes (as even the WaPo column tends to suggest) is simply wrong.

The answer is yes:

http://www.c-span.org/about/contact.asp

Deborah Lipstadt is once again forced to deal with the shoddy scholarship of David Irving. Intellectual relativism pervades todayís leftist institutions. Nobody can supposedly think logically and reach a rational conclusion regarding the reality of the holocaust. The heck with the overwhelming evidence. Objective truth does not exist; itís merely a matter of my way of looking at things versus your own. Who are you to impose your reality on me? So what if I might believe that Adolph Hitler and Adolph Eichmann were slandered by a worldwide Zionist conspiracy? The world is round? Well, I belong to the Flat Earth Society, and you can go to hell.

I didnít even know about this crisis until I visited Deborah Lipstadtís blog. How did we earlier miss this bombshell? Well, at least the Washington Post paid attention. We must give them credit for doing so.

ìThe word balance is not in quotes for emphasis. It was invoked repeatedly by C-SPAN producers who seemed convinced that they had chosen the most noble of all journalistic causes: fairness. “We want to balance it [Lipstadt's lecture] by covering him,” said Amy Roach, a producer for C-SPAN’s Book TV. Her boss, Connie Doebele, put it another way. “You know how important fairness and balance is at C-SPAN,” she told me. “We work very, very hard at this. We ask ourselves, ‘Is there an opposing view of this?’ ”

ìThis is the man C-SPAN turned to for “balance.” It told Lipstadt that since it was going to air her lecture, it would do one of Irving’s, too. As luck would have it, he was appearing March 12 at the Landmark Diner in Atlanta. C-SPAN was there for this momentous eventóalthough Irving’s advance warning that cameras would be present apparently held down attendance. (His people seem to prefer anonymityóor, in the old days, sheets.) Lipstadt was in effect being told that if she wanted to promote her book on C-SPAN (an important venue) she would also have to promote Irving. If she was to get a TV audience, then so would he.î

http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2005/03/balance-of-absurd.html

The progeny of Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault are obviously alive and well at C-Span.