AJC Disturbed by C-SPAN Decision to Broadcast Holocaust Denier

AJC Disturbed by C-SPAN Decision to Broadcast Holocaust Denier

NEW YORK, March 21 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Jewish Committee last week sent a letter to Brian Lamb, chairman and chief executive of C-SPAN, expressing its astonishment that the network would choose to broadcast Holocaust denier David Irving as "balance" to its proposed coverage of a lecture at Harvard by Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar at Emory University and author of the new book History on Trial.

In 2000, Lipstadt won a libel case that Irving brought against her in the U.K. because she deemed him a Holocaust denier in one of her books. In his letter to Lamb, Kenneth Stern, AJC's specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism, noted that: "David Irving has been found by a judge to be a pro-Nazi polemicist, a racist, an anti-Semite." Lipstadt's new book is about the case.

Stern, who has appeared on C-SPAN as an expert and author, wrote that the network "should find better ways to use its programming than to provide an audience for such a bigot, and it certainly should not show Mr. Irving as 'balance' to anyone."

AJC applauds Lipstadt's decision to choose not to promote her book on C-SPAN rather than give Irving the unwarranted credibility he would receive from appearing on the same network as she.

Source: The American Jewish Committee

CONTACT: Kenneth Bandler, Director of Public Relations and Communications, +1-212-891-6771, bandlerk@ajc.org, or Lisa Fingeret Roth, Assistant Director of Public Relations, +1-212-891-1385, rothl@ajc.org, both of The American Jewish Committee

Web site: http://www.ajc.org/

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