“Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice.”
-- Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust
Deborah Lipstadt's talk debuts on TED
10.05.2017
Historian Deborah Lipstadt’s talk on her courtroom battle with a Holocaust denier, chronicled in the film “Denial,” debuted as a TED talk this week.
Lipstadt’s talk at a TEDxSkoll event in Oxford earlier this year went live on TED.com on 2 May. Her talk tells the story of her six-year battle to defend the occurrence of the Holocaust in a British courtroom, and proposes solutions for how to fight for the truth in a new era rife with “alternative facts.”
"There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies," says Deborah Lipstadt."Truth is not relative."
Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot professor of Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, was sued for libel in 1996 by David Irving for having called him a Holocaust denier. After a ten-week trial in London in 2000, in an overwhelming victory for Lipstadt, the judge found Irving to be a "neo-Nazi polemicist" who "perverts" history and engages in "racist" and "anti-Semitic" discourse. The Daily Telegraph described the trial as having "done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations." The Times described it as "history has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory." According to the New York Times, the trial "put an end to the pretense that Mr. Irving is anything but a self-promoting apologist for Hitler."
Lipstadt directs the website known as HDOT, Holocaust Denial on Trial, which contains a complete archive of the proceedings of Irving v. Penguin UK and Deborah Lipstadt. It also provides answers to frequent claims made by deniers.
The 31 Member Countries of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion in 2013.
Image: Ted.com