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Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev: “Placing Irving’s opinions alongside respected figures like Sir Ian Kershaw and Professor Richard Evans or institutions like Yad Vashem, recipient of the Prince of Asturias Award, grants him a legitimization that he does not deserve and puts into doubt the credibility of your newspaper.”
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JERUSALEM/MADRID (EJP)---Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said he would not have consented to grant an interview to a Spanish newspaper if he knew that Holocaust denier David Irving would also be interviewed.
Centre-right daily newspaper El Mundo published the interview with Irving, who has denied Nazi Germany killed six million Jews during the Holocaust, as part of a series of six interviews with World War II experts, timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the war's outbreak.
Among those interviewed were also historians Sir Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans, Andrew Roberts, Jorg Friedrich and Avner Shalev.
Upon learning of Irving's involvement, Shalev sent a letter to El Mundo’s director Pedro J. Ramírez in which he wrote: “I spent a number of hours with your reporter, because I assumed that this was a honest look at the issues relating to World War II and the Holocaust.”
He added: “Placing Irving’s opinions alongside respected figures like Sir Ian Kershaw and Professor Richard Evans or institutions like Yad Vashem, recipient of the Prince of Asturias Award, grants him a legitimization that he does not deserve and puts into doubt the credibility of your newspaper.”
“It is inconceivable that a serious newspaper would provide a platform for anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. This is not an issue of freedom of speech. Rather, it goes to the very heart of responsible journalism and judgment. There are some things that don’t have a pro or con: the Holocaust is one of them.”
“The integrity of the newspaper - both in how you approached me for this interview, as well as in your colossal lack of judgment in interviewing a man like Irving - has been irreparably damaged,” said Shalev.
In 2006 a court in Austria sentenced Irving to three years in prison after he pleaded guilty to denying the Holocaust but he was released and deported to Britain after serving just one-third of his sentence.
He was arrested in late 2005 on charges stemming from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 where he said most of those who died at Nazi concentration camps were not executed, but instead succumbed to diseases like typhus.