Spanish paper calls 'Holocaust denier' Irving expert on WWII

First the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet cited freedom of the press as its justification for accusing IDF soldiers of harvesting Palestinian organs. Now the Spanish daily El Monde is using the same argument to defend including Holocaust denier David Irving among its list of experts to be interviewed this week to mark 70 years since the start of World War II.

An interview with Irving, who served time in an Austrian prison for his Holocaust denial, is scheduled to appear in the paper on Saturday, a day after an interview with Yad Vashem's chairman Avner Shalev.

When Israeli Ambassador to Spain Raphael Schutz learned of the plans, he wrote a letter to the newspaper, saying it was obscene to include Irving in the list of experts and give him an esteemed platform. Such exposure, Schutz argued, lent Irving credibility.

Schutz's letter appeared in the paper on Wednesday.

An interview with Irving, who served time in an Austrian prison for his Holocaust denial, is scheduled to appear in the paper on Saturday, a day after an interview with Yad Vashem's chairman Avner Shalev.

When Israeli Ambassador to Spain Raphael Schutz learned of the plans, he wrote a letter to the newspaper, saying it was obscene to include Irving in the list of experts and give him an esteemed platform. Such exposure, Schutz argued, lent Irving credibility.

Schutz's letter appeared in the paper on Wednesday.

Schutz wrote that one of the problems facing the post-modern age was an inability to recognize anything as true, saying instead that there were only "different narratives."

As such, Schutz wrote, there was no capacity to differentiate between truth and lies, between the important and the superfluous. And in this world void of truth, everything is at the same level - the murdered and the victim, the wise and the ignorant, Mozart's opera and the latest pop song.
Even freedom of the press, Schutz wrote, had limits. One sentence that was edited out of his letter was his charge that the paper was printing the interview to cause a sensation.

The paper's response, which was run under the letter, was not to endorse Irving's ideas, but rather to cite press freedom and the right for everyone to decide on their own.

Yad Vashem spokesman Estee Yaari, speaking for Shalev, said that it was "shocking" that a paper like El Mundo would include an interview with Irving as an "expert."

Shalev, she said, "would never have agreed to be interviewed had he known."

Aftonbladet, meanwhile, received backing for its article on IDF organ harvesting from Syrian President Bashar Assad's spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban, who praised the article in the Pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat on Tuesday, and said Israel "should be put on trial" for the these "criminal acts."

"These criminal acts began in 1992 when Palestinians started to witness a sharp rise in the number of young Palestinians disappearing and of bodies of Palestinians killed by occupation forces being returned with organs like hearts, kidneys, livers and eyes missing," she wrote, in a story that appeared on the paper's English Web site.

She also wrote that "investigations in New Jersey have proved that Rabbi Levy-Izhak (Isaac Rosenbaum) from Brooklyn and other rabbis have run for years Soprano-like networks to sell the kidneys of Palestinian martyrs in the US black market. Patients in the United States paid up to US$ 160,000 per kidney.

"In 2003, a medical conference showed that Israel is the only country in the world in which the medical profession does not condemn stealing human organs and does not act against those involved in such a crime."

Yossi Levy, the Foreign Ministry's spokesman for the Israeli press, said Shaaban's praise for the article should be a "warning light" for the Swedish government which "unfortunately has still not fully and courageously condemned the article."

"It is not surprising that Damascus smelled the anti-Semitism emanating from the article, and quickly embraced it for its propaganda purposes," he said, adding that "poisonous anti-Semitism was no stranger to Syria's political philosophy."

Levy cited as just one example remarks Assad made to welcome Pope John Paul II to Damascus in 2001. At that time Assad said Israel and the Jews "tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Mohammed."

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