:The imitable Jonathan Freedland recently wrote a column in the Jewish Chronicle in which I was mentioned in passing (http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/columnists/158642/dont-play-nazi-card).  ​I didn’t actually read the column. If forced to choose, I’d rather watch grass grow or paint dry than read Freedland.  But some readers were offended by this inveterate bore’s inveterate lies.  Below I post a letter/correction that the Jewish Chronicle refused to run.

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To the editor

Mr Freedland’s long overdue apology adds insult to original injury. Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry, does not praise David Irving for making an ‘indispensable contribution to our understanding of the the last war’. Rather it cites Gordon Craig in the NY Review of Books as the author of this statement, and goes on to observe that respected historians such as Arno Mayer and Raul Hilberg had reference​ed​ Holocaust deniers​ in their scholarly publications. ​As it happens, I was involved in publishing and promoting ​The Holocaust Industry. Having negotiated the serialisation in the Guardian, I was shocked to see the paper ​(in the person of Mr Freedland) ​subsequently denounce it as ‘elaborate conspiracy theory’​,​ and ​Finkelstein as  ‘closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it’. ​If Mr Freedland have joined ​Finkelstein on his book tour of the UK, he would have witnessed at the end of the week Finkelstein debate Shimon Samuels from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in the St Johns Wood synagogue. JD Bindenagel, US Ambassador and Special Envoy on Holocaust Issues, to President Clinton had been flown over, along with his elderly mother. The event closed when she stood, and interrupted Mr Samuels, with the demand that he acknowledge the truth of Finkelstein’s argument. ​Samuels was left speechless. Unable to make a serious apology, ​it would perhaps be more prudent if ​Freedland​, following Samuels, stayed silent, rather than continue to expose himself as a fraud and malicious repeater of lies.

Yours sincerely

Gavin Everall