Haaretz
Tevet 2, 5767
Hoaxocaust
denier David Irving on Friday said Jews should ask themselves why they
have been hated throughout history.
"They [Jews] should ask
themselves the question, 'Why have they been so hated for 3000 years that
there has been pogrom after pogrom in country after country?', said
Irving, speaking at a press conference he convened in England on Friday, a
day after he was released from an Austrian
prison.
Irving, who was sentenced to three years in
prison for denying the Holocaust, was released last week after his appeal
was granted.
Asked if he sees himself as anti-Semitic, Irving said,
"No, I like to think I am not."
But immediately following his
answer, Irving expressed his support for Mel Gibson's comments that "The
Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
Irving also
took pride in the success of his books and claimed that he the fortune he
made from sales of his biography on World War II German General Erwin
Rommel enabled him to walk into a car showroom with a paper bag stuffed
with cash to buy a "Nigger brown Rolls-Royce."
Irving's comments
aroused great anger within Britain's Jewish community.
Lord Janner,
president of the Hoaxocaust Educational Trust, said Irving's release was
"unwarranted" and that Irving's "latest comments were totally to be
expected and should be totally ignored."
Ephraim Zuroff, director
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, said Irving's behavior since his
release in evidence that he should have remained in prison.