STEVE MARBLE -- Notebook

Time for a little truth.

A Newport Beach-based group that disputes the accuracy of the atrocities,

the murders, the dark hell that was Nazi Germany has suffered its own

reversal of fortunes.

Actually, because this group purports to be so interested in the naked

details and the unvarnished truth, let me go there: The setback was

suffered by one of this group’s better-known cheerleaders, a man named

David Irving.

Irving is an author and claims to be a historian, but many -- entire

countries, even -- consider him to be a man dedicated to hate.

In a London courtroom Tuesday, Irving lost a highly publicized libel

trial, was ordered to pay $3.2 million in legal costs and was dismissed

by the judge as being “an anti-Semitic and racist.”

The judge said Irving “associates with right-wing extremists who promote

neo-Nazism” and is dedicated to “misrepresent and manipulate” history in

a long and grinding effort to paint Adolf Hitler in a positive light.

So what does Irving have to do with this little corner of the world?

Irving is a cheerleader for the Institute for Historical Review, the

Newport-based revisionist group that purports to be a think tank for

scholars dedicated to examining the Holocaust.

They delight in studying wartime death, gas chambers, counting corpses

and offering open-ended questions designed to make Hitler look like,

well, a little less like Hitler.

Think tank or not, the biggest news the group made was when it offered a

cash reward to anyone who could prove the Holocaust took place, that Jews

were gassed in Nazi death camps.

Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein, a Huntington Beach businessman who

lost most of his family in the concentration camps, took them to the mat

and won a court order stipulating that the Holocaust was real. Very, very

real.

It was Irving who actually initiated the London court case by suing a

woman -- author Deborah Lipstadt -- and her publisher for libel. In

question was a book she had written that detailed the history and growth

of Holocaust denial. The book included information about the Institute

for Historical Review.

The case ended when a judge came down on Lipstadt’s side -- not only

agreeing with her, but going a step further and branding Irving as a

“racist” and his brethren as champions of “neo-Nazism.”

Irving also swaggers through a Web site hosted by a guy named Bradley

Smith, the same man who kicked up a small dust cloud of controversy this

year when he purchased a revisionist ad in the campus newspaper at Orange

Coast College.

Smith, like Irving, is a promoter for the Institute for Historical

Review. Somehow, somewhere, maybe deep in the dark space of the Internet,

all these people and things connect, if only as a mutual respect club.

On Smith’s Web page, there’s a dedicated link to the Irving trial, which

has been front-page news for months throughout Europe. On Tuesday, just

hours after the verdict came down, the Web page’s headline was terse and

to the point: “The Result: Ouch.”

The article urges sympathizers to give Irving a little peace so that he

can save his strength and energy -- and money, one would assume -- for an

appeal. It also seeks money so that Irving’s books, including one titled

“Hitler’s War,” can be reprinted.

On the site, there’s also an odd but grotesque plea for readers to help

“our experts” compile a list of absurd eyewitness accounts of the

Holocaust. The best account, it says, will win the “prestigious Elie

Wiesel Prize.”

Wiesel, a respected author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is a survivor of

Buchenwald. That his name would be commandeered by a group of “experts”

intent on trivializing the Holocaust borders on the obscene.

So, for those who were intrigued, stimulated by the college newspaper ad

to take up -- all in the name of intellectual pursuit -- the quest to

examine the Holocaust, well, now you know who your professors are.

* STEVE MARBLE is the managing editor of Times Community News. He can be

reached at o7 Steve.Marble@latimes.comf7