Lipstadt’s Zionist Distortions

Deborah Lipstadt became famous for standing her ground against a nasty Holocaust-denier named David Irving.  Once considered a capable historian, Irving moved steadily into absurdity, denying Auschwitz had gas chambers, denying the Holocaust, denying Hitler wanted to kill the Jews.  Lipstadt wrote a book Denying the Holocaust castigating Irving.  In 1995 Irving sued her for libel.  The judge found that Irving was in fact a Holocaust denier, racist, etc., etc.  A good outcome.

Except that Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt is a died-in-the-wool Zionist and that’s completely colored and warped her thinking. In 2011 she wrote The Eichmann Trial; Denial: Holocaust History on Trial whose major point was to attack the legendary Hannah Arendt who in her Eichman in Jerusalem reminded the world of Zionist deals with the Nazis and who was scathing about the Jewish leaders on the (Nazi-created) Jewish Councils. Arendt had written, “Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been really unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people.” 

Lipstadt, was appointed by Biden as Special Envoy Combating Global Antisemitism in 2022 and served until January 2025.  In September of 2024 she apparently gloried in the Israeli attack on Hezbollah by responding to a comment about Oct. 7 possibly showing Israeli weakness with the quip “Want a beeper?”  The beeper attack largely on Hezbollah men in their homes killed over 30 people and blinded and otherwise injured 3,000 others. It was called “terrorism” by none other than Leon Panetta former director of the CIA. Responding to her joke the Council on American Islamic Relations called (vainly) for her resignation. 

She denies that Israel has conducted a genocide in Gaza.  Instead, she told Time magazine late last October, “You can say this was a tragedy.”  It’s a “tragedy”, meaning there’s no criminal responsibility.  It was just one of those sad moments in history. 

On January 21, 2025, Washington D.C. saw a huge antisemitic provocation.  In front of a Republican crowd celebrating the inauguration of Trump, Elon Musk did two stiff-armed salutes wide seen as Nazi salutes.  Millions saw it live and on video.  Musk at the time was the darling of the new Trump Administration. He was normalizing conduct that which for 90 years was beyond the pale.  Anyone who had any sense was disgusted.  Predictably the ADL dismissed this staggering act as an “awkward gesture.”

So what did the now retired Special Envoy in combat with antisemitism have to say? Lipstadt told the Jewish Telegraph Agency, “I believe we have much, much bigger things to worry about regarding contemporary antisemitism than this particular issue.”  saying she was referring both to Musk’s salute and the ADL’s response.  What were the “much bigger” things she thought we should be worrying about?  One of them evidently was students protesting on campus against Israeli genocide.  After her term as Special Envoy she was offered a position at Columbia University and wrote a screed “Why I Won’t Teach at Columbia” for Bari Weiss’s right-wing The Free Press.    In it she recalled as she had watched at times “in horror,” as, “administrations coddled anti-Israel protesters who broke university regulations, harassed other students, and prevented the normal learning process from proceeding.”  Good god, they violated REGULATIONS, they harassed students [largely a lie] and they hindered the LEARNING PROCESS.  Nowhere does she mention the atrocities these RULE-BREAKERS were protesting.  Columbia and other colleges were purged; college presidents were hauled before Congress and later fired.  But that was not good enough for Lipstadt.

On January 11, 2026, Mississippi’s largest synagogue burned in an arson attack.  Lipstadt retweeted news of this with the comment, “This is a major tragedy. But it’s more than that. It’s an arson attack and another step in the globalization of the intifada.”  She did this without knowing anything at all about the details of the attack.  It came out that the alleged arsonist was a teenager who hated Jews and saw the synagogue as having “Jewish ties” and being a “synagogue of Satan.”  In answer to the reading of the charges he replied, “Jesus Christ is Lord.”  There was no connection at all to Palestine, the Middle East or the “intifada”.  It was just the same moronic and vile antisemitism that has plagued the world for 2,000 years. 

Holocaust expert Lipstadt could have apologized for her error and then moved on, but three days later in a retweet she wrote, “True — the Mississippi arson suspect isn’t Islamist. But if you use ‘intifada‘ to mean indiscriminate attack on Jews, then it’s correct usage. Fahoud, the murderous Islamist attack on Iraqi Jews (sic) 1941 is often called a pogrom, a Russian word. Is that wrong?”  Several things to unpack here.  She writes “if you use ‘intifada’ to mean indiscriminate attacks on Jews…”  But only fascist-minded people say “intifada” means that.  “Intifada” is Arabic for “shaking off.”  It was a term popularized in the late 1980’s when masses of Palestinians justifiably took action (almost all of it unarmed) after decades of Israeli oppression.  Her claim ranks with the lie that “Globalize the Intifada” means “Kill the Jews.”  Second, the attack in 1941 was carried out by pro-Nazi Iraqi nationalists.  It had nothing to do with Palestinians or Zionism and it’s even unclear how much religious hatred was involved, let alone “Islamism.” Third, slandering Palestinian victims of genocide and the people who support the victims by connecting them to an unrelated Mississippi arson is simply despicable.

Lipstadt’s Zionism fatally overcomes and distorts her knowledge about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Mehdi Hasan sums up in a tweet, “Lipstadt is a liar and an anti-Palestinian bigot bent on smearing the Palestinian cause.”  In a conscious or unconscious rebuke of Lipstadt the main picture in The New York Times article about the Mississippi synagogue on January 20 shows from the back a young man wearing a watermelon-colored kippah, the kind that shows solidarity by Jews for Palestinians.