Website Note:

The Yehuda bauer "suggestion."

Lipstadt is being over-coy here. The few documents she did produce to Mr Irving by way of discovery show that the book was originally commissioned by Yehuda Bauer (who is incidentally a real historian of consirable merit, unlike Lipstadt) of the Israeli Government agency Yad Vashem, who paid $25,000 for it. She later signed a deal with the unlovely Robert Maxwell to publish the book. The contract eventually passed to an imprint of New York based Macmillan Inc. See Mr Irving's closing speech, Day 32, at pages 118 et seq:

[...] It was at precisely this time, 1984 -- I will not comment on the year -- that the Second Defendant, then teaching in the Near Eastern Languages Centre of the University of California at Los Angeles, Professor Lipstadt, offered her services to Yehuda Bauer in Jerusalem, a very well known Israeli Professor. She attached "A proposal for research: The Historical and Historiographic Methodology of the Holocaust revisionists". This was the genesis of the book that we are complaining about. I ask your Lordship to note that on page 38 of the synopsis prepared by the Second Defendant, which is in my bundle E at page 38, The Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt, mentioned my name in the following words: "They [the deniers] also find it expedient to associate themselves with those such as David Irving who do not deny that the Holocaust took place but seek to shift the blame to others." To conclude this, on the matter of her employment: on May 31, 1988 Professor Lipstadt was awarded and additional agreement for research on this topic by the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. So at all material times, the book was being commissioned by that University in Jerusalem. This research, it should be added, was what finally bore fruit as the book complained of, "Denying the Holocaust". The publisher at that time was to be Mr Robert Maxwell, who was liaising with Professor Yehuda Bauer. [...]

Then at page 141:

[...] Some time in 1992 her book was complete in its first draft, and Professor Lipstadt sent it to the people who were paying her, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We do not know what was in the book, since I cannot question the second Defendant and she has not disclosed the early draft, with Professor Yehuda Bauer's scribbles on it, as he said, in her sworn list of documents. The early draft was clearly discoverable but it has not been provided to us. We do know however what was not in it. We know that there was no mention of his Hizbollah and Hamas and Louis Farrakhan and the November 1992 terrorists in Stockholm, or of the lie about my speaking on the same platform with them. In fact, we also know that in this first draft I was merely mentioned in passing. This is a book about denying Holocaust and I am only mentioned in passing. This is evident from the letter which Professor Yehuda Bauer wrote back to her, congratulating her on November 27th 1992. Bauer complained that the book lacked the "worldwide perspective" and said, "Irving is mentioned, but not that he is the mainstay of Holocaust denial today in Western Europe" which is where all the misery then began of course. Somehow therefore I had to be shoehorned into the text before publication. Professor Bauer urged her too not to write things inadvertently that might convince the reader that there was something to what revisionists or deniers said, although that is hardly a true scholar's method, to suppress mention of opposing arguments.