Canadian Graduate School Cancels Hall Rented to Holocaust Revisionist

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a degree-granting graduate school, says it was duped into renting its auditorium in Toronto for a lecture by David Irving, the British author who denies the Holocaust occurred.

Walter Pitman, the director of the institute, which promotes multiculturalism and anti-racism said he canceled the contract because he decided that Irving’s lecture “was not an appropriate use of our facilities,” the Toronto Globe and Mail reported.

Irving’s lecture was booked by The Council on Public Affairs, “which sounded like an educational organization, but we later became aware that indeed it was not quite as simple as that Pitman said.

Irving testified for the defense in the second trial of neo-Nazi propagandist Ernst Zundel, who was charged with violating Canada’s anti-hate laws by circulating the book “Did Six Million Really Die?” which claims the Holocaust was Jewish hoax.

Irving is on a Canadian tour. His announce subject is “German reunification and other related topics.”

The tour visited Vancouver, but began across Puget Sound in Victoria, British Columbia, where it was sponsored by the Canadian Free Speech League.

Rabbi Victor Reinstein of Victoria said that “when the Holocaust is challenged,” it is not an issue of free speech. “It is a matter of hatred and denying suffering that has occurred as a result of that hatred,” he said.

Michael Elterman, Vancouver regional chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress, was quoted in The Province as saying, “What Irving is saying is an insult to the memory of the people died in the Holocaust. It is an insult to families of those Canadians who died in Second World War.”

But Franz Weltschnigg, who organized Irving’s Canadian tour, complained that “pressure groups” deprived people of an opportunity to “find out what actually happened during the war or after the war from sources other than so-called recognized historians.”