If you want to buy a book or DVD from the Web site of Writer David Irving, you’ll no longer be able to use your American Express card, and that wasn’t Irving’s idea. It was the idea, evidently, of New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents the district of Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York. Accusing Irving of neo-Nazism for Irving’s defense of Adolf Hitler’s actions as Führer of Nazi Germany and his revisionist inquiries into the Holocaust, Hikind wrote a letter to American Express and got eleven other New York elected officials to add their signatures to his.
Congress, of course, got the ball rolling for financial censorship in a big way when it barred use of credit cards to fund bets with offshore gaming Web sites, but this might be the first case of a “private” shutdown at the initiative of a group not exercising actual “legal” power over the card operator.
You can still buy books and DVDs, even reserve a place at a series of private meetings he’s holding with fans in the US (Irving is British) currently using your Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal accounts, at least so far. Hikind may not be pursuing the matter further as he’s currently in Israel, encouraging Americans to purchase real estate in East Jerusalem on formerly Jordanian territory occupied by Israel since its 1967 War.
