Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day018.06 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 MR IRVING: That is not quite so, my Lord. A. I have the passage here: "Irving has been obliged to disclose an enormous mass of material in addition to the list of documents he initially agreed to supply". I understood that you were indeed obliged to hand over your private diaries to defence by court order. Q. Did you understand that I was ---- A. Is that not the case? Q. --- obliged to hand over my entire diaries? A. That is my understanding, yes, because they were deemed to be relevant to the case. Q. Yes. Was it not the case, in fact, that originally the Defence asked to see any diary references to, I believe, half a dozen or a dozen people in my entire diaries? A. I cannot really answer that. I have not been privy to every move that the defence has made, but I am aware of the fact that the Master of the Queen's Bench did order you to hand over all the diaries because they were deemed to be relevant to the case. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you attach any criticism to Mr Irving for . P-46 his reluctance to hand over his entire diaries? A. My Lord, I think it is quite understandable. MR JUSTICE GRAY: So do I. Are we gaining anything by this? MR IRVING: My lord, there was no reluctance to hand over the diaries at all; quite the contrary. Will you accept, witness, that, in fact, when I was asked to provide the diary references to these dozen people, which would have involved me in an inordinate amount of labour, looking through 49 volumes of diaries for 10 names, will you accept that I volunteered to provide the entire diaries to the defence whereupon Mr Anthony Julius said yes? A. If you can show me the documents in which you did so. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to stop this because I do not think this is helping me at all. I do not think any criticism attaches to you in relation to the diaries and, even if it did, it really would not bear on the issues we have to decide. MR IRVING: I am sorry I am being so obtuse, my Lord, but I am reaching a point which I will now bring forward by one or two sentences, if I may? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, do. MR IRVING (To the witness): You have had at your disposal, have you not, witness, therefore, either jointly or severally as a defence team, something like 20 or 30 million words of my private diaries which I made no attempt to conceal, is that so? . P-47 A. Which were disclosed by a court order, that is right, yes. Q. Will you accept that the court order concerned only the limitations on whom these diaries could be shown to apart from yourselves, and that they should be destroyed after this case was over? In other words, a court order was requested by myself to protect the privacy of those documents? A. I understood that the Defence went to court in order to obtain access to the documents. There may have been an additional -- I think there was an additional court order which restricted access yes. Q. You have had 20 or 30 million words of my private diaries, also complete transcripts of my telephone conversations where they were recorded on tape and transcribed. You have also had transcripts of enumerable speeches and public lectures that I delivered. Out of this enormous documentation, you and the entire defence team have picked one or two sentences which you then displayed for the delectation of the entire world, have you not? A. Well, I think it is more than one or two. I think I made a distinction between the diaries which, as I said, were not really very useful for my report because my report is mainly concerned with your published work as an historian and, clearly, your private diaries are concerned with many other things. So you will have noticed as you look through my report that I do not really say very much about . P-48 them and I cite them in just a handful of cases and they are really not very central. What you have on the published record, in terms of speeches and writings, is a very different matter. And in 740 ---- Q. Would you agree that diaries go to the state of mind more than speeches, private diaries? A. In the 740 pages of my report, I do cite all of these other things extremely extensively. I think it is more one or two sentences. It is more like several hundred, including some very lengthy extracts. Q. We are at present dealing just with the diaries. We will deal with the other matters bit by bit. But will you accept that if you had 20 or 30 million words of diaries in front of you -- I have to confess, I have not counted them; I have just done a back of an envelope calculation as to how many words are involved -- but you have had all these diaries which go very clearly to my state of mind, my private state of mind, and you have found at the end of this enormous mountainous task, one ditty? A. That is not my report. Q. To prove that I am racist? A. I am sorry, that is not quoted in my report. Q. Well, I am afraid I have to put to you this question because you have had access to these and, unfortunately, the person who put that in his report is not presenting himself for cross-examination. . P-49 A. But, Mr Irving, my Lord, I hope I can say that I really do not feel I should answer or can answer questions on other ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is a question that you can be asked which you would have to answer and I think -- may I ask it? No, you do not have to answer for other people's thoughts, but I think the question is this -- Mr Irving, tell me if I am wrong -- the use that is made of the ditty is unrepresentative of the diaries in their totality. Is that really what you are asking? MR IRVING: That is precisely the point I was going to make, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a question you may or may not be able to answer, but ask the question. A. Yes. One thing I want to say is that your diaries, Mr Irving, are not introspective diaries. There are many, many different kinds of diaries but you do not fill them with agonising over your own state of mind, so that it is often rather difficult. They are not primarily sources for your state of mind. Indeed, that is not what I in particular used them for. I cannot answer for witnesses and what they will have used your diaries for. I used them principally for identifying, such as I could, contacts that you had had with Holocaust deniers. That was my main purpose of looking through them. Q. We are going to come to that later. . P-50 A. But for other things, for views that you express and so on, I had all your published work, and that surely is enough. Q. We will come to that in a minute. A. There is a mass of more work there. Q. Can I ask you at this point, if, for example, you had come across in the diaries sentences like "Zundel is a lunatic" or "Faurisson is completely irresponsible or incorrigible", or something like that, would you have quoted that in your report, or would you have left it out? A. Can you point to me the places in the diaries where you make those---- Q. It is a hypothetical question and we will come back to chapter and verse next week. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe the best way of dealing with it is to ask the witness to answer the question that I put, namely do you think that the ditty is selected and that it is an unrepresentative entry in one of the diaries, if you look at the totality of what is in the diaries? A. It depends, my Lord, what you mean by "unrepresentative". There is not a ditty a day. Q. I think the word is fairly clear in the context of my question. A. There is not a ditty a day, it is one ditty, but there are many other remarks of that sort. That is only one ditty. It is not full of these things. . P-51 MR IRVING: You say there are many other remarks of that sort? A. Yes. Q. Did you quote any, or did any of the witnesses to your knowledge quote any of these other remarks? A. I only know what I have been reading in the court transcripts. Q. From the diary. We are just talking at this stage about the diaries. A. I really cannot answer for other witnesses. Q. I have had held up around the world as a racist who has poisoned the mind of my infant. A. Not by me, Mr Irving. I have not quoted your offensive racist comments in my report. Q. Or the Defence team of which you are part. You have not quoted my----? A. Offensive comments in my report. Q. Which offensive racist comments have I made then? A. You just referred to them. Q. Apart from the ditty? A. You just referred to them yourself. Q. We are referring here to the ditty from the diary. A. Yes. Q. I have been held up by the defence in this case to obloquy around the world. In yesterday's Guardian there is this photograph of me and the headline which his Lordship can read, "The Bogey Man in the Nursery", the Guardian . P-52 newspaper again. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that is legitimate. I think I have asked the question that can be asked. I am sorry, Mr Rampton, I did not see you were on your feet. MR RAMPTON: I agree, and what is quite wrong is for Mr Irving, once again if I may say so and I will say it bluntly, to distort the record by referring to just one of the goodness knows how many examples that I have cross-examined him about and that have been noticed in the newspapers. MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is a limit to what you can achieve by this cross-examination. You can put it, and I hope I have put it for you, that really they have picked out -- it is cherry picking. That is what you are really accusing the Defence of. MR IRVING: This is the one cherry that they have found in the diaries, my Lord, and I insist on this. If Mr Rampton wishes to produce others from the diaries? MR JUSTICE GRAY: In due course he will. He cannot do it now. MR RAMPTON: I am just going to be going through it all again. I suppose Mr Irving remembers how God was reaching the Final Solution of the black problem with Aids in South Africa. MR IRVING: We will deal with that when the time comes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, please, we must focus on what this witness is here for. . P-53 MR IRVING: You said that it is unrepresentative? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not said it is unrepresentative. MR IRVING: I am sorry, you have used the word "unrepresentative". I say it was unrepresentative? It was 19 words out of 30 million. A. It is not quoted in my report, Mr Irving. I am here to answer questions on my report. You may ask other witnesses on their reports. Q. Do you know what percentage of me is therefore racist? .00016 per cent of me is racist. A. Is that a question? Q. Which means that 99.9984 per cent of me is not, according to the diaries. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I do not think this is really helpful. Can we leave it this way? I have got a clip of what the Defendants rely on for their allegation that you are a racist. I will have to make what I can of that. You have asked the question that this witness I think has answered and I personally think that we would do well to move on. MR IRVING: That is right, my Lord. The reason for asking this witness is that he said yes, he read the diaries, as much he needed to. He says this because he has formed the opinion that they are not very introspective. MR JUSTICE GRAY: He has given his answer. You may not agree with it but he has given his answer. . P-54 MR IRVING: Can I now put to the witness the photographs, or is this not the appropriate moment? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know what you are going to put. MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is something the witness cannot possibly answer questions upon.
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