Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.10 Last-Modified: 2000/07/25 I know very little about these bodies, but I am aware that the anti-defamation league of the B'nai Brith, which is an American body, has a 50 million dollar annual budget, substantially greater than an author commands whose livelihood has been destroyed by their activities. When your Lordship comes to consider such things as costs and damages, I would respectfully submit that you bear these things in mind. We have them to thank for the spectacle that has been presented in this court room since January. Without their financial assistance, it is unlikely that Mr Rampton and this defence team and his instructing solicitors could have mounted this colossal onslaught on my name. Further down, for over three years this . P-115 well-funded team sitting opposite me, next to me, has drilled down deep into my private papers, burrowed on a broad front into the archives of the world and a multi-pronged attack trying to establish that what I have written over the last 35 or more years is distorted or mistranslated in pursuance of an agenda, namely the exoneration of Adolf Hitler, trying to dig up every little morsel of dirt on me that that can. My book Hitler's War was published by the Viking Press in New York and by Hodder and Stoughton in this country in 1977. That is when what can be seen as the coordinated attack on the book began. The Viking Press was and is one of that nation's most reputable publishers and in fact I believe they are owner of the first Defendant company in this case. Turning the page now, the Anti-defamation League issued a report with more fervour than accuracy, saying: "David Irving is the nom de plume of John Cawdell" -- this not true, I hasten to say, do not get it wrong, it is totally untrue -- "a revisionist historiographer of Adolf Hitler, particularly regarding Hitler's role in and knowledge of the mass extermination of European Jewry. His major premise", says the Anti-defamation League, "is that Hitler was largely oblivious to the large scale killings of Jews in the death camps". I carry on: The agent's report -- this is a . P-116 report put out in 1977. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I wonder, Mr Irving, really whether one might just go to the middle of page 35 without doing any injustice to your case. MR IRVING: Yes. When I then began my lecturing activities around the United States in the early 1980s, speaking at private functions, schools and universities, the headquarters of the ADL sent out a secret circular, a "Backgrounder", in 1983, to all their local agents. The backgrounder, dated July 6th 1983, began with the words, "British author David Irving has been of concern to ADL, as well as to the Jewish community generally, since the 1977 publication of his book Hitler's War", and it indicated that it was the controversy over Hitler and the Jews that was the reason. We have heard of similar such circulars being generated by them on other famous names. In my case the ADL instructed its"regional offices": "Should he surface in your region, please notify the Fact Finding Department and your Civil Rights Co-ordinator". It is quite plain that the ADL were not concerned with promoting civil rights. I am mentioning them because of course that collaborated very closely with the Second Defendant in the preparation of the book that is the subject of this trial. It is quite plain that the Anti-defamation . P-117 League were not concerned with promoting civil rights, but in abrogating one of the most basic rights of all, the right to freedom of speech. Further down, correspondence with my literary agent showed by 1984 that already the international smear campaign was inflicting substantial financial damage on me. 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 . P-118 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. Briefly summarizing the next page: During this period the international campaign against me achieved some ugly successes. I was illegally deported from Austria. The Austrian government had to pay me compensation when it was overturned. The Second Defendant's discovery -- lower down that page -- which included such correspondence with, and items from, the Anti-Defamation League as she has seen fit to provide, throws some interesting lights on the ADL. When a local newspaper, The Daily Pilot, published in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, a report on a function of the Institute of Historical Review, about which we have heard much from the Defence in the last few weeks. The anti-Defamation League was horrified as the regional office reported, to find that the reporter in the newspaper, and I quote "seems to find an air of legitimacy surrounding the group". That word "legitimacy" again; remember they were going to destroy my legitimacy? The . P-119 reporter, Mr Bob Van Eyken, who had evidently not got the message, even described the IHR members as "neatly dressed ... evoking a sense of reasoned dignity". This clearly clashed with the skinheaded, jackbooted extremist stereotype that the ADL, like the expert witnesses in this case, wished to promote for the IHR and other "right-wing" groups. This material, though clearly discoverable in this action, was withheld from discovery by the Second Defendant until a summons was issued to produce all her correspondence with the ADL. We know that the Second Defendant has had extensive dealings with the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, this American body. Even from her own limited discovery, about the deficiencies in which I still have more to say, we know that Professor Lipstadt was provided with smear dossiers by them. She thanks them in her Introduction. She made not attempt to verify the contents of this material with me as the victim (or, so far as this court knows, with any others), but she recklessly published it raw and unchecked. A 25-cent phone call to me would have saved her endless trouble. Instead she preferred to rely on these sheets like the "confidential" and defamatory four-page item dated October 23rd 1986, headed: "Profile on Dave Irving", evidently coming from another Canadian body. Characteristically, the "profile" was disclosed to me by her solicitors without any covering . P-120 letter from its author or custodian and shorn of any identifying material; I wrote more than once in vain asking for the missing pages to be provided. It is quite evident that the Anti-Defamation League, who were in cahoots with the Second Defendant, set itself the task of destroying my career, in consort with other similar organisations around the world, many of whom, if not all, collaborated with the Second Defendant in writing her book. The pinnacle of their achievement came in 1996, when the Second Defendant, as she herself boasted to The Washington Post, was among those who put pressure on St Martin's Press Incorporated, who had been one of my United States publishers for some 15 years, to violate their publishing agreement with me and abandon publication of Goebbels, my Goebbels biography, "Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich". For a few days, these enemies of free speech stepped up the pressure. They publicised the private home addresses of St Martin's Press executives on the Internet. They staged street addresses in Manhattan. They organised a walkout by the publisher's staff. When SMP refused to be intimidated, Professor Lipstadt wheeled out the rhetoric: to Frank Rich, a syndicated columnist of The New York Times, she accused me of being a repeat killer, if I can put it like that: "What David Irving is doing ... is not the destruction of live people, but the . P-121 destruction of people who already died. It's killing them a second time. It's killing history". This was not far distance from the outrageous claim on page 213 of her book, to which no justification has been pleaded to my knowledge, that I justified the incarceration of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Quoted by The Washington Post on April 3rd 1996, Professor Lipstadt stated: "They ... don't publish reputations, they publish books", referring to St Martin's Press. "But would they publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy relations? Of course the reputation of the author counts. And no legitimate historian takes David Irving's work seriously." We have heard quoted in this Court two tasteless remarks I am recorded as having made, about Chappaquiddick and about the Association of Spurious Survivors, and I do not deny that those words were tasteless. But bad taste is not what is in the pleadings, while express malice is: and the odiousness of Professor Lipstadt's comparison, in a mass circulation newspaper of record, of a British author with Jeffrey Dahmer, a madman who had recently murdered and cannibalised a dozen homosexuals in the mid-West of the USA, in surely compounded by the fact that Lipstadt had at that time not read a single book that I had written, let alone the manuscript of Dr Goebbels that she had joined in trying to suppress. It is clear . P-122 that neither she nor the ADL was concerned with the merits, or otherwise, of the Goebbels biography. They wanted it put down, suppressed, ausgerottet: and me with it. Having, like St Martin's Press, thoroughly read it, the major US publisher Doubleday Inc. had selected this book as their May 1996 choice for History Book of the Month. But that deal depended on the SMP contract, and thus it too collapsed. The financial losses inflicted on me by this one episode in April 1996 were of the order of half a million dollars, which might seen proper reward for the eight years' hard work that I had invested in writing this box, and hauling it through its five draft versions. The book never appeared in the United States. From the publication of Hitler's War onwards, the attitude of the print media to me changed. A strategically placed review written in one afternoon, by one man furnished with the appropriate dossier on me, could go a long way to destroy the product of six or eight years' research, as we have just seen. That was why these dossiers had been created. To the right journalists or writers, such as the Second Defendant, these dossiers were on tap. A fax from Professor Lipstadt to the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London, or to the ADL in New York, or to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, and we have got these faxes . P-123 from her discovery, released to her a cornucopia of filth, which she had no need to check or verify, because in the United States such writings are protected by the authority of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the laudable name of the freedom of speech, or by the authority of New York Times v. Sullivan, which effectively declares to libellers that it is open season on any public figure. I turn the page, my Lord. This Court will surely not take amiss of me that I refused to be intimidated by these truly "Nazi" methods, and that I have on a few occasions used perhaps tasteless language around the world about perpetrators. The violence against me spread around the world, and always it was orchestrated by the same organizations. Turn the page. In England, a parallel campaign was launched by the Board of Deputies, and by other organizations which we know to have collaborated with the Defendants in producing this libellous book. This kicked into high gear after my own imprint published an abridged edition of the Leuchter report in 1989. Pressure was put on the World Trade Centre in the City of London to repudiate our contract for the press conference. A picket, a muscle man picket, was staged outside our own front door to prevent journalists from attending when the conference was switched to my own . P-124 harm. The Board arranged an early day motion in the House of Commons, as a privileged way of smearing my name -- publishing a smear on my name. On June 30th of that year the Jewish Chronicle, which is one of the newspapers that has reported this entire proceedings most fairly, in my view (and I wish to put that on record) revealed that representations had been made to my principal British and Commonwealth publisher, Macmillan Limited, to drop me as an author. Macmillan had already published several of my books and they were under contract to publish several more. I had no fears that they would succumb to this intimidation. They had informed me that Hitler's War was running so successfully that they intended to keep it permanently in print. I am entitled to mention this background, as I have mentioned the Board's other clandestine activities against me, because it was said by Mr Rampton that I later made one tasteless remark in public about the Board of Deputies. If somebody attacks, using secret and furtive means, the very basis of the existence of my family then it may be at least understandable that I speak ill of them. Lower down the next paragraph: Secretly, on July 17th 1991, the Board of Deputies wrote to the President of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution (which is their MI5), a body of which we . P-125 heard greatly admiring words from Professor Funke in the witness box; this English board urged that they take steps to stop me, a British citizen like no doubt the members of the Board, from entering Germany. Germany is a country on whose publishers and archives I have been heavily dependent, as this Court is aware. We have only the BfV's reply, dated August 9th 1991, to the Board of deputies. I retrieved a copy of this letter. If your Lordship is wondering how I come into possession of documents like that, I retrieved a copy of this letter from the files of the Prime Minister of Australia; so the same Board in London had evidently also sent its dossiers to its collaborators in Canberra and, no doubt, other countries, in its efforts to gag me worldwide. That is an indication of the worldwide networking that went on, this secret common enterprise, of which the Second Defendant is a party, to destroy my legitimacy as an historian and to deprive me of free speech, of which the Defendants have made themselves the willing executioners. As is evident from a letter from the Austrian Ambassador dated June 22nd 1992, the Board also applied pressure on that country to ensure that I did not enter, or that if I did I would be arrested. The same kind of thing happened in Argentina. Lower down the page towards the end: On . P-126 December 6th 1991, an Internal Office Memo from Macmillan's files -- my own publisher in London -- records that "quite a number of people" had commented unfavourably to Macmillan's about them publishing my books, and one person, who was an unnamed Professor of Politics at Oxford, who had evidently learned nothing from the book burning episodes of Nazi Germany, stated "that they would be more inclined to publish with us [Macmillan] if we were not publishing Irving". (The Oxford professor of politics was probably, in my view, Professor Peter Pulzer, identified by Professor Lipstadt in her books as such and quoted by The Independent at the time).
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.