Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.11 Last-Modified: 2000/07/25 This campaign had been coordinated. In some of its members, it seems that the illiberal spirit of Dr Goebbels lived on behind the Board of Deputies' facade. Meeting behind locked doors at their headquarters in December 1991, December 12, a body identified as the "Education and Academic Committee of the Holocaust Educational Trust, registered as a charitable body, held a conference, including point 6: "David Irving: Concern was voiced over the publication of the second edition of Hitler's War". This is 1991, 14 years after the first edition. "There was debate over how to approach Macmillan publishers over Goebbels Diary". That was the other book they were going to publish of mine. "It was agreed to await new[s] from . P-127 Jeremy Coleman before deciding what action to take." We know more of this meeting from the statement to this Court by my witness Dr John Fox, who was present at this cabal in his capacity as editor of The British Journal of Holocaust Education. He testifies as follows: "As an independently-minded historian, I was affronted by the suggestion concerning Mr David Irving [...] At a certain point in the meeting, attention turned" -- do you wish to suggest I move on? MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I am reading around what you are reading out to me. MR IRVING: Yes. "At certain point in the meeting, attention turned to the subject of Mr Irving and reports that the publishing company of Macmillan would be publishing his biography of Goebbels. Mr Ben Helfgott ... turned to me, the only non-Jew present at the meeting, and suggested that 'John'", John Fox, "'could approach Macmillan to get them to stop publication'. I refused point-blank to accede to that suggestion, arguing that in a democracy such as ours one simply could not do such a thing. That amounted to censorship ... Nevertheless, as the Committee minutes make plain, it was planned by some to consider further action about how best to scupper Mr Irving's publishing plans with Macmillan". The clandestine pressure on Macmillan's began at . P-128 once. My editor at Macmillan's, Roland Philipps, noted in an internal memorandum of January 2nd 1992 that they should reassure prospective authors that they had turned down many other book proposals from me, and had no plans to continue publishing me after Goebbels. It was not the bravest of postures to adopt, you might think. The memorandum continues: "If this helps you to reassure any prospective authors we are happy for you to say it (although not too publicly if possible)". The desire of Macmillan's to stab in the back, for this stab in the back to be secret from their own highly successful author, myself, is understandable. In fact, their ultimate stab in the back was to come in the summer of 1992. In May 1992, meanwhile, we find Deborah Lipstadt providing a list of her personal targets, victims, including now myself to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; she advised the Museum to contact Gail Gans at the Research Department of the ADL (about whom we have heard) in New York City for additional names, and to "tell her I told you to call her". This establishes that the Defendants consider that that museum, which is a US taxpayer-funded body, was actively participating in their network, and the museum duly provided press clippings from London newspapers relating to me, which have now turned up in the Defendants' files. The attempts to suffocate my publishing career . P-129 continued. I mention a second arm of this attack. Since my own imprint, my own publishing imprint, which I had set up myself some years earlier, would not be intimidated as easily as Macmillan's, or indeed at all, the hostile groups applied pressure to major bookselling chains throughout Britain to burn or destroy my books and in particular the new edition of Hitler's War. Some of the press clippings reporting this nasty campaign are in my discovery. They include reports of a sustained campaign of window smashing of the branches of Waterstone's bookstores in the biggest Midlands cities, after complaints were made by local groups. Waterstones informed one Newcastle newspaper that they were taking books off public shelves "following a number of vandal attacks on book stores across the country". The Nottingham Waterstones took the book off display after a brick was thrown through its window. The campaign clearly coordinated from London. None of this was reported in the national press, but one would have thought that these groups would have recognized the bad karma in any campaign of smashing windows or burning books. I wrote privately to Tim Waterstone, the head at that time of Waterstones, guaranteeing to indemnify his chain for their costs of any uninsured claims. But he refused to be intimidated by the campaign and, my Lord, . P-130 that is one reason why I took the names of four Waterstones branches off the list of Defendants in this action at a very early stage. I am turning the page now, my Lord: Demonstrations organized outside by property, violent demonstrations, police were frequently called. The same newspaper reported -- this is halfway down that following page -- that the Anti-Nazi League and its parent body, the Board of Deputies, were applying pressure to The Sunday Times to violate its contract with me which was the contract to obtain the Goebbels diaries from the Moscow archives. Again, the reason why I mention all of this may be apparent, it is when I make remarks about by my critics, occasionally using vivid language, I sometimes had reason. As an indication of the pressure ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am just wondering, and I am sorry to interrupt you and I am not going to stop you at all, but reading on to about page 54, you describe, do you not, the continuation of what you see as being this really worldwide attempt to close you down as an historian and attacks on your house and pressure of various kinds being brought to bear all over the world. I just wonder whether there is any particular benefit -- tell me if you there is -- in reading out the next seven or so pages? If there is any particular point you want to make, do, but I feel myself we could probably move on to the middle of page . P-131 54. MR IRVING: I will move on to 51, my Lord. When I found out - too late - that this fake evidence had been planted on Canadian files, which resulted in my being deported from Canada in handcuffs on November 13th 1992, I was angered and astounded that a British organisation could be secretly doing this to British citizens. It turned out from these files that academics with whom I had freely corresponded and exchanged information, including Gerald Fleming, had been acting as agents and informants for this body. I submit (which is why I am reading this out) that these are the bodies that collaborated directly or indirectly with the Defendants in the preparation of the book and that the Defendants, knowing of the obvious fantasy in some of what they said, should have shown greater caution in accepting their materials as true. There was an immediate consequence of this fake data planted on Canadian files. One data report recorded the "fact" that I had written 78 books denying the Holocaust which, of course, is totally untrue. In August 1992 a docket was placed on Canadian immigration files about me saying, among other things, this is a secret file, "Subject David Irving is Holocaust denier, may be inadmissible" to Canada with the result, of course, that precisely that happened. I was arrested on October 28th at Vancouver, making a speech on freedom of speech, . P-132 deported permanently from Canada on November 13th causing me great financial damage and loss. Access to the Public Archives of Canada was as essential for my future research as access to the PRO in Kew or to those archives in Italy. My Lord, this goes, of course, to the damage that has been caused to me by this general libel at being called a Holocaust denier. That is one proof of the direct and immediate cost of the pernicious label "Holocaust denier". And the same thing, they made the same attempt to get me banned from the United States but failed. Page 54, my Lord. I now come to Macmillan's final stab in the back. The hand on the blade was Macmillan's but the blade hade been forged and fashioned by all the Defendants in this courtroom, and by their hidden collaborators overseas. On July 4th 1992, as this Court knows, I had returned Moscow with the missing entries of the Goebbels Diaries exclusively in my possession, having gone there on behalf of The Sunday Times. This hard-earned triumph caught my opponents unawares. Newspapers revealed that the Anti-Defamation League and its Canadian collaborator, the League of Human Rights, sent immediate secret letters to Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times demanding that he repudiate their contract. On Sunday, 5th, the London Sunday newspapers were full of the scoop - and also with hostile comment. On Monday, July 6th, The Independent . P-133 newspaper reported under the headlines "Jews attack publisher of Irving book", that a UK body which it identified as "the Yad Vashim Trust" with which we, of course, were we familiar, was piling pressure on to Macmillan's to abandon its contract with me to publish Goebbels, failing which they would urge booksellers not to stock or promote it. Macmillans finally took fright that same day, as I only now know. After their directors inquired, July 6th 1992, in an internal memo, how many of my books were still in their stocks, and having been given totals of several thousand copies of all three volumes of my Hitler biography, representing a value of several hundred thousand pounds, my own editor, Roland Philipps, on July 6th issued the secret order reading: "Please arrange for the remaining stock of [David Irving's Hitler biographies] to be destroyed. Many thanks". Book burning. They prepared a "draft announcement", but it was not released. Although still a Macmillan author, I was not told. The royalties due to me on the sale of those books were books were lost and destroyed with them. The Defendants' campaign to destroy my legitimacy as an historian, of which the book published by the Defendants became an integral part, had thus reached its climax. My Lord, I now pass over the next pages to page 57. . P-134 The same thing happened in Australia. I spoke in the Munich. Final paragraph: Opponents released -- I am sorry, yes. Opponents released to Australia television the heavily edited version of Michael Schmidt's 1991 video tape of me addressing the crowd at Halle about which we have heard from Mr Rampton this morning, the Sieg Haels and the rest of it. As edited, it omitted my visible and audible rebuke to a section of the crowd for chanting Hitler slogans. Grotesque libels about me swamped the Australian press, printed by various organisations including the New South Wales Board of Deputies and various newspapers. One example was an article by a lecturer in politics. He wrote: "Irving has a history of exciting neoNazi and skinhead groups in Germany which had burned migrant hostels and killed people ... Irving has frequently spoken in Germany at rallies... under the swastika flag ... himself screaming the Nazi salute..." This is how these stories begin. Unsurprisingly, Australia then banned me too. I was t6 be refused a visa, they announced, on February 8th 1993 as I was a "Holocaust denier". They had thus adopted the phrase that the Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt, prides herself in having invented. This new and very damaging ban on visiting Australia made it impossible for me to work again in the National Library of Australia in Canberra. At great . P-135 personal expense I appealed to the Australian Federal Court. The Court declared the Minister's refusal of a visa illegal. The government in Canberra therefore changed the law in February 1994 to keep me out. We note from Professor Lipstadt's own discovery that the immigration minister faxed the decision to keep me out direct to one of her source agencies that same afternoon. The same kind of thing happened. In July 1994, as the resulting fresh legal actions which I started against the Australian government still raged, the Second Defendant was invited by Australian organisations, all expenses paid to visit their country; she was hired to tour Australia, and to slander my name and my reputation and add her voice to the campaign to have me refused entry. The court, my Lord, you will probably remember the Australian TV video which I showed entitled "The Big Lie" in the early days. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: Broadcast in July 1994, it showed both the expert witness, Professor van Pelt, and Mr Fred Leuchter. It showed Fred Leuchter standing on the roof of crematorium No. II, about which we are going to hear more, crematorium No. II at Auschwitz which van Pelt declared to be the centre of the Nazi genocide, and the Second Defendant being interviewed while still in Australia (and refusing once again to debate with the revisionists, just as she . P-136 has obstinately refused to go into the witness stand here and be questioned). Thus I found myself excluded from Australia. We have had now Germany, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand as well, I lost the ability to visit my hundreds of friends down under and my own daughter too, who is an Australian citizen; and I lost all the bookshop sales that this ban implied in Australia - where my Churchill biography had hit the No. 1 spot in the best seller lists earlier. Over the page: My lecturing engagements in the British Isles came under similar attack. I had often spoken to universities and debating societies, including the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, in the past, but now in one month, in October 1993, when I was invited to speak to prestigious bodes at three major Irish universities, I found all three invitations cancelled under pressure and threat of local Jewish and anti-fascist organisations. The irony will not elude the court that these Defendants, on the one hand, have claimed by way of defence that I speak only to the far right and neo-Nazi element, as they describe it, and yet it turns out that their own associates are the people who have done their damnedest to make it impossible for many others to invite me. The Second Defendant, Deborah Lipstadt, had meanwhile made progress with her book. She told her publisher that she had written a certain statement with . P-137 the marketing people in mind. In other words, sometimes money mattered more than content, in my submission. She had revealed in September 1991 in a letter: "I have also spoken to people in England who have a large cache of material on David Irving's conversion to denial". We do not know who the people are, but we can, of course, readily suspect who in this case those people were. She is once again not presenting herself for cross-examination, so there are many things we cannot ask her about, including and I would have asked her, in fact, most tactfully the reasons why she was refused tenure at the University of California and moved downstream to the lesser university, in my submission, in Atlanta where she now teaches religion. In the light of Mr Rampton's strictures on my now famous little ditty -- your Lordship will remember the little ditty which I am supposed to have hummed to my nine month old daughter, the racist ditty, which went around the press because Mr Rampton issued a press release -- supposedly urging my nine month old little girl not to marry outside her own people, I should also have wanted to ask questions of Professor Lipstadt's views on race had she gone into the witness box. We know that she has written papers, and delivered many fervent lectures, on the vital importance of people marrying only within their own race. Quotation: ("We know what we fight . P-138 against...", she wrote, "intermarriage and Israel-bashing, but what is it we fight for?") She has attracted, in fact, much criticism from many in her own community for her implacable stance against mixed marriages, marrying outside their own race. In one book Professor Lipstad quotes a Wall Street Journal interview with a Conservative rabbi, Jack Moline, whom she called "very brave" for listing 10 things that Jewish parents should say to their children: "No. 1 on his list", she wrote (in fact it was No. 3) "was 'I expect you to marry Jews'." She considered that to be very brave. My one little ditty which I hummed to my nine month old daughter, Jessica, was a perhaps tasteless joke. Professor Lipstadt's repeated denunciation of mixed marriages addressed to adults was deadly serious.
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