Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.16 Last-Modified: 2000/07/25 Searching hopefully for evidence of "anti-Semitism" in me, the investigation by he Board of Deputies in 1992 came up empty handed in their secret report which they planted on Canadian government files. They confirmed that I had dealings with my Jews in my professional life, and they added that I "used this as an excuse" to say that I am not an anti-Semite. These people are hard to please. "He is far too clever an opponent" the Board wrote in this secret report, "to openly admit to being an anti-Semite". "We endorse all condemnation of anti-Semitism", they quote me as writing in my newsletter back in 1982. All of these things, including the actual 1992 secret intelligence report filed by he Board of Deputies, were disclosed to these Defendants in my discovery. The Defendants quoted a passage from a speech delivered, they said, in May 1992. In fact, as my diary confirms, it was delivered in May 1993. So it may be that the year was not accidental, because by that time my family and I had been subjected to a catalogue of insults by the leaders of these various bodies. If a writer's books are banned and burnt, his bookshops are smashed, his hands are manacled, his person insulted, his printers are burnt down, his access to the world's archives is denied, . P-187 his family's livelihood is destroyed, his phone lines are jammed with obscene and threatening phone calls, death threats, his house is beset by violent, angry mobs, the walls and posts around his address are plastered with stickers inciting the public to violence against him, and a wreath is sent to him with a foul and taunting message on the death of his oldest daughter, then it ill-behoves people to offer cheap criticism if the writer finally commits the occasional indiscretion and lapse in referring to the people who are doing it to him. I singled out in this -- well, I am not going to comment at length on these evil allegations and slurs. They lend fire and fury to the original libel complained of, that is my view. I submit that the word "racism" in the ears of the man in the Clapham Omnibus is about Stephen Lawrence and cone heads in the Ku Klux Klan. It conjures up images of murder and thuggery and violence and foul-mouthed graffiti. In deliberating on the conduct of the case and on the appropriate scale of damages, your Lordship will no doubt bear them in mind, these allegations made against me. I voluntarily provided all my entire private diaries to the Defendants in this action. They asked to see a few pages and I said "take the lot". Fifty-nine volumes of private diaries, 20 million words on paper and on disk. Mr Rampton produced from them one nineteen-word . P-188 ditty attached to another quite harmless one about the "messica dressica" of my daughter Jessica. To find in all those diaries and telephone conversations written since 1959 just one nineteen-word ditty that you could trot out for the media, does not suggest that I am as obsessed with race and racism as learned counsel and, for that matter, the newspapers that report this case too. I repeat, this multi-million dollar Defence team has found one nineteen-word nonsense poem, recorded in my diary with other Lear- or Belloc-type rhythmic verses as having been recited to my own nine-month old infant who has, I am glad to say, grown into a delightful girl of six now, bearing none of the traces of the poison that Mr Rampton recklessly suggested that I had fed to her. Fortunately, I did not sing to her "Three Blind Mice". Similarly, from my hundreds of lectures and talks these very proper spaniels have sniffed out a few lines of music-hall whit of the type that a Dave Allen might indulge in, with Mr Trevor McDonald as one of the butts. That in Mr Rampton's words is racism. One wonders which well-shielded part of the modern world is inhabited by learned counsel. Can anyone go and live there? The references that I have made to what is now formally called the Instrumentalization of the Holocaust, have also been adduced as evidence of anti-Semitism. Are non-Jews disbarred from making a criticism that is made . P-189 increasing vocally now by others like Professor Peter Novak or by Leon Weiseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic who wrote on May 3rd 1993: "It is a sad fact, said the principal philanthropist of the grotesque Simon Wiesenthal Centre of Los Angeles, that Israel and Jewish education and all the other familiar buzz words no longer seem to rally Jews behind the community, the Holocaust though works every time." I turn to page 89, my Lord, the third paragraph. In general, I would invite your Lordship to pick out one such utterance as a sample, to reach then for the transcript of the entire speech, to take note of the rest of its content, its clear reference to the very real sufferings of the Jews, the liquidations, the Bruns report and the rest, and then ask: Was the remark true? Was it explicable? Was it rhetorically justified as part of the skilled lecturer's armoury? Your Lordship has been told of my remarks that more women died on Kennedy's back seat than in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, the one shown to the tourists. It is a tasteless but quite literally true. It is, as I have shown in this court, even true if the main gas chamber at Birkenau is brought into the equation, crematorium (ii), the factory of death, because the eyewitnesses lied about that one too. The Poles have admitted that the Auschwitz building and its chimney are a post-1948 fake. My . P-190 colourful language, my tasteless language, was a rhetorical way of bringing that extraordinary revelation home to audiences. The audiences, I am told, are extreme audiences, of extreme people, although the photographs suggest rather differently. They appear rather boring middle-age kind of people. My files confirm that I occasionally addressed audiences of the Association for Free Journalism in Germany, the National Democratic Party in Germany and the German Peoples Union. My Lord, those four documents which I have disclosed to the Defendants, they are English translations of the policy leaflets, the manifestos of these bodies, and in my submission they do not show them to be extreme in any way. These were, furthermore, bodies that were accepted at that time under Germany's very strict laws as being legal and constitutional. But the court is more concerned, I believe, with have individual personages than with bodies, than with the actual organizations. I have not the slightest doubt that this court will find that I had no meaningful contact with the ugly rag-bag neo-Nazi extremists mentioned by Professor Funke, people with whom, to make the point quite clearly, the Defendants, their experts and their legal team seem more familiar than I. Most of the names were completely unknown to me and the Defence have sought, in vein, for . P-191 them in my diaries and papers, to which I emphasise yet again I gave them complete and unlimited privileged access. This has not stopped them from bringing these names forward and mentioning these alleged links in the open court in an attempt to smear me still further with an eye particularly on the German media. I urge that this, their conduct of the case, be held against them. Characteristically of the weakness of their case, Professor Funke listed one entry in a diary where I noted "road journey with a Thomas" whose second name I never learned; Funke entered the name "Dienel?" So for as I know, I have never met a Dienel, but it illustrates the kind of evidence that the Defence were hoping to rely upon. As for Michael Kuhnen, the documentary evidence before both Professor Funke when he wrote his report and before this court, is that I explicitly said I would not attend any function at which he was even present. I never did and I never met him. By way of evidence the court has been shown a number of videos. Shorn of their commercial packaging, they do not amount to very much, in my submission. In view of the weight attached to it by learned counsel and by his witness Professor Funke, my Lord, I have re-examined the raw video of Halle function of November 9th 1991 at which I briefly spoke, and I have timed and . P-192 listed the scenes that it shows. My Lord, you will see in the footnote on that page that I have given the appropriate breakdown referring to the time on the video. Your Lordship may wish at sometime to have the video back to check that these times are correct, or the Defendants' solicitors may wish to submit any corrections they feel are needed. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I will assume your time is correct unless I am told otherwise. MR IRVING: Yes, unless otherwise informed. The raw details are, when the when camera's meter shows 170021 I am first seen arriving at an unnamed hotel restaurant in Halle, accompanied by Mrs Worch and by David Leigh of he Sunday Observer. At 17:14:40 I am again glimpsed, 14 minutes later, still at the hotel speaking to a reporter. The cameraman and David Leigh then go off to film the rival processions during which I am at no time seen on film. In fact I remained lunching at the hotel. At 18:11:00 a truck is seen being rigged as an open-air platform, and at 18:14:26 I am seen with two reporters watching from the edge of the square. In my submission, my Lord, I do not have a particularly happy look on my face at all at what I am seeing. At 18:16 I walk over to the platform, hands in pockets and mount it. The man whom Professor Funke tells us is Dienel, and I have no way of checking it one way or . P-193 the other, is seen to get off to the left and there is no contact whatever between him and me. Mr Worch briefly introduces me to the audience. I begin speaking at 18:16:39 and the filmed portion of my speech ends less than three and a half minutes later. When the off-screen chanting of slogans begins at 18:18:59 I am clearly seen to interrupt my speech, shake my head at them and gesticulate with my left hand to them to stop, and I am clearly heard to say, "You must not", because they are shouting the "Siegheil" slogans, Mein Fuhrer, and things like, "you must not always be thinking of the past". I am heard clearly to say: "You must always be thinking of the past. You must not keep coming out with the slogans of the past. We are thinking of the future [voice emphasised] of Germany. We are thinking of the future of the German people. As an Englishman I have to say ...", and so on. So I am quite clearly expressing extreme anger at these people who have come along with their Nazi slogans. Six seconds after ending my brief speech I am seen to leave the platform without further contact with anybody. My diary notes that I at once left by car and drove back to the Rhur in Western Germany. Heavily edited, for example to remove my rebuke to these slogan-shouting people, whom I took and take to have been agents provocateurs, this sequence was shown on . P-194 November 28th and 29th to British TV audiences in a "This Week" programme entitled "Hitler's Children, the New Nazis", directed by the German Michael Schmidt, Professor Funke's star witness, and with none other than Gerald Gable of Searchlight listed as the consultant, and in Despatches on the other channel. This indicates whose hands were behind the editing. Again, heavily edited the film has been shown around the world against me. This was the thrice edited film to which I drew your Lordship's attention in suggesting there was evidence of dubious admissibility. May I again remind your Lordship of my basic principle on lecturing. Unlike the Defendants who have proudly stated that they refuse to debate with opponents, I have expressed a readiness to attend, to address all and any who are willing to listen. Your Lordship will remember my letter of June 24th 1988 to my editor William Morrow, Connie Roosevelt, to whom I wrote: "I have been invited to speak as a guest speaker at a right-wing function in Los Angeles next February. They have offered a substantial fee and all my expenses, and until now I have adopted a policy of never refusing an invitation if the speakers meet my terms, namely a free speech and a fat fee. On this occasion I intend to give the audience a piece of mind about some of their lunatic views." . P-195 I may secondly point out that were it not for the clandestine activities of the violent and extremist bodies dedicated to destroy my right to free speech and the rights of all audiences in the United States and elsewhere, at Berkley, at Dublin, Pretoria or wherever, to hear my opponents and equally dedicated to intimidating my publishers and smashing bookstall windows, where it not for their hate campaign I would have been able to continue in the normal manner with my exemplary professional career. It rings hollow that the same shabby bodies who have generated the hatred against me now point their crooked finger at my and abuse me using the very considerable privileges afforded to them by this court, to continuing to make my voice heard whenever I can. When I use words to describe them in detail, which they well deserve, they ring their hands lament about extremism. I have pointed out that so far as Germany is concerned, none of the German bodies who invited me to speak was illegal or banned. In fact when first invited to address the German Peoples Union I wrote to and telephoned the Germany Embassy, as the documents in my discovery show, and asked them specifically whether this was a legal and constitutional body. The Embassy confirmed in writing on July 25th 1984 that was. The extremism was in the eye of beholder. The further to the left the beholder squinted from, the more distant these . P-196 bodies may have seem from him. We have heard a lot from Professor Funke, the sociologist of the Free University in Berlin. My Lord, I am now going to pass over the next two pages and continue from the bottom of page 94. As for his allegation, the allegation by Professor Funke, here in court, my Lord, I also ask you to disregard those two pages. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think I know why, and I think that is very right and proper. MR IRVING: As for his allegation here in court that I should have known that various allegations were going to be banned in years ahead, it is difficult for an Englishmen coming from a country with deeper democratic traditions than Professor Funke's, to implant himself into the brain or mindset of the authoritarian German mould where book burning is now once again de rigueur, where a German academic like Funke does not bat an eyelid upon hearing that a teacher is still serving a seven-year jail sentence imposed for chairing a lecture at which I spoke, where two District Court judges who acquitted that teacher were reprimanded and finally retired in disgrace by order of the Minister of Justice, and where governments recently have begun routinely banning fringe opposition parties and circumscribing even their legal activities. My general response to this attempt at "guilt by . P-197 association" which we have seen a lot over the last few weeks, is to compare it with the worst accesses of the inquisitions conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In Britain the courts have always viewed it as repugnant; most recently I believe Morland J in another court in the same building. Hollywood's finest scriptwriters, many of them Jewish, had their careers vernichtet, to use that word again, by the reckless allegation that they had associated with known communists. Now come these Defendants levelling the mirror image of these same charges at me. McCarthyism was rightly exposed for what it was in more recent years and more enlightened years, and these Defendants for their own purposes are seeking to turn the clock back. As far as the United States are concerned, apart from the Institute of Historical Review, which I shall deal with separately, the one organization identified by learned counsel for the Defence, as I understand it, is the National Alliance. First let me point out that, no doubt with good reason, the Defendants have decided not to call their expert on political extremism in the United States, Professor Levin, and they have withdrawn his expert report. I think "junked" was the word. Mr Rampton used the word "junked" or "dumped" I believe. Had they not I would have "debunked" it I think. We have, therefore, no general expert evidence as to the nature of . P-198 he National Alliance, and I think I ought to emphasise that matter. The court is probably as much in the dark about this group as anybody else. The Defence invites the court to study the leaflets put about by that body at one meeting, but could offer to the court not the slightest evidence that I was aware of such leaflets or, for that matter, if they are once again falling back on negligence, that I ought to have been aware of them. If, as I submit, the meetings were organized by individual friends of mine acting outside whatever their capacity, if any, within the National Alliance may have been, there is no reason why I should have read such leaflets if they were indeed on offer. As for the IHR, the Institute of Historical Review, I have little to add to what I have stated in my various written replies and on the witness stand. It is clearly unsatisfactory, though not surprising, that establishment scholars feel the need to dismiss any rival body of scholars or historians as extremists, merely on the basis that these others propagate a different version of history from their own consensus versions.
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.