Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day014.16 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. Yes, exactly, and in exactly the same terms with the same sneer in your voice. A. I disagree. Q. We all heard it. A. I disagree. I am not accustomed to sneer. I do not stoop to the hypocrisy or sarcasm when I speak. Q. The same sarcastic jokes which evoked laughter from you sympathetic audience about the suffering of the Jews at Auschwitz? A. I am prepared to take lessons in sarcasm from you, Mr Rampton. Q. Mr Irving, I have no interest in a sober academic argument . P-139 which I believe to be hopelessly ill-conceived any, but that is completely beside the point, about whether or not the Jews are in some sense to blame for what has happened to them through the pages of history. I am interested in your motivation, your attitude and nobody else's. You notice I did not cross-examine your nice Mr McDonald. That is the reason, Mr Irving. A. Well, I think we know the reasons why you did not cross-examine Professor McDonald. Q. If you would look, please, at page 19, it is the last reference I want to make to this transcript. Towards the end of the big paragraph at the top of the page there is a sentence which begins: "If you", that is Jews: "If you [Jews] had behaved differently over the intervening 3,000 years, the Germans would have gone about their business and would not have found it necessary to go around doing whatever they did to them, nor would the Russians, the Ukranians, the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians and all the other countries where you have had a rough time." Why do you propose that in any sense, whatever the Jews might have done or not done, differently or otherwise, made it necessary for them to be exterminated by these other central Europeans? A. I agree "necessary" is the wrong word. The point I am trying to make there, it is exactly the same question as I put to Goldhagen in New Orleans. I said to him, not . P-140 just the question that why have all these nations found it so easy to kill the Jews, why have all these nations found it so easy to unburden themselves for their Jewish population, for example the Slovaks and the Dutch and the Hungarians and Romanians and so on, when the Nazis said "Give us your Jews", all these surrounding countries said, "Take them off us", that would have worried me if I was a Jew. Also why the British and the Americans and the other nations refused to accept the boat loads of Jews, like the famous episode with the St Louis, the ship laden with Jews, these kinds of things would have concerned me as a Jew. I would have wanted to know what is it, why do people not want to accept us, why do people not want to rescue us. I would have wanted to know that far more than I would have wanted to know the sordid story of who pulled the triggers. But maybe I am different from Goldhagen in that respect. He wants to look at the immediate effect and I would have wanted to look at the cause. Q. Thank you, Mr Irving. A. I agree that the word "necessary" is totally misplaced there. Q. Indeed so. You used it, nonetheless, to a different audience? A. I am not speaking, as you will have noticed, from the film, I am not speaking from a prepared script. . P-141 Q. No. A. Any more than I am speaking from a prepared script now. Q. Mr Irving, do you have, only because I do not have a transcript in the file, that clip of extracts which I handed in this morning? A. Do I have that clip of extracts? Q. Yes, this little clip of extracts? If you do, could you please turn to page 24 of it, to the extract marked 1.7/A in a square bracket. A. Yes. Q. I want you to look at the top of the page. There are some words in German in a square bracket which are said to come from a video cassette of your having said something entitled the: "Ich Komme Wieder" about 1994. A. Yes, rioters standing outside my home against whom the West End Police had to put up steel barricades, yes, very nice people. Q. I am sure you were not feeling in the best of moods because you had just lost your contract with the Sunday Times for the serialization of the Goebbels' Diary, had you not? A. Not true. This is two years before that. Q. So it is not 1994? A. No. The contract with St Martins -- I am sorry, the St Martins Press contract was lost in April 1996. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, this is the Sunday Times contract. . P-142 A. The Sunday Times episode was, if this is referring to July 1992, yes, the "Gas Irving" posters and so on. MR RAMPTON: I am sure you were under pressure, as you are now, reasons for stress. A. On the contrary, I would use exactly the same phrase now. Anybody who comes ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us see what the phrase was because I have not seen this before. MR RAMPTON: Let us see what you said: "The whole rabble", you read the German and then you can correct the translation if it is wrong: "The whole rabble, all the scum of humanities stand outside. Homosexuals, the gypsies the lesbians" ---- A. This is a typical example of how objectionable it is to produce something out of context. Outside what? The answer is outside my family home at 3 a.m. in the morning we hear the police bringing the barricades. I get phone calls from the police say, "Mr Irving, if your home is invaded this is the emergency number you have to phone". I get a phone call from Scotland Yard saying, "Mr Irving, we need to come and photograph the inside of your apartment in case we have to come rescue because we have had secret intelligence about what they are going to do to you." This is the kind of nightmare I went through in July 1992, when I see the barricades going up outside my house during the middle of the night and my family says, "What's the . P-143 sound?", and I say: "It's lorries unloading barricades again. Tomorrow the scum are going to be outside again", and here they are described. Q. Now under stress, a perhaps little frightened, certainly angry? A. I am not easily frightened but I get angry at this kind of thing. Q. Right, angry when under stress. Do you know the expression, I am sure you do, which is sometimes used, it is Latin but it is not legal Latin so I can use it, in vino veritas? A. Are you accusing me of drinking? Q. No. Please do not always try to fifth guess me. In vino veritas, what does it mean? It means that we sometimes get better truth from people when they are pickled. A. When they are drunk. Q. No, in wine it means, in their cups. A. Yes. Q. Do you not agree sometimes when a man is angry or under stress the mask may slip? A. That is precisely why I prefer to carry on talking this evening so that his Lordship knows that I am talking from the heart. Q. I suggest this came directly from the heart, Mr Irving. This is when the mask slips. Mr Irving is under stress. He is angry. He thinks people are getting at him. He is . P-144 feeling persecuted. A. I think people are getting at me? Q. Yes. A. Well, what evidence does one need before one stops thinking and starts realising? Q. He has got a grudge against the Sunday Times and some people are causing a nuisance, and so what he says is this: "The whole rabble, all the scum of humanity, stand outside. The homosexuals, the gypsies, the lesbians", and now this is where you interrupted me, "the Jews, the criminals, the communists, the left-wring extremists, the whole commune stands there and has to be held back behind steel barricades for two days." That is Mr Irving's true mind, is it not? A. This is a literal description of who was visible on the other side of those barricades. Shall I show you the photographs? We can identify who they are, the banners they are holding, the placards, the leaflets they are holding out, the stickers they are putting on all the lampposts: Irving speaks Rostock burns. That is what I had to put with day after day. Q. Are we going to see gypsies? A. They were there. They were there in the photographs. They were holding up placards saying "Gas Irving". Q. What, the sort of "Gay liberation wants Irving gassed"? A. I will bring the photographs in and you can satisfy . P-145 yourself. I have quite a folder of them. Q. This is the plain language of a plain unvarnished racist? A. On the contrary. This is the language of somebody who can see the evidence with his own eyes, the people who he has got to put up with, the people who are harassing everybody in that street for two days, being held back by the forces of law and order. Q. Right. A. I will give you one clue as to the conditions of terror we were living in, my family. Q. Do not. A. I am sorry, I am going to tell it to you. We had basket, a Moses basket in the corner of my drawing room with a length of wire rope so I could lower my child out of the window in case my house was set on fire. That is the conditions we were living under at the time I made that speech. Q. Of course. I understand that. A. It cannot be very nice. I am sure this very seldom happens to leading counsel. Q. I will not respond to that either. Mr Irving, I want to look at some other little things that you said, if I may. Page tab 10 of this file, please. Page, I hope this is going to be right, page 57. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am in the wrong file. Which file are you in? . P-146 MR RAMPTON: It is K4, my Lord. You are in the right file, my Lord. I am in the wrong one. I meant K4. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this in the clip? MR RAMPTON: Yes, it is my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Give me the reference? MR RAMPTON: It is the bottom of page 24 and the top of page 25 of the clip. This is from your publication Action Report, Mr Irving, is it not, for July 1997? A. What page are we looking at, 24? Q. 57. A. Page 57. Q. Tab 10, page 57. It is the column: "Going for Gold". A. Yes. Q. I will read the first paragraph as your Lordship has not got that in the clip, but it does no matter. It is very short: "Mr Winston Churchill is rumoured to have observed that he could listen to arguments about the merits of different breeds of tea with complete disinterest. Action Report finds it can view any dispute between New York politicians, lawyers, wealthy Swiss bankers and the international Jewish community with the same lack of passion. What is remarkable is that this community have considered it worth taking such a long- term risk, possibly evening sowing the seeds of future Holocaust in the name of short-term gain in gold. All the . P-147 elements of anti-Semitic stereotype are there. The cosmopolitan, rootless millionaire, bereft of any local patriotism, flinging his unpopular perception, ill-gotten gains outer head as he escapes from the country where he has briefly rested. The demand for 'unclaimed Gold' regardless of whose it is", note those words, Mr Irving, "regardless of whose it is, whether wedding rings eased off the lifeless fingers of Hamburg or Dresden air raid casualties for identification purposes and stored by the bucket in the Reichsbank vaults or dental fillings ripped out of the bodies of gas chamber victims by SS dentists, somehow immune to the Zyklon fumes which had dispatched the others." That is July 1997. A. Yes.
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