A copy of this has been sent to Mr Irving via snail mail (he does not have an e-mail account), lest anyone think I am speaking unfairly behind his back:

David Irving's Action Report #11 dated December 18, 1996 is available on the CODOH page, http://www.codoh.com/irving/irvactrprt197.html. I attended one of the events Mr. Irving describes in his "Radical's Diary" section of Action Report #11, and have a few comments on parts of the report.

I attended a speech by Mr. Irving in Pompton Plains, New Jersey on Friday, September 29, 1996. The event was sponsored by the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area of the National Alliance. The National Alliance charged each attendee $10. It is unusual, in my opinion, that Mr. Irving did not mention this in his Action Report when he described the event and my attendance there.

The National Alliance is William Pierce's self-described 'white-separatist' organization. Some would call them Neo-Nazi -- a term which the National Alliance itself doesn't like -- but the National Alliance literature espouses "National Socialism" as the preferred form of government, and many would arguably call that a "Nazi" position. David Irving spoke at a regular monthly meeting of the group on more than one occasion. On this day he spoke with a large National Alliance flag as a backdrop.

Mr. Irving writes in his Action Report "diary" -- a loose collection of daily occurrences, thoughts and observations:

... I drive up the New Jersey Turnpike the next day through more teeming rain, arriving at Newark 9 p.m. But the hotels there are full, so I have to drive around and it is half past eleven before I finally find one, in the middle of nowhere, at Pompton Plains, New Jersey. Exhausted. Straight to bed.

COMMENTARY: Pompton Plains is a small, deary blue-collar suburb of Patterson and the location of the VFW Hall where the lecture Irving was scheduled. He is apparently writing about events of Sept 19, the day before his scheduled 9/20 appearance on behalf of the National Alliance.

The local newspaper The Record reports under the unappealing headline [sic] that the hall has canceled the booking for our Friday meeting under pressure from a female the newspaper identifies as a local Jewess, Andrea Pason of Hackensack ("a local activist in liberal causes").

COMMENTARY: The 'unappealing headline' Mr Irving mistakenly disincluded was "Neo-Nazi Group Calls Off Meeting in Elmwood Park." The article was by Peggy O'Crowley, staff writer, Bergen Record.

That article appeared in the Record on 09/18/96 (Thursday before the National Alliance appearance). It is reproduced here as Appendix 1 with Ms O'Crowley's kind permission. The meeting location had to be changed because of a story about the hall that appeared in the Bergen Record, "Little Clubhouse of the Far Right Hall is a Haven for Unpopular Views" by O'Crowley, on Saturday, 09/14/96. Reproduced here as Appendix 2. I had the articles faxed to me by the Bergen Record and spoke with the author of the article.

Also, Mr Irving miscatagorizes Ms. Pason's involvement in the affair. Ms. Pason, you'll note, is not "identified" in the article as a "local Jewess" -- she is described as "...Pason, who is Jewish." The word Jewess, is perhaps a nit-picky complaint on my part, but this kind of petty name-calling is really scurrilous of Mr Irving, in my opinion.

In addition, he doesn't have the facts right. The lecture had to be moved because, a few days before, Ms. O'Crowley wrote an article about the Elmwood Park meeting hall, and the owners asked them to go somewhere else. The Elmwood Hall location is the regular location of the National Alliance meetings and has had trouble before with speakers (see article). Ms. O'Crowley's publicity so alarmed the owners of the hall, they canceled Mr Irving's appearance. Ms Pason is merely quoted in the article. Also, to be fair, the Elmwood Hall only holds about 35-40 people at best, and would have been way too small for the number of people who responded to the National Alliance's advertisements.

Mr. Irving continues:

There is however a back-up hall. The organizer says that Ms Pason is a noted drug-abuser and bi-sexual. How appealing. He mentions that he is getting phone callers trying to get information on Friday's meeting. Among them one "Albert Rich," whose number is however listed by Bell Atlantic under his real name, Israel Richter.

COMMENTARY: I don't know Ms Pason and her number is unpublished, so I couldn't get her side of this, but the source of this 'information' is obviously members of the local National Alliance chapter. Pretty tacky gossip, if you ask me. I sure would like to know how the National Alliance knows that Ms Pason is a bi-sexual and/or drug abuser. I would also like to know what that has to do with the matter at hand.

Also we discover from this paragraph that the National Alliance checked up on the phone numbers of people who left requests for information on the National Alliance answering machine. Makes me wonder how I passed muster, with a Jewish-sounding name and all. Israel Richter wasn't acceptable, it appears. Strangely enough, I didn't even LEAVE a number when I called. I told the answering machine that I wasn't comfortable leaving that kind of info on a strange machine and hung up. The phone rang soon afterwards and a young man said he got my number from caller ID! That was a little alarming.

In our conversation, the man said that the National Alliance would not publish the address on the Internet because 'David' didn't want any publicity from 'media lackeys' and they would only release the location 48 hours before so people wouldn't have time to mobilize any trouble. They only want a nice evening of a speech and quiet togetherness, he told me. I asked why Irving didn't want publicity, and my caller said the press always gets it wrong. For instance, they call Irving a 'denier' instead of a 'truth-seeker.' I left my name and number and was called back with directions to the lecture on Thursday 9/18 -- the VFW Hall in Pompton Plains.

The National Alliance obviously didn't want the reporter for the Bergen Record to know where the lecture would be. She told me left a number of requests for the new location of the lecture on the National Alliance machine and was not called back.

Mr Irving continues:

... I drive over into Manhattan for lunch with Steve Wasserman, a wiry, intelligent, beardy-weirdy type of Jewish editor; it was he who phoned me in London a few days after the SMP [St. Martin's Press] débâcle in April and asked if Random House could take up the U.S. rights in the GOEBBELS biography. Unfortunately, as he now describes to me, although Jason Epstein and other editors there strongly favoured taking the book over, it met with another obstacle which he does not identify to me. He is willing to do what he still can. He asks if he can also see NUREMBERG.

I rubberneck around Manhattan until 5 p.m., then meet Don F. at The Viking Press-he was the editor who originally commissioned GOEBBELS while at Atheneum. He is still young, keen, blue-eyed, mild-mannered. He too wants to see NUREMBERG, and hopes to be able to persuade his chief, a Mrs Grossmann, to take over GOEBBELS despite all the fuss-"a slim chance," he admits. The New York Review of Books article has helped them all.

I leave New York later than planned, around 7 p.m., and drive straight over the Hudson river to the New Jersey meeting, arriving at 8 p.m. ...

COMMENTARY: selective recollection here -- Mr Irving arrived at the ungodly hour of 9:30 for a lecture billed to begin at 8 PM.

... Large audience, about 150...

COMMENTARY: More like 85-90 by my count, but, hey, who's counting?

... including one Annie Alpert who identifies herself at the end as a representative of the Nizkor project, the Holocaust revisionist-monitoring (watch that word, "monitoring"!) outfit on the Internet. Some body says she was spotted using a midget tape recorder. They're incorrigible.

COMMENTARY: That part's nearly right -- I was there with a tape recorder. I have health problems that make it difficult for me to take extensive notes. The tape recorder was placed on the floor at Mr Irving's feet, in full view. I wonder, though -- who is it that Mr. Irving thinks is 'incorrigible'? Perhaps Mr. Irving is under the mistaken assumption that I am Jewish? I'm not. Or does he mean Nizkor? Women? Or Annie Alperts?

I never used the word 'monitoring' in reference to Nizkor, though -- nor do consider myself a 'monitor.' After the lecture, I introduced myself: "Hi, I'm Annie Alpert. I'm a friend of Jamie McCarthy from Nizkor." I also spent an outrageous $45 (by check with my name and address on it) on a signed copy of Mr Irving's book, 'Goebbels'.

"Oh, do you correspond with him on the Internet? They are everywhere, aren't they?" he asked. I had the impression he thought I was a National Alliance sympathizer at that point.

"I work with the Nizkor Project," I said.

"Really? Work with them? What does that mean? Are you an employee?" he asked stiffly.

"Well, actually, I'm more of a 'friend' of Nizkor. They have no employees. I use their data base and write for them,." I said. He signed my book and we left cordially. Days later got a letter from Mr Irving at my home address threatening me with legal action if I posted a transcript of his speech to the Internet. (I also got many several anonymous prank calls in the week after the lecture.)

I also got a strange e-mail letter from someone identified only as 'Ann Daltyn.' I later discovered that Ms. Daltyn is an official of the National Alliance although she was not at the lecture in New Jersey. Why she chose to track down my e-mail ID and send me that is still unknown. I asked David Irving about it in a letter, and asked him to inform Ms Daltyn of the truth of the matter, but I haven't had a response yet. She apparently felt justified in acting as a representative of Mr. Irving.

Mr. Irving:

I learn that Ms Alpert posted a triumphalist item on the Internet about the Jersey meeting, having found out the secret venue, and invited others to contact her to learn it and attend...

COMMENTARY: I have a problem with the idea that this was a 'secret venue'. Is Mr. Irving in the habit of giving 'secret' lectures? The event was published in many publications, and all the attendees were not members of the National Alliance. We all paid the same $10. Also the original location was published in the press and I only knew about the lecture because Ernst Zundel's pal, Ingrid Rimland, wrote about it in her internationally distributed daily "ZundelGram."

She wrote:

So if you have a chance to hear David Irving in person, don't miss it. For further information, e-mail to ihrgreg@kaiwan.com. Here are two more lectures to add to the previous itinerary I sent out:

September 20th	7 P.M.	New Jersey	Richard	201 697 1011
September 21st	3 P.M.	New Hampshire	Ken	603 547 2208

As an aside, Greg Raven of the Institute for Historical Review was mighty surprised when I emailed him asking for information about the lecture. He sent me a curt reply that neither he nor the IHR had anything to do with Mr Irving's lectures. Oh well, it won't be the first time that Ingrid got something wrong.

... Also that a Mr Rich Grange is claiming on the Net to be a friend of mine (I don't know him) and to have attended the Costa Mesa function, of which he has posted a garbled and wrongful account on the Net.

He means Rich Graves, of course -- a person who posts regularly on alt.revisionism. It seems the National Alliance is keeping pretty close tabs on the Internet. Mr Graves never claimed to be a friend of Irving's to my knowledge. Merely to have attended the lecture in California.

MISCELLANEOUS CONSIDERATIONS

It appears that Mr Irving's connection with the National Alliance runs deep. I understand that a writer is not responsible for the political affiliations of those who hire him to speak, but if my core audience was made up mainly of self-proclaimed Nazis, racists, and xenophobics I would have to ask myself, "What am I doing wrong here?" Mr Irving, on the other hand, seems to embrace his allure to society's disenfranchised. In addition to speaking on the behalf of the NATIONAL ALLIANCE, he makes a number of references in his Action Report to "calling on our friends in New Jersey" to do Bell computer searches on folks' telephone numbers. I also have to point out that Mr Irving is not above lying about his connections with Neo-Nazis. Here is an example.

Transcript of Interview with David Irving - Radio Station 2BL (Sydney, Australia) "AM" Programme, Friday, November 8, 1996:

REPORTER: You've been banned from Canada, as you mentioned earlier, in fact I think in 1992 the Canadian's Secretary of State described your views as abhorrent and as an incitement to racism and you were later declared persona non grata, there. But you did choose to enter Canada illegally and were arrested while giving a speech to Neo-Nazis, apparently at a Chinese restaurant.

You've also ignored bans imposed on you by some countries in Europe. If Australia does refuse you entry, will you choose to come here by stealth anyway?

IRVING: Oh, no. Good Lord. I'm a great believer in abiding by the law and I don't give speeches to Neo-Nazis. The audiences who come to attend my talks in restaurants or in private halls or whatever, they're middle aged people, usually respectable gentlemen and their wives wearing collars and ties and eating with knives and forks. No jack boots on site, no skinheads, no Nazi flags. This is just a picture that is concocted by my enemies to try and make me unappetising.

NOTE: This was just two months after the National Alliance appearance when he appeared at the lecture in New Jersey standing in front of the National Alliance Flag. Elderly couples? Yes. Jack boots? Yes. Skinheads? Yes. Compare that to this comment later in his 'Diary':

Drive down to Richmond for a television interview at a small public access television station. I insist that the Confederate flag backdrop be removed. S. needs to be shot, sucking me into something like that.

This tells us that Mr. Irving understands the ramifications of appearing before a controversial backdrop. Why the Confederate Flag was unacceptable, while the National Alliance flag was not, is a mystery to me! Also the event I attended was videotaped by the National Alliance. In his 'Diary,' Mr Irving talks about a speech he made in New Hampshire:

At once launch into the talk to a small audience in a garden marquee, about seventeen people. Three of them are making videotapes, a practice which I dislike. I hear that various bodies are offering large rewards on the Net for such a video record of my talks. Unlimiteded [sic] funds!

Now, I've never heard of such a bounty for Mr Irving's speeches, but weirdly enough, full audio transcripts of Irving appearances are available at a number of Internet locations -- all of them run by Holocaust deniers and the Institute of Historical Review sells a video presentation of his appearance at their convention and the National Alliance has a full record of his lecture in New Jersey. Refer to:

• http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~lpauling/
• http://www.eskimo.com/~ralphj/David-Irving_html/
  And, until Mr Irving complained, in the classified ad section of Fenix Mall web page:
• http://www.smartnet.net/~fbooks/index.html

A FINAL NOTE

Mr. Irving writes:

In the evening I download the disc that J. T. has sent me, full of stinking garbage about me that he has shed out of the Internet, including a totally fictitious account by one David Katz of a speech by me in Johannesburg, including talk by me of "niggers" etc. That is a word I have never used in my whole life: but I imagine that the South African Katz's of this world have more than once.

The "Nigger" remark is apparently from: Extracts From a Lecture Tour Given by David Irving in Johannesburg, South Africa, 1987, by David Katz dkatz@icon.co.za, posted February 29, 1996.

The speech took place sometime in 1987, according to Mr. Katz, at the Auckland Park Moth Hall. "The purpose of his lecture was to launch his new book on Churchill titled 'Churchills War.'"

... The first thing that struck me as being odd was the huge picture of David Irving placed behind the speakers podium. The picture looked very Mussolini like with jutting jaw and folded arms. The speaker congratulated Mr Derby-Lewis on his recent election showing and commented on how important the Conservative party was to holding off the threat of niggerisation of the white culture. He complained bitterly of the "Nigger" problem in the UK and that we must not allow the same invasion of our white heritage. The speaker proceeded to discuss his latest book on Churchill interspersed with a credible impersonation of Mr Churchill...

Jamie McCarthy asked Mr. Katz about this, and he replied in e-mail:

From: David Katz, dkatz@icon.co.za
To: Jamie McCarthy, jamie@voyager.net
Sent: 1/7/97 4:16 PM

I will keep this brief and simple. I took notes at Mr Irving's lecture in Johannesburg while he was talking. I stand by all that I have said in my letter to you in February 1996. My notes were not a complete rendition of what Mr Irving said but rather a brief synopsis of his somewhat more startling comments. Mr Irving did use the word "nigger" and derivatives thereof much to the amusement and loud applause of the audience. I am amused that Mr Irving finds this particular remark about "Niggers" to be the sole item in my whole letter that is offensive to him. Perhaps he does not wish to offend his many black friends. It would be interesting to find out wether Mr Irving disagrees with anything else in my letter.

Yours sincerely
David Katz

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