[images
added by this website; apologies for the late
posting, this was only recently called to our
attention]  - London, Saturday, February 26, 2006
My
perfect place to hang Irving by Giles
Coren IT'S A SATURDAY, and
no time for droning on any more about David
Irving. We are here, we Saturday columnists, to
provide a bit of light relief from the weightier
witterings of the working week. But the thing is, David Irving has
gone down [Website:
English slang for going to jail], he
is news, and I have a long letter from him on my
lavatory wall which has been waiting for just such
an opportunity as this to get a public airing. And
let's face it, after nigh on five years in my
downstairs khazi I think you'd want an airing
too.  David
Irving comments: GILES COREN raced to get his witty
thoughts into print, comforted by the
belief that I had just been locked down
for three years in Austria. Wrong!
Notice how ashamed he
seems to be of his Jewishness -- never
quite fessing up to it, but eager to
capitalise on the suffering of his distant
relations all the same.
Happy to sup, but
unwilling to pay. We've all met men in the
pub like him: short arms and deep pockets,
that's what my mates on the construction
sites used to say of the likes of him,
fify years ago when I was paying my way
through university.
The appeal court judge's
ordering my release after just 400 days in
solitary confinement must have come as
quite a shock to this nasty piece of work
-- like when the zookeeper finds the
tiger's cage is unlocked and the animal
somewhere out on the prowl.
Except that tigers
notoriously give a wide birth to
skunks. Here
is what I wrote on this website commenting
on his July 2001 atttack on my Churchill
biography -- note the bits that the
poo-obsessed Mr Coren omitted: I HAVE no idea
who -- or what -- The Times diarist
Mr Coren is, or what I have done to upset
him. His suppressed bile has shrivelled
his vocabulary to an almost incoherent,
monosyllabic stammer. Readers who are near
newspaper libraries might like to compare
the quality of his prose with that of
The Times a hundred years ago.
But never fear! Such
newsprint as his literary effort graced
just a few days ago is already in turn, if
it is lucky, now wrapping evil-smelling,
greasy bundles of fish-and-chips; or it
has been recycled -- the paper going one
way, to be melted down and pulped, the
tired printing ink going another, being
separated from the pulp by chemicals and
flushed down into the gutter, where the
pea-brained, poo-obsessed journalists like
Mr Coren live and can replenish their pens
afresh.
As for selective
quotations: I turned to one of the most
perverse critics of my works [Mr
Justice Gray], and quoted one of
the best passages from him. The
journalists like Mr Coren quoted only the
most vile. (The entire text of the 330
page judgment
has been on my website for over a year).
Who is being the more
selective. . ? [more
of Judge Gray's comments] [click
for the actual press release]
[and
another Coren sneer] |
The letter is addressed not to me but
to the Editor of The Times (who passed it on
to me), and is a response to a
piece I had written in the Times Diary (which I
shepherded to the brink of extinction after 80-odd
glorious years) on July 24, 2001. Now, I had had a little personal
correspondence with Irving up to this point and had
occasionally featured on his website in a not
entirely flattering light. One entry, for example,
ran: "I have no idea who -- or what -- the Times
diarist Mr Coren is." Don't you love the
"what" there? I do wonder what he means . .
. And look at what Irving is aching to
suggest here: "Never
get into a pissing match with a Skunk. Although, I
fear to compare Mr Coren with that furry animal,
lest I be accused of anti-Skunkism." Ha-Ha. Do you see what he's done
there, with the capital "S" and everything?
Anti-Skunkism. These Skunks, they're everywhere in
the media, and so neurotic, with that infuriating
persecution complex of theirs . . . If you don't believe me, just go to
Irving's website at www.fpp.co.uk
and put my name in the search engine. As
websites go, it is fast, well organised and
ruthlessly efficient. Qualities, given the context,
to make your blood run cold.  But
to the matter in hand. When Irving published
the
second volume of his Churchill biography in
2001, he sent a copy to The Times, and
while the policy of the paper
at that time was to ignore him, to pretend he did
not exist, I decided to feature it as the
Diary's Book of the Month.
In response, Irving wrote the letter
which has given five years of fun to full-bladdered
guests in my home, largely because of its
eye-popping lack of self-awareness. It is datelined, with a gloriously
high-flown sense of occasion, "London, Thursday,
July 26, 2001 (1:49am)" -- I do love the thought of
him sitting there in the small hours, furiously
typing by the light of a guttering candle, under
that picture of the Führer he had on his wall
[Website comment: This
lie by Deborah Lipstadt was indeed libellous, Mr
Justice Gray ruled in his Judgment of April
2000] , imagining himself in a
Munich prison cell in the 1920s railing against the
liberalities of the Jew-riddled Weimar
Republic. I should add that he writes at the
top of his letter "Not for Publication" -- but,
frankly, I dare say my long-dead great-grandmother,
great-aunt, great-uncle and cousins who got on the
train to Auschwitz (no doubt believing, as Irving
still does, that there could not possibly be a
death camp at the other end) considered themselves
"Not for Liquidation". So, frankly, balls to him: Dear
Editor, I
am not going to take issue with Giles Coren's
latest swipes and sneers at me (July 14, 24),
but is it not the practice, when material (in
the latest case, a photograph) is lifted from a
book sent to your newspaper for review purposes,
at least to give the book's proper title? Mr
Coren has studiously avoided doing so, not once
but twice. May I ask you therefore to insert an
item, perhaps in your corrections column, in
case any of your readers take his silly title
(Hitler etc) seriously. The book's real title is
Churchill's War, vol ii: Triumph in Adversity
(Focal Point, 2001). By
way of comment only, I must protest at Coren's
treatment of facts. His latest item reads (July
24): "The photograph above comes from my book of
the month, David Irving's How Hitler Invented
Penicillin, Told Excellent Jokes Against Himself
and Saved the Jews from Stalin (JudenRaus Press,
Recihmarks 20). How do you think this picture in
Mr Irving's charming and balanced account of the
war is captioned? Is it: (a) "Hurrah! -- Britain
celebrates VE-Day." (b)
"Ladies first -- our girls celebrate the end of
the war." Or
(c) "The White and smiling face of wartime
Britain -- Churchill's people in the summer of
1943 are contented and confident, but Cabinet
ministers express concern about the British
female's appetite for the Black US servicemen
now flooding into the country." Answers
tomorrow (but it's 'c')." In
fact . . . the picture caption in my book reads:
"The White and smiling face of wartime Britain:
Churchill's people in the summer of 1943 are
contented and confident; but the war has ushered
in a social revolution for women. They are
manning the workbenches and taking home
pay-packets of their own; they have started
smoking in public and wearing trousers, and
Cabinet ministers express concern about the
British female's appetite for the Black US
servicemen now flooding into the
country." There
are four pages of the book devoted to Cabinet
minutes on the latter controversy. It has to be
said that Bernard Levin did this kind of
thing much better. Yours
sincerely, David
Irving
It is a troubled and guilt-ridden
little country that locks up a pompous old dullard
like Irving. You might as well imprison Tam
Dalyell or Elmer Fudd. Irving should be
sent home immediately and given some comfy shoes
and an allotment somewhere. I'll look after him if
you like. International justice has bigger fish
to fry.  Donate
| regular
David
Irving imprisoned in Austria: dossier:
index
Giles Coren: A
poo-obsessed Times journalist
Giles
Coren sneers about a two page photo in
"Churchill's War", vol. ii: "Triumph in
Adversity"
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Irving