Saturday, May 11, 2002
Los Angeles (California) -- Las Vegas (Nevada)

M. GIVES me a page from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, to which he referred a few days ago; as I have not read that tome, it was unfamiliar to me. Writing in 1923/24, a few years after the Balfour Declaration, Hitler muses on the future state of Israel: If the Jews should ever succeed in setting up their Israel in the state of Palestine, he prophesies, "most of them will not go to live there." No, they will continue in their criminal actions elsewhere, and establish the new homeland as a refuge for all the shady elements forced to flee after their naïve and overweening host peoples have finally rumbled what they are up to.

Pursued by the authorities, predicts Hitler in Mein Kampf, these criminal elements will use Israel only as a safe haven, a habitat of convenience, from which they cannot be extradited: What a novelist might title The Sheinbein Game, I add. I wonder if Hitler will prove to be correct?

After reading the Los Angeles Times over breakfast I leave Costa Mesa around eight a.m. by car. Its standard of reporting is once again superb, enough to put any British newspaper to shame. The Times of the last few days has provided much food for thought about the Israeli siege of Bethlehem, now ended. One would have thought that in a normal world it would be a nightmare public-relations scenario: an armed force illegally invades a neighboring country, in brutal violation of United Nations agreements and resolutions, and sees nothing wrong in bulldozing private homes, with their elderly and infirm residents still inside, or in shooting up the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, randomly killing several Palestinians who have sought sanctuary there, by sniping at them through the church windows.

Several Israeli bullets, according to today's report, have smashed into the statue of the Virgin Mary, severing Her neck and one arm. The Times correspondent Carolyn Cole forces her way into the church -- displaying extraordinary courage, because the troops of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, whom President George Bush has rather excessively called a Prince of Peace -- make no distinction between men and women in shooting them; she reports today that she saw not one shot fired by the Palestinians from inside the church; but she did see one of them shot and killed by a sniper from outside.

The "Infrastructure of Terror"
[See: Photo gallery of Israeli massacres]	Left: She was someone's little angel. One of the victims of war criminal and massacre-denier Ariel Sharon (above).

Yesterday's LA Times article closed with a paragraph describing how the Israeli troops had all but withdrawn from Manger Square, "leaving only the tower crane with a remote-controlled machine gun" that had been used to snipe at the occupants of the Church of the Nativity, birthplace of Our Lord.

It is not often that you come across a sentence like that in a newspaper of record, and I read it twice to make sure I had not imagined it.

As a Christian, I look forward to the day when the war criminal who ordered this outrage is put on trial by the Belgians -- always assuming that some animal-rights campaigner has not put an end to his despicable existence first.

THE drive over the mountains and across the Mojave desert is spectacular. I have not travelled this route before, and it is God's country. Half way across the desert -- to judge from the local gasoline prices -- I phone Bente in London; she is subdued, as Jessica is away for the weekend and the house is very quiet.

I do not at all dislike Las Vegas: it is vulgar, like many American cities, but deliberately so, which is excuse enough. I pull into the city at 1:30 p.m. after a half-hour break.

In Las Vegas my publishing imprint Focal Point has rented a booth at the big Gun Show this weekend at the Cashman Center. I have to circle the parking lot for half an hour until a space opens up, in a far corner. I curse, but it appears to have been an unnecessary oath as I am not allowed into the building. One doorman shiftily refers me to another, when I ask for my vendor's pass as instructed by D.; then a burly seated Peloponnesian security guard who is pointed out to me as being in charge of the passes says simply, "You will not be allowed to enter the building."

I do not at first understand; he says with a sneer: "You can leave your merchandise here of course." I say, "But I am the vendor, we have paid for a space," and he then makes plain: "Mr Cashman has said that you are not to be allowed into the building."

It is the Pittsburgh ExpoMart scenario, the Oxford--Lewis bigotry all over again. I presume he is Jewish, -- where do they get those odd names from? -- and it is the familiar problem. It is unlikely that Mr Cashman has ever read even one book by me. Never mind, it is not my milieu anyway: indeed, it seems to me a bit hypocritical (as it did to Judge Judith Friedman in the Pittsburgh court in 1996, granting me the injunction against the billionaire Lewis in the identical circumstance) that Cashman allows in hundreds of tables laden with guns, swastikas, flags, boots, and Nazi memorabilia, which I can glimpse through the open doors, but not an English historian exhibiting a massive and much praised Churchill biography.

AS I last night took the risk of identifying the location of this evening's Las Vegas talk on my website, I wonder if that too will be cancelled.

I take to wondering about the Jews and their self appointed leaders once again. Somebody sends me a quotation that is going the rounds, from a wellknown American writer: the Israelis are "our only friends in the Middle East", it mimicks, and the writer adds: "Until we became friends with Israel, we had no enemies there."

Mr Sharon's tower crane in Manger Square, with its remote controlled machine-gun, picking off opponents even in the Christian sanctuary of a church, seems somehow symbolic of their presence in every other community around the world: the moment they sense a danger to their interests -- peng!

It's a miracle that they did not take out Mr Winston Churchill after his famous 1920 article in the Illustrated News: instead, they went on after 1936 to become one of his principal financial powerhouses. Yes, odd people, the Jews: they think that they own History, that they can control it; but they cannot, and they eventually get trampled underfoot again and again in the vain attempt.

Over to the Swiss Café on Tropicana Avenue, venue of this evening's function. But it is closed until five p.m. I sit in a Mexican restaurant, typing. Surprisingly, a lot of locals turn up for the function by seven p.m. including B. (without Helga) and Rainier; Al the professional blackjack player who visited me in Key West last year; M. (who gives me an envelope with $1,000 in cash for the legal battle); a Hungarian, and others: Bo and his wife Judy Kirsch, a Heydrich look-alike and girlfriend April, and around thirty others.

The restaurant patio itself is a disaster as a venue, open to the air, unprotected on three sides from Mr Sharon's friends if they show up, -- less likely now that the loveable Irv Rubin and his gang have been put away -- and barely 50 feet from Tropicana Avenue, one of the most travelled boulevards in Las Vegas.

The noise is deafening, the acoustics awful. I persuade the little audience to press as tightly as possible round my top table, and deliver a more than reasonable talk in the circumstances.

I GO online and deal with e-mails at midnight. To Bente I report the results of the day, and add: "Makes the journey worthwhile (it was spectacular anyway). . . Nothing now until the weekend. But driving, driving, driving (an anagram for D Irving, you'll notice)." Next stop Seattle.

Previous Radical's Diary

1922 prophecy In Mein Kampf, Hitler prophesied that if Israel were ever created in Palestine, the Jews would use it only as an non-extraditable safe haven for when their host countries got too hot for them