June 16, 2002 (Sunday)
Key West (Florida)

SOMEBODY emails me at 8:25 a.m., "I saw the awful news in the newspapers today. I am very sorry to see your courage and integrity so foully dealt with and such monstrous injustice dispensed from an English court." He recommends "John 11:35, Hebrews 13:8" and I reply: "Sorry, don't know which newspapers. But I can guess. Bear with us, I am a Christian too and I know that things will come out all right." Somebody else then emails me, "I'm looking to purchase some of your books. Do you still work out of your London home? Please let me know how I can contact you to make a purchase." I give him our new phone number in Curzon Street, then instantly regret it: he may be a mole.

It was today's The Sunday Telegraph in England which has run an item, rather late (it happened over three weeks ago) on my home of 34 years having been seized within 48 hours of losing the latest appeal. It is not unfriendly, and ends with two rather off-the-wall quotations from "Professor" Deborah Lipstadt -- how long before she gets a knighthood? -- and Lord Janner a controversial barrister and member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Professor Lipstadt last night told The Telegraph she took no pleasure in the news that Mr Irving had lost his home. She said: "This is not something I can gloat about. It is Penguin who are pushing for the money, not myself. I can understand their reasons. They feel that if they don't recover the money they are owed on this case then they would open themselves up to all sorts of similar actions.

The case brought by Mr Irving and the subsequent appeal has cost me more than £1 million. I doubt whether I will ever get any of that money back."

Lord Janner, the chairman of the Holocaust Education Trust, said: "I am pleased that justice has caught up with him. He deserves everything he gets."

I am surprised -- or am I? -- that a Professor of Religion at a minor American university can afford one million pounds ($1.5m) to defend herself.

Of course, she is lying yet again. She does not want people to remember that a multitude of her greasy friends like ("Sir ") Stephen Spielberg, Edgar J Bronfman, the American Jewish Congress et al. stepped forward on the day of her Pyrrhic victory to boast to Jewish weeklies, newspapers, and television media that they, yes they, had provided her with the largesse, the six million dollars, that was poured into her side of the British courtroom in January 2000.

Or that the singularly creepy Anthoyn Julius oiled his way around the pressroom floor a few days later, boasting that his law firm had done the whole of their side of the work without fees? And that it was precisely because of these boasts that the same court refused to allow her her costs; in fact her lawyers did not even ask for them?

What a pity we did not get her in the witness box to confront her with all her lies. Truth seems to be a very scarce commodity among her fraternity.

Lord Janner's remarks will rebound upon his head, that I can predict. One day Justice may well catch up with him. His "Holocaust Educational Trust", another of those well-funded money-sucking quangos that litter the landscape of London, just as the political action committees are strewn across that of Washington DC, is anything but a charity: Dr John Fox, a British academic who was a member of the Trust, though non-Jewish, resigned in disgust after they held a secret censorship meeting in November 1991 to explore ways and means of pressurizing my main British publisher Macmillan Ltd to abandoned all their remaining publishing contracts with me.

I always wondered why Macmillan did, and eight years passed before Fox provided a copy of the secret meeting's minutes to me.

I HAVE received several comments on the Sheffield academic Ian Kershaw's acceptance of a knighthood for his biography of Adolf Hitler. Good luck to him, I say, it will earn you money and invitations, but not lasting respect. Only hard labour in the quarries of history does that. Somebody points out that the BBC announcement referred no fewer than five times to his being, uh, "a Catholic": so that's all right then. No bias there.

June 17, 2002 (Monday)
Key West (Florida)

I SEND an email to my lawyers in London, Amhurst, Brown, Colombotti, instructing them:

I want to stay on top of the final stage of the court [Lipstadt] matter. Please therefore ask the transcribers to supply, as we are entitled I believe, a disc (digital) copy of their transcript and email it to me (and Counsel) as soon as it arrives. I will then assist in finding the passages that matter, of which I have a vivid recall.

Several correspondents send me a long feature article published in The Observer (London) yesterday about Professor Richard Evans' (left) plan to publish his book, now back to its original title of Telling Lies about Hitler.

The article is written by a Mr Nick Cohen, and is about as mean and abusive as can be in the circumstances.

To all the calumny that the jittery Mr Justice Gray heaped upon me in April 2000 Mr Cohen adds many abuses of his own. For a moment I recall Mr Winston Churchill's famous pre-war aphorism -- "The world today is full of the most damnable libels about me, and the really damnable thing about them is that most of them are true."

I send this letter to The Observer:

A "bullying neo-fascist conman" replies
Nick Cohen repeats the legend that William Heinemann, a firm of unquestionable high reputation, having signed up the book by Prof. Richard Evans, "bravely pulped it after Irving threatened to sue". This just ain't so. I had no contact with Heinemann either before or after. They took the decision on the advice of their own lawyers, and it may well prove to have saved them a lot of money.

[Postscript: Sunday, July 7, 2002: The Observer does not print this].

There is only one thing worse than this kind of public immolation, about which one knows and hears, and can reply to; and that is the hidden smear campaign, against which one is virtually defenseless.

Some years back, perhaps five or ten, at any rate before the days of the Internet, the politically incorrect anti-Semitic mafia, of which I am of course now held to be a Court-appointed, Judge-certified, officially confirmed, and in-every-other-respect-too-Leading Member, was periodically treated to an over-detailed dossier of allegations of paedophilia against Mr Greville Janner (right, outside the Home Office), as Lord J. was known in those days. The samizdat dossier purported to contain sworn statements from young men that he had sexually abused, and it urged people to campaign for the prosecution of this leading and highly respectworthy personality in London's Jewish community.

One printer, who happened to bear the name of one of England's most famous comedians, produced and circulated exceedingly well drawn cartoon-strips conveying much the same message about the wretched and defenceless Mr Janner. The cartoons were as offensive, and as cunningly well drawn, and as obscene, as a similar publication I had seen about Anne Frank. I confined both items to the trash can, virtually unread.

Being English, I assumed, and still assume, that Mr Janner was innocent. He is innocent in the eyes of the law until proven guilty. Since whatever police inquiries were conducted did not lead to a prosecution, if indeed any were instituted at all, that remains the case in England.

Being English, like being a Christian, is something of an opiate to ones primaeval suspicions. I am sorry that Lord Janner is unable to draw upon the blessings that ones Christianity confers.

NOW comes, as said, their Mr Nick Cohen who accuses me in righteous horror of having sought to "censor." By "their", I mean of course that Cohen is presumably a fellow Jew of theirs. (Let us be mathematically precise here -- the name Cohen alone is not enough to go by. I recall my favourite math professor, Preidel, lingering long enough on an equation in pure mathematics containing an "e" to remark: "-- 'e', which is not, although it might be, the same as the exponential coefficient 'e'." A private joke for pure mathematicians, that).

Preidel was an academic whom I greatly loved for his teaching ability, at Imperial College in the late 1950s. Thanks to him I came to love pure math, to which I had been a total stranger until the year before. Had he been a "Sir," my respect for him would have abated.

I cannot think of a single academic of lasting distinction whom I met, and who was knighted: it is a token of political servility, of correctness. Was Otto Hahn less of a chemist, or Werner Heisenberg less of a physicist, for not being a "Sir"? Professor P M S Blackett, who taught us elementary physics, was a noted communist and so God knows no friend of mine; he was a Nobel prize winner, and one of our most distinguished nuclear physicists. The idea of accepting a knighthood would never have occurred to him.

I pen this letter to journalist Nick Cohen at The Observer:

You must learn to be more subtle, it generates more credibility (and in your case less anti-semitism). But perhaps you want more of the latter -- who can tell? I passed the article on to the appropriate gentleman [my Counsel], with this comment:

"He [Cohen] quotes the publisher as saying most helpfully: "I asked [the publisher] Verso's spokesman, Gavin Everrall, if he was worried about Irving suing. 'I hope he does,' came the reply. 'The free publicity will save our marketing department a fortune.'"

That is as you know real punitive-damages stuff: Intending to exploit a libel to increase the profit. Broome vs Cassell & another, 1970. I would have thought that Anthony Julius and others offering to assist the publication of a libel by giving free legal help during the resulting trial would also be maintenance in its crudest form: solicitors working free under such circumstances lay themselves open to the charge that they have maintained the action, right? Of course, Evans may have subtly toned down the book for the UK market (and skunks may fly.)"

Altogether a jolly morning and not much real work on Churchill's War, vol.iii done yet.

My London lawyer reports at midday:

I have spoken to the transcription people this afternoon. They now have the tapes .... They have agreed that we may listen to them and assist in identifying the right sections and with the transcription.

I reply to him:

Now that the tape cannot be accidentally "lost", we should ask ... all others ... to produce and disclose their own notes of the hearing....

Sunshine here today, five inches of rain yesterday. A metaphor for something. The Observer published a hideous piece of Irving-bashing yesterday, which I just read.

SUPPER over at Harpoon Harry's; my knees are beginning to hurt. Getting older.

June 18, 2002 (Tuesday)
Key West (Florida)

THIS morning a titled London friend reports to me by email:

Richard Compton-Miller of The Daily Express just telephoned. Asked me what Irving's friends are doing about retrieving his private papers that are soon to be auctioned. I said, more importantly, what are we going to do about retrieving his home so that free speech may be permitted to exist in this country. . . I said Janner's malicious remark is rich coming from a person with whom justice has yet to catch up [. . .]

I mentioned the website informs us that a final card is to be played within the next ten days.

Last night, I shook the hand of the French Ambassador [to London, M Daniel Bernard, right] who was the speaking guest at the European-Atlantic Group. During question time he referred to "not America, but the Entity within America". Said he'd 'suffered' for his remark [at a private dinner he referred to Israel as "that sh*tty little country" which was in his view to blame for all the present world unrest].

I led the applause following these remarks. He warmly kissed me on both cheeks goodnight and handed me the flowers they'd presented him as he departed.

I reply to her with an Anglicism: "You are a brick; well, not red, not square, and not heavy, but a brick all the same." Another correspondent, an American, writes words of embarrassing fulsomeness having read the Cohen article, and rather mixing his historical metaphors: "You must be the Joan of Arc of today, the way the Jews have done and continue to do everything possible to discredit a life's work. You truly have them frightened. All they like is burning you at the stake."

 

 

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