These ex-Germans seem to wish to wash away their ancestry in a bath of hate. -- Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary, November 19, 1944

Tuesday, January 29, 2002
(London, England)

I HAVE been working on the jacket of the new edition of Hitler's War, which comes off the presses at the end of February. There are serious technical problems, in the colour management, but I think I've got them licked. Around 2 a.m. I phone my friends in Chicago: going the rounds, one might say. I finally get to bed around 5:30 a.m., with work on the jacket still not complete.

At 10:30 a.m. There is an email from the moles who attended last night's lecture in the Inns of Court by Richard Rampton QC, and took notes on my behalf. One reports:

A. and I duly attended last night, which was something of an anticlimax. It was a very general description of the case with no new insights or indeed libels. As in the Radio 4 programme, Richard Rampton described your books as having a "racy, generalistic style which for those who did not know better might be taken as good history."

Having concluded - with Evans' and Van Pelt's help - that you had deliberately falsified history Penguin had, Rampton said, struggled to find a motive, and the only one they had come up with was "profound anti-Semitism". This was evident from material obtained on discovery, principally your private papers. Rampton gave the speech in California in 1996 as an example, and that in Louisiana two or so years before, and your responses to the Jewish hecklers. He also trotted out "the poem" you made up for Jessica. No reference was made to the diary entries.

During the speech, Rampton admitted that there was no direct evidence or express order that the Holocaust should take place, but that the evidence of it, and Hitler's knowledge of and responsibility for it, was based on (as he put it) totally convincing but circumstantial evidence.

In answer to a question at the end (did he think you had damaged your cause by representing yourself), Rampton said that he thought you did the trial as well as anyone could have done it.

-- which is nice. I find incidentally that every time I read the name Lipstadt, with my indifferent eyesight it looks like Upstart.

Of course, it is rich for Rampton to take the opportunity -- behind my back, since I was refused permission to attend his lecture -- of calling me a racist; as I pointed out under cross-examination, I repeatedly employed very capable Punjabi, Barbadian, Jamaican, Indian, and Sri Lankans as my personal assistants over the years, selecting whichever applicant was most qualified; while in Rampton's entire courtroom team of forty lawyers, barristers, assistants, historians and researchers, week after week, there was not a single coloured face to be seen in even the lowliest position.

This very pertinent remark drew a stinging rebuke from on high, from Rampton's former pal, his erstwhile fellow barrister and sparring partner, Mr Justice Gray.

THE allegation of being anti-Semitic rankles, particularly when levelled at me by Prof Upstart and Penguin Books Ltd.

Upstart's racism is notorious, and she displays it in all her writings. As for Penguin Books, they still peddle that penny-dreadful, The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, who later became Governor-General of Canada; during the Lipstadt trial I took a copy, bought here in Oxford Street, into the High Court and attempted to put some of its more lurid descriptive passages of Buchan's Jewish arch-villains to Penguin's chief witness, the absurdly philosemitic Prof. Richard ("The Skunk") Evans. The passages were vile, there is no other word for it. I suggested that these defendants of all people had no right to level such charges against me.

Judge Gray stepped in and stopped this exercise, nor would he let me question Evans about where he would place me, if at all, on a hypothetical 1-to-10 scale of anti-Semitism, if we calibrated it against the private views of such noble and exalted British statesman as Brendan Bracken, Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax, Lord Beaverbrook, and others.

I handed to the witness Evans passages of what those gentlemen had privately written about the Jewish community, and -- to spare the blushes of the public gallery -- invited him to read them to himself before I cross-examined him on them -- but again Judge Gray saved him by refusing to allow this exercise in sanity.

As Gray must know, there is hardly a major public figure who has not at some time or other uttered the harshest phrases about the Robert Maxwells of his alrededor. "Sh*tty" seems almost complimentary in comparison to some of their language.

FDR's man once said that the more he contemplated the Jews around him the more he understood why it was the practice in Middle Eastern countries -- the "little one" mentioned by the French ambassador did not at that time exist -- of retaining the foreskin after the circumcision and throwing away the rest. That kind of offensive remark nowadays would suffice to get even a rabbi extradited and tossed into a German jail.

BUT there we have it: Anti-semitism and racism: The real irony is that even the odious Upstart mentioned neither of these allegations against me in her turgid and negative-sales chart-climber, Denying the Holocaust, so Rampton ought therefore not to have been allowed by Judge Gray to play either card in the trial of my High Court libel action against her. They were irrelevant. But His Lordship smiled benignly and allowed Rampton to, well, rant on.

Which by no means exhausts that most boring of subjects "the Jews," and their whinge "Why us?" (an interesting variant on their usual guilty exclamation of, "What, us?")

This afternoon I receive an e-mail from the chairman of the Nottingham University Forum, a debating chamber as powerful and prestigious as the Oxford and Cambridge Union societies and the Durham Union. This announces that Monday's David Irving address to the student body is cancelled. The university praises the Forum effort, is in principle willing to allow my lecture to proceed, but must regretfully ask the students in that case to fork out eight thousand pounds (some $14,000 or €15,000) to pay the local police force to lay on extra security against the violence likely to be organised by those I call our traditional enemies.

It is precisely the method used by the University of California at Berkeley to smash free speech. There too we were asked to pay for extra police: but we agreed to do so, I sent a cheque for $5,000, and the function was staged; but the police kept out violent demonstrators and the huge audience alike, so after sitting in the empty lecture theatre for an hour to make the point, I flew back to Key West.

I wonder how much poor Mr Blair has to pay for his extra police protection when he speaks? My heart goes out to him. Surely I am not alone in being singled out for this burden ?

I send this reply to the Nottingham University Forum at 3:15 PM

Sorry to hear that; please keep the boxes of books (and other materials) with my compliments and distribute the books among those who favoured the function to proceed; please set aside two copies for the University library, and one each for the top university authorities who were in favour of proceeding. There is no charge from us for this.

I CALL them the "traditional enemies of free speech" but they are also control-freaks. When there is the slightest danger of any viewpoint or insight on history being ventilated other than their own, that is the version of unreal history that they themselves and their conformist Stinktier friends teach and propagate, they unleash the kind of screaming hysteria that a beautiful Danish blonde might well display upon glimpsing a black mouse scampering across the carpets of her Mayfair drawing-room. I speak from recent experience.

The pages of The Jewish Chronicle have fulminated for the last three weeks about the prospects that -- having been effectively banished from the panelled halls of the Oxford Union last year, I might this year actually get to speak to the students of Nottingham University who had clamoured for six months to hear me lecture on a subject that I know quite a lot about, the difficulties of writing about Hitler's Reich.

One would think that what with the global slowdown, September 11, Congolese volcanoes, and global warming, rational people would have other worries than this to make the topic of their front page headlines and editorials (one Jewish Chronicle editorial headlined "Irving's 'freedom'." Nice touch that, the quotation marks.

These immigrant communities -- and that includes the Jewish community leaders -- seem to have forgotten that whatever was the purpose the British found themselves dragged into Hitler's War for, it was ultimately fought as a war to preserve essential freedoms like the freedom of speech. As Anthony Eden once wrote, "These ex-Germans seem to wish to wash away their ancestry in a bath of hate. A.E. Nov 19, [1944]."

But Neville Nagler (right), his Board of Deputies of British Jews, and all the rest of their teeming, conspiring, disloyal, unhealthy street-gang allies have spotted that mouse, and not even a black one: and they have clambered onto chairs, gathered up their skirts, and are shrieking themselves hoarse. Just like after the Lipstadt trial, when Nagler wrote a letter to the BBC governors demanding that I never again be allowed to appear, let alone live, on British television screens (and the Board of Deputies had the stupidity to release the letter to the press), they have spent the last week writing arrogant letters to governors and university chancellors and police chiefs demanding that the Irving lecture not go ahead. And many a recipient will find himself, unwillingly, hating the Jews a little bit more.

Underlying every letter that they have written in this affair is the threat of organized violence, policed no doubt by the evil-smelling and unemployed foot soldiers of the Community Security Trust and other illicit paramilitary bodies, and the kind of nice folks who turned up in Chicago some months back at a private dinner I was holding, wearing black balaclavas and wielding baseball bats.

I noticed in one letter which Lipstadt's lawyers disclosed in their defence that when she expressed the fear that the awful David Irving might turn up and heckle (she was to deliver the keynote speech at the London Book Fair that year), the then chief rabbi reassured her that precisely these CST thugs would be on attendance to ensure that I did not get far.

I posted the two letters on this website, but it was not long before her lawyers had the offending items removed from sight. Such letters do not even exist. Their writers have scampered back beneath the floorboards, just like those mice.