Diary of David Irving's Renewed Attempt to Lecture at Berkeley,California, February 1995

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Index

Diary of David Irving's Renewed Attempt to Lecture to a Huge Audience Waiting for him at Berkeley, California.

February 1 1995
Organiser A. phones Mr Irving in Key West, Florida, from Berkeley to report that there have been ugly confrontations with the Spartacists while his men were selling tickets today for the coming meeting; he has recognised two of the thugs who attacked Mr Irving among them. Later, Monica Valencia of The Daily Californian phones him from Berkeley to report that there has been much turbulence there today, with demonstrations by women's groups.

February 2, 1995

Mr Irving flies from Key West to Oakland for the lecture. The next day is, he notes, an "odd day." He is instructed to wait at "Oxford Circle" in Berkeley where an unmarked police car will pick him up "just after" 6 p.m. Since the opposition demonstration at the hall is due to begin at 6:30 p.m. this is cutting it needlessly fine.At the appointed time there is no sign of any police car, so he takes a cab straight to the Latimer Hall. (Later he deduces that the police intention has been to take him somewhere else and hold him incommunicado on "security grounds" until it is too late to stage the lecture). Those are their methods.

The police at the hall are startled, then angry, when he turns up unescorted. Mr Irving has evidently scotched Police Captain Foley's little plan. He is escorted into the empty auditorium at 6:15 p.m., and sits there motionless in the front row, alone for the next hour or so while the raucous cacophony builds up outside.

A woman screeches through an industrial size bullhorn

"David Irving You Can't Hide / We Charge You with Genocide!" (sic).

She keeps up this stupefyingly mindless patter for an hour (the meeting is due to begin at 7:30 p.m.) The police--Mr Irving's $3,500-worth of police!--make no attempt to quieten her or control the mob. He tells the two police officers assigned to his side, as the female grows more raucous, "When you hear a woman screech like that you begin to understand O.J. Simpson." There is no sign of the audience being let in. A couple of hundred people have already gathered to hear him, braving the violent mob. At 7:25 p.m., still with no audience being allowed in, Mr Irving tells the organiser: "Give the police an ultimatum. If they don't move the demonstrators back out of range, and enable my audience to enter, we shall call off the whole event."
This will make plain that the university has joined in suppressing free speech. He gets the point. Mr Irving is smuggled out to an unmarked police car--by the same police officers who, it turns out, provided security for Irish terrorist leader Gerry Adams with no difficulty (or payment) a few weeks ago.
It is quite plain that the university has planned this outcome all along: they are reluctant to ban the lecture (Free Speech), but they have promised to various Jewish bodies that nonetheless it would not take place. Hence their demand for a ruinous police security charge; and hence their orders to the police not to intervene when Mr Irving and A. nonetheless pay the charge.

February 4, 1995
A. reports that he has now learned that the university's Chancellor wrote to the Rabbi assuring him that he deprecated the meeting and that Mr Irving's speaking at Berkeley would not be construed as Berkeley endorsing his lecture. A. reports that a police officer told him off the record that at the de-briefing police officers asked angry questions as to why they had not enabled the meeting to go ahead; Foley was evasive. Witnesses also saw on the periphery of the violent demonstration outside the hall several well-dressed and wealthy people in Jewish garb, who had earlier taken part in a candlelight vigil against the lecture, handing out twenty-dollar bills to street people whom they culled from Telegraph Avenue to take part in the demonstration.

February 6, 1995
On his return to Key West Mr Irving at once stops payment on the cheque which his organisation paid to the university for additional police security, accusing the university's Regents in a letter of failing to honor their contract with the Free Speech Coalition and calling the required five-thousand dollar security payment "a studied attempt to deny Free Speech."

The university [he writes] failed to honor the Agreement, and it is our belief that it had no intention of honoring the Agreement. In particular the police authorities made no attempt to protect and secure the event, i.e. to enable it to proceed unimpeded.

The police authorities made no attempt to enable the audience to enter the building to hear Mr Irving as they wished, although many had come long distances and he himself made a 7,000-mile journey for the purpose. On the contrary

(a) on the pretext of security, the police held Mr Irving incommunicado in the Latimer Hall from the moment that he arrived at 6:15 p.m. until the moment that the meeting was abandoned at 7:45 p.m. when they removed him, without informing the organizers, from the campus;

(b) they detained the audience which had arrived to hear his lectures outside the hall, denied them entry to the hall, and made it impossible for them to enter;

(c) the police denied permission for our own security organizers to enter the hall and to control the audience's entry;

(d) the police made no attempt to protect individual members of the audience from being spat upon, harassed and assaulted by violent demonstrators who attacked them in plain view of police officers, who were under orders, we have learned, not to intervene;

(e) at 7:40 p.m., when we asked the police to enable the meeting to proceed and in particular to move the demonstrators back from the entrances which they were blocking, the police evicted the entire public body, both demonstrators and audience, thereby rendering the meeting impossible.

February 7, 1995
The Daily Californian [the university newspaper] features the episode extensively on the front page in a very favourable light, but there is a hostile editorial written by Professor Robert Post of the school of law.

February 9, 1995
Mr Irving faxes a handwritten letter to the Daily Californian:

I invite Professor Robert Post of your school of law to reveal who supplied him with those fictitious quotations for his arrogant little OpEd piece (Feb. 7, "Go Home, Irving") justifying the despicable methods used to silence me on campus last week: like my allegedly describing a visit to Berchtesgaden as a "spiritual experience". Come clean! Who put into your pen the words you put into my mouth? Who put you up to it--and why?

On the same day Mark Weber of the IHR mentions to Mr Irving in passing during a telephone conversation that the leading French news magazine L'Express has published an article stating explicitly that the gas chambers at Auschwitz I are fake -- "there is nothing genuine about them from start to finish." Mr Irving remarks that this admission is an extraordinary victory for the revisionist movement, and asks Weber to rush him a photocopy.

To his worldwide supporters, Mr Irving reports on the events at Berkeley:

We signed an Agreement with the Regents of the University of California at Berkeley to provide security for the meeting -- tho' under protest because I've never been required to pay for security at any other university anywhere else in the world; to our knowledge none of the other controversial speakers including Nelson Mandela, Aristide Bertrand, and Gerry Adams, was required to make such a payment, and it seemed a studied attempt to deny Free Speech by pricing us out.
We honored the Agreement to the full, paying $3,500 for additional police officers. The university had no intention of keeping its side of the bargain. Their police made no attempt to enable the meeting to proceed. On the pretext of security, they held me incommunicado inside the Latimer Hall from 6:15 p.m.; they denied the audience which had arrived entry to the hall; they denied permission for our own security organizers to enter the hall and to control the audience's entry; as the press reported, the police made no attempt to protect people from being spat at, harassed and assaulted by violent demonstrators; the police were under orders, we have learned, not to intervene; at 7:40 p.m., when we asked them to move the demonstrators back from the entrances which they were blocking, they evicted the entire public body, both demonstrators and audience, thereby rendering the meeting impossible. I have told the students that I shall return It is clear that the UCB Regents came under outside pressure to disable the meeting and dishonour their Agreement with us.