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free speech Diary of David Irving’s Renewed Attempt to Lecture at Berkeley,California, February 1995 DURING the mid-1990s DAVID IRVING was invited several times to address functions at the University of California, at Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech movement of the 1960s. The local Jewish and communist organisations staged violent protests to prevent audiences from hearing him.

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