free speech DAVID IRVING issues a special ACTION REPORT on the Berkeley disturbances for DIFF contributors living in California, Nevada and Oregon, October 1994 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.
O n October 10, 1994 David Irving speaks in a church hall at Portland, Oregon, filled to overflowing with around 120 people. There was a crowd of demonstrators outside. He went out to try to debate with them, and got spat at for his pains; the police arrested Alaric Brown for disorderly conduct, and evening TV showed the incident.
On October 13, 1994 at the University of California at Berkeley the traditional enemy staged more determined violence. Faced with their threats, vocalized by Berkeley’s Hillel director Rabbi Rona Shapiro, the university chancellor cancelled Mr Irving’s hall contract at the Alumni House at the last moment, citing insufficient security resources, forcing the organisers to move the evening lecture down the street to the main meeting room of the YWCA at 2600 Bancroft Way.
The intimidation of the mob outside the Alumni House held off all but 100 of the original audience, some of whom had come from as far as Nevada and Oregon.
As Mr Irving was about to speak, two hundred people including members of the Jewish fraternity Alpha-Epsilon-Pi and mobsters hired by the Anti-Defamation League and its strong-arm gang, the Jewish Defence League, arrived and stormed the building; many of them had their faces concealed in stocking masks like bank robbers or the violent Marxist thugs familiar in street riots in Germany in the seventies.
One thug had the specific task of throwing over Mr Irving’s book tables and trampling books, cassettes, and the speaker underfoot. Although Leslie Katz of the Northern California Jewish Bulletin claimed that the protest was “reportedly organized by a student communist group, Young Spartacists”, many of the thugs were in their fifties, and their leaflets’ language was straight out of ADL literature, with vicious embellishments.
Emily Tanner, a spokeswoman for the Spartacist League (“a revolutionary socialist organisation,” as she called it to the San Francisco Chronicle ) accused the police of causing the injuries with their batons. In fact the injuries were all inflicted by the leftist thugs.