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at Oxford University Posted Friday, . your Board of Deputies index… Just how long has this hidden campaign been going on?Mr Newton was told that a decision had been taken several years ago against withdrawing Mr Irving’s books.
London, Harrow withdraws Irving books after plea from rabbiBY BERNARD JOSEPHSA NORTH London council has changed a long-standing policy by removing the books of Holocaust-denier David Irving from the shelves of its libraries, following a plea by a United Synagogue rabbi, the JC learned this week.Rabbi Dr Jeffrey Cohen, of the Stanmore Synagogue, wrote to Harrow council calling for the books to be withdrawn after the authority had turned down a similar request by Mill Hill
resident Christopher Newton.Mr Newton was told that a decision had been taken “‘several years ago” against withdrawing Mr Irving’s books.
He passed this information to Rabbi Cohen, who, in his letter, reminded the council that Mr Irving’s views on the Holocaust had been repudiated by a High Court judge.Two weeks later, the council replied that the books had been consigned to the “closed-access reserve stock, available only on request.”Meanwhile, Mr Irving has blamed Jewish members of the Reform Club for a decision to exclude him from its Pall Mall building.He told the IC: “I understand that Jewish members wanted me banned and
that non-Jewish members stood up for my right for freedom of thought.” All of David Irving’s books are soon to be available as n this website. Many already are. AND: Thanks to your help, all thirty of David Irving’s books will be back in print by the end of 2002.
Irving’s misuse of ‘free speech’ lineOXFORD UNION president Amy Harland is clearly not a student of mathematics, given her description of the overwhelming 95-15 vote of her union instructing her to disinvite David Irving as “a small but very vocal minority” (JC, May 11).It was David Irving who sued Deborah Lipstadt after her exposure of him in her book, so for Irving now to claim his right to free speech following his failed attempt to silence others’ is breathtaking humbug.The damning words of
Mr Justice Gray in his judgment in the case has now taken Irving (and his acolytes) out of the realm of being controversial with questionable or unorthodox views, to being social pariahs whose presence is unacceptable not only to the Oxford Union but to any civilized gathering he attempts to infiltrate in the name of free speech in order to peddle his pernicious nonsense.ROBERT ZEFF, [email protected].
David Irving writes:MISS HARLAND was referring to the tiny minority of political activitists, marxists, Jews and the rest of that freedom-loving ilk (to whom Free Speech is only a “line”). They called a sudden late night student union meeting in order to obtain a rigged vote, which was taken in the small hours of the morning. Mr Zeff is also wrong in saying that the vote was of “her” union. The Student Union is different from the Oxford Union, which is an independent body; it is hoi polloi.
Miss Harland may well have seen the writing on the wall however, and we cannot blame her for capitulating to these ugly methods.Ninety-five is a vanishingly small number of the Oxford Union of Students membership.
The overwhelming majority of students wished to hear me speak, and Miss Harland made that fact plain to the national press.It has been an object-lesson for the non-Jewish student majority, and may well have generated further anti-Semitism, which appears to be what the Zeffs of this world want. It is the dungheap on which bigots and bugs like him survive. The press should have investigated the rigging of the vote: that was the real news story, but for some reason, they failed to do so.