Speech: UCB (February 2, 1995)

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 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.

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