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Free Speech: Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai Brith, USA Anti-Nazi League Australian Government Australian B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation Commission Board of Deputies of British Jews Center for Democratic Renewal, Atlanta Canadian Jewish Congress Canadian League of Human Rights of the B’nai Brith Coalition for Human Dignity, Oregon Community Security Trust of Board of Deputies German Government Jewish Telegraph Agency Searchlight and Gerald Gable Simon Wiesenthal Center Surfwatch Internet
censorship These ex-Germans seem to wish to wash away their ancestry in a bath of hate. — Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary, November 19, 1944 (London, England) I HAVE been working on the jacket of the new edition of Hitler’s War, which comes off the presses at the end of February. There are serious technical problems, in the colour management, but I think I’ve got them licked. Around 2 a.m. I phone my friends in Chicago: going the rounds, one might say.
I finally get to bed around 5:30 a.m., with work on the jacket still not complete. At 10:30 a.m. There is an email from the moles who attended last night’s lecture in the Inns of Court by Richard Rampton QC, and took notes on my behalf. One reports: A. and I duly attended last night, which was something of an anticlimax. It was a very general description of the case with no new insights or indeed libels.
As in the Radio 4 programme , Richard Rampton described your books as having a “racy, generalistic style which for those who did not know better might be taken as good history.” Having concluded – with Evans’ and Van Pelt’s help – that you had deliberately falsified history Penguin had, Rampton said, struggled to find a motive, and the only one they had come up with was “profound anti-Semitism”. This was evident from material obtained on discovery, principally your private papers.
Rampton gave the speech in California in 1996 as an example, and that in Louisiana two or so years before, and your responses to the Jewish hecklers. He also trotted out “the poem” you made up for Jessica. No reference was made to the diary entries.
During the speech, Rampton admitted that there was no direct evidence or express order that the Holocaust should take place, but that the evidence of it, and Hitler’s knowledge of and responsibility for it, was based on (as he put it) totally convincing but circumstantial evidence. In answer to a question at the end (did he think you had damaged your cause by representing yourself), Rampton said that he thought you did the trial as well as anyone could have done it. — which is nice.
I find incidentally that every time I read the name Lipstadt , with my indifferent eyesight it looks like Upstart.
Of course, it is rich for Rampton to take the opportunity — behind my back, since I was refused permission to attend his lecture — of calling me a racist; as I pointed out under cross-examination, I repeatedly employed very capable Punjabi, Barbadian, Jamaican, Indian, and Sri Lankans as my personal assistants over the years, selecting whichever applicant was most qualified; while in Rampton’s entire courtroom team of forty lawyers, barristers, assistants, historians and researchers, week
after week, there was not a single coloured face to be seen in even the lowliest position. This very pertinent remark drew a stinging rebuke from on high, from Rampton’s former pal, his erstwhile fellow barrister and sparring partner, Mr Justice Gray . THE allegation of being anti-Semitic rankles, particularly when levelled at me by Prof Upstart and Penguin Books Ltd. Upstart’s racism is notorious, and she displays it in all her writings.
As for Penguin Books, they still peddle that penny-dreadful, The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan , who later became Governor-General of Canada; during the Lipstadt trial I took a copy, bought here in Oxford Street, into the High Court and attempted to put some of its more lurid descriptive passages of Buchan’s Jewish arch-villains to Penguin’s chief witness, the absurdly philosemitic Prof. Richard (“The Skunk”) Evans . The passages were vile, there is no other word for it.
I suggested that these defendants of all people had no right to level such charges against me. Judge Gray stepped in and stopped this exercise, nor would he let me question Evans about where he would place me, if at all, on a hypothetical 1-to-10 scale of anti-Semitism, if we calibrated it against the private views of such noble and exalted British statesman as Brendan Bracken , Anthony Eden , Lord Halifax , Lord Beaverbrook , and others.
I handed to the witness Evans passages of what those gentlemen had privately written about the Jewish community, and — to spare the blushes of the public gallery — invited him to read them to himself before I cross-examined him on them — but again Judge Gray saved him by refusing to allow this exercise in sanity.
As Gray must know, there is hardly a major public figure who has not at some time or other uttered the harshest phrases about the Robert Maxwells of his alrededor. “Sh*tty” seems almost complimentary in comparison to some of their language.
FDR’s man once said that the more he contemplated the Jews around him the more he understood why it was the practice in Middle Eastern countries — the “little one” mentioned by the French ambassador did not at that time exist — of retaining the foreskin after the circumcision and throwing away the rest. That kind of offensive remark nowadays would suffice to get even a rabbi extradited and tossed into a German jail.
BUT there we have it: Anti-semitism and racism: The real irony is that even the odious Upstart mentioned neither of these allegations against me in her turgid and negative-sales chart-climber, Denying the Holocaust, so Rampton ought therefore not to have been allowed by Judge Gray to play either card in the trial of my High Court libel action against her. They were irrelevant. But His Lordship smiled benignly and allowed Rampton to, well, rant on.
Which by no means exhausts that most boring of subjects “the Jews,” and their whinge “Why us?” (an interesting variant on their usual guilty exclamation of, “What, us?”) This afternoon I receive an e-mail from the chairman of the Nottingham University Forum, a debating chamber as powerful and prestigious as the Oxford and Cambridge Union societies and the Durham Union. This announces that Monday’s David Irving address to the student body is cancelled.
The university praises the Forum effort, is in principle willing to allow my lecture to proceed, but must regretfully ask the students in that case to fork out eight thousand pounds (some $14,000 or €15,000) to pay the local police force to lay on extra security against the violence likely to be organised by those I call our traditional enemies. It is precisely the method used by the University of California at Berkeley to smash free speech.
There too we were asked to pay for extra police: but we agreed to do so, I sent a cheque for $5,000, and the function was staged; but the police kept out violent demonstrators and the huge audience alike, so after sitting in the empty lecture theatre for an hour to make the point, I flew