Diary: November 27, 2000

Monday,
November 27, 2000

Monday,
November 27, 2000 (Key West,
Florida)

…
SLEPT appallingly after that. Weird dreams, nightmares, which unusually I can remember in full detail as I awake: sitting on top of a thundering Pan-Am 747
as it takes off, rising slowly through a forest, its wingtips brushed through clusters of outer branches of giant
Sequoia Redwoods, Nicky sitting on a cushion next to me; I say, “We are already
900 feet up, these trees are really giants.”

Then I am inside the cabin, the upper cabin, and all the lower cabin passengers suddenly crowd up into it, milling around. A family of three Negroes (father and two children) lies on the floor, take our places. The dream ends up in a ferry, a Pan Am ferry, heading for
Napoli, Long Island (says the female). I am the only person in the ferry, and I just get off in time. How to get back to where I want? I awake feeling very heavy headed.

Breakfast at Sloppy Joe’s. Back to the cottage, it stinks of rotten vegetables. A long search for the source reveals: the gas has been left slightly on last night, with no flame. Nearly Kerboom. (My spellchecker wants to change that into “cherubim”. I nearly was.) Good thing I don’t smoke.
Mystery of the bad dreams is thus explained.

I can just imagine the headline:
” REVISIONIST
FOUND GASSED. DENIES IT
HAPPENED.”
Or even worse:
” AUTHOR
KILLS SELF.” (That won’t ever happen.)

I have received from a loyal Canadian friend an excellent German translation of the entire Lipstadt Trial
Diary.
She has done a great job. As soon as formatting it is complete — later today
— I shall post it as a PDF file at this link and then see about printing it for wide distribution in Germany.

Trinity
College, Dublin, has cancelled the speaking invitation under threats of violence. I had heard rumours of this from people who read items in the Irish press and the Jewish Chronicle, who seem well informed on such things. I was to speak on the problem of reconciling the law of libel with freedom of speech. That makes the seventh major university this year, including Oxford, Cambridge, and
Durham, to cancel an invitation to speak, under threats of Jewish and marxist violence.

The only way (apart from bumming
Six Million dollars off Steven Spielberg) that they can win their argument.

Trinity
Maths student Geraldine
Lawless, secretary of the university’s Lit &
Deb., explains:

"The two main oppositions
the committee which had to your
appearance were security and
disagreement. Security for the event
would have cost a lot, and the society
is actually in debt at the moment. Also
some members of the committee had
problems with your interpretation of
the Holocaust. In addition to this
there were fears that a large
proportion of our membership and the
other students of Trinity would be
offended by your appearance as our
guest in the college.

If, that is,
college authorities had let us go ahead
with the meeting. Apologies
again, Geraldine Lawless."

Heigh-ho.
I write her: “You are surely aware that I have spoken three times before at Trinity.
And that nobody knows my views on the
Holocaust until they hear them. And that that was not the topic anyway?”

Related item on this website:

University
College, Cork: Marxist and Jewish
rioters prevent Irving speech.