David Irving | ||||||
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Friday, July 25, 2008
© Focal Point 2008
On the way the not unexpected call comes from the Rhodeside Grill in Arlington.
Above: David Irving speaks after dinner near Washington DC
July 22, 2008 (Tuesday)
Falls Church (Virginia)THE fight with PayPal goes on. They write me at 11:42 p.m.
Dear David Irving,
- Thank you for contacting PayPal.
- You have been corresponding with PayPal. This is not an attempt to phish any information from you or a spam email.
- We have asked that in order to remove the limitation from your account you remove PayPal from your website. We have determined after a review of your website http://www.irvingbooks.com that you in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy relating to the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime.
- In order to comply with the Acceptable Use Policy and avoid the limitation or closure of your account, you will need to:
- 1. Remove PayPal as a payment option, as well as all references to PayPal, including the PayPal logo and/or shopping cart, from your website(s), http://www.irvingbooks.com;
- For more information about the status of your account, please log in to your PayPal account. We encourage you to login and return your account to good standing as soon as possible. Failure to respond by July 19, 2008 will result in the further escalation of this issue.
- We appreciate your cooperation in this matter. Please understand that this is a security measure meant to help protect you and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.
If you have any questions, please contact the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy Department at aup@paypal.com.- Sincerely, PayPal Acceptable Use
Policy Department PayPal, an eBay CompanyThese folks are shrouded in mystery. [We shall post the entire correspondence with PayPal when this dispute is concluded].
LANCE asks: "What is this book HITLER UND SEINE FELDHERREN attributed to you on Amazon?" I reply: "That was the first German edition of Hitler's War, as published by Ullstein Verlag [West Berlin]. I had to ban its sale two days after publication after I determined that the publisher had amended its content substantially, guess how, without asking me. Very rare. Buy!"
N. joins me for breakfast. On the way the not unexpected call comes from the Rhodeside Grill in Arlington at 9:03 a.m., the manageress says their top management have been coming under telephone attack since yesterday evening, and they instructed her at midnight last night to cancel our function; apologies, regrets, more apologies, etc. We go straight round to the restaurant where I spoke some years ago, to fix up for this evening there.
I take Gabriela out in the car to a Sprint store, where a Black man in dreadlocks does what he can to sell her a Nextel phone to replace her defective Peruvian one. Nextel however have a total monopoly and won't sell without a "plan". Eventually, in return for a cash inducement reminiscent of the good old days of American Airlines kerbside check-ins at Buffalo, a colleague of his at a store in DC sells us the instrument. Hey-ho. It all takes two hours.
At five P.M. I unload the books at this evening's location, and drive over to the Rhodeside, leaving G. setting up, happily chatting on her cellphone with Peru at the same time. How can they do it! But almost every woman you overtake on the American highways these days has a phone pressed to her ear -- a misdemeanor now in most of Europe. Eventually, evolution will provide them with a small hollow in their shoulder in which to cradle their mobile phones.
Around thirty-five or more have assembled in the new location, and I speak for two hours. My new book Banged Up goes like hot cakes. The manageress is very pleased, and we can certainly use that location again.
July 23, 2008 (Wednesday)
Falls Church (Virginia)AT two PM I am back at the archives in College Green. My old (octogenarian) friend the archivist John Taylor is still working there (they held a fiftieth anniversary party for him ten years ago!), but he's not in today. Supper in King Street, Alexandria. The Seaport Inn at No. 6 has changed into a glitzy Thai restaurant, so we eat at a fish restaurant. D. invites me to a Norman Finkelstein function tomorrow evening, at the American University. Good idea.
July 24, 2008 (Thursday)
Falls Church (Virginia)L. has found a location, "Joe's Crab Shack," in Duluth, near Atlanta. I am worried about the location and say so. Belatedly, moments after G. leaves for an afternoon off, Eric Z. phones in with the location for Charlotte. I work at the archives until six PM.
Listeners in the Hungarian Catholic hall in Upper East side, Manhattan on July 16. Right, charming New Yorker Joanna buttonholes the speaker afterwards.
July 25, 2008 (Friday)
Falls Church (Virginia)D. HAS written protesting about L.'s choice of a venue for Atlanta on August 1. "Duluth," he says, "is almost impossible to get to during rush hour and Friday rush hour is the worst of all." This is what I protested yesterday:
This is precisely what I feared, even as a non Atlanta resident. Would I be wrong in suspecting that Duluth may be rather nearer to your residence than to most other Georgians? I have therefore cancelled August 1 as a date for Atlanta and rescheduled it for one week later, August 8, which is (just) possible on my circuit.Left-wingers have posted an edited video of my July 16 Manhattan talk on the Internet. The journalist involved, one Max Blumenthal, described himself to me as a journalist for Nation, and gave a Washington DC phone number [202 744 4951], and he brought along a sidekick, one Thomas Shomaker of New York [917 753 3907] who, without my permission and in the middle of my talk, set up a video camera on a tripod in front of me. I should have kicked them out, but my naturally liberal instincts foolishly kicked in, and I did not.
It now turns out that he was in cahoots with that body of southern hatemongers, the "Southern Poverty Law Center" -- not much poverty among those folks, I understand, and least of all visible in their chief, one Morris Dees, who shares certain, uh, less ugly features with Blumenthal and Shomaker.
As their leftist-mob friends demonstrated their hatred for free discussion outside the Manhattan hall, and we made ready to leave at the end of the evening, urged on by a kindly and clearly sympathetic Irish officer of New York's finest (who confessed to me that he had passed retirement age ten years ago), Blumenthal insisted on shooting a fifteen minute stand-up interview.
WHERE IS DAVID IRVING SPEAKING IN THE USA? Apply for details. Register at the door, or cheaper online [link]. A NEW LIST OF CITIES HAS NOW BEEN POSTEDLike any good modern hack, he carried a hand-held digital notebook listing suitable killer-quotations and points-to-make. I tend to rely on memory for important matters, and my mind is consequently a blank about what was said, except that Blumenthal, banking on my on-camera courtesy, was unnecessarily offensive and abrasive, and that toward the end he remarked that the notable American academic Deborah Lipstadt had herself condemned my imprisonment after I was arrested in November 2005, as it made a martyr of me; and that I replied -- over his attempts to interrupt -- that when the Vienna court of appeal ordered my immediate release after four hundred days of solitary confinement, the same notable American academic Deborah Lipstadt vigorously protested about the judges setting me at large again!
I suspect that little pas de deux will not have passed his editing criteria.
Here is today's item at Hatewatch -- perhaps more aptly named Navelwatch:
Here's a fresh treat for readers of Hatewatch - a brand new video, made by journalist Max Blumenthal and videographer Thomas Shomaker and co-produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, about convicted Holocaust denier David Irving. It's an amazing, sardonic account of Irving's visit this July 16 to a church in Manhattan, where Blumenthal presses him into a most remarkable interview.Irving, of course, is the infamous British writer who penned numerous apologetics for Adolf Hitler and then sued American scholar Deborah Lipstadt after she called him a Holocaust denier. Irving ultimately lost his epic court battle in London, with the judge in the case concluding that he was a "pro-Nazi" polemicist. The court also found that the author of some 30 books had "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" to promote his racist and anti-Semitic ideas.
We'll save most of the good stuff for viewers of the video, but offer just a couple of teasers here. At one point, Irving tells his audience: "Adolf Hitler was being kept out of the loop and was probably not at all anti-Semitic… . He repeatedly held out his hand to stop things happening to the Jews." Just as you're digesting that incredible piece of neo-Nazi propaganda, the video recounts how journalist Christopher Hitchens, a former Trotskyist-turned-Iraq War cheerleader, has described Irving as "a great historian" and, in Irving's words, remains "a good friend" to the man who once said that more people died in the back of Ted Kennedy's car than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Although the video doesn't make this point, Hitchens was named one of the world's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine of Britain in 2005, long after his paean to Irving's swell talents as a "historian."
Take a look at this remarkable video, which we offer here a day late as a birthday present from Hatewatch, which just completed its first year of existence. As the months unfold, we hope to bring you more along these lines.
Can't wait.
Today the website carries a note: Sorry, this video is no longer available. Any theories?
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