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.