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FOR THIRTY-FIVE years the international Jewish organisations have been harassing British historian David Irving. Again and again he has been shown examples of the furtive "backgrounders" and smear-sheets circulated by them in an attempt to blacken his name. |
COURTESY LINK: Visit the Simon Wiesenthal Center Website.
August 27, 1992
The Toronto-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre writes
secretly to Bernard Valcourt, Canada's bibulous
Minister of Immigration and Employment, to ask him to stop
the planned visit of "the infamous Holocaust denier David
Irving":
David Irving has previously been convicted in Germany for slander and defamation against the victims of the Holocaust.
They enclose copies of relevant newspaper clippings and state, wrongly, that "those convictions" have been upheld on appeal (in fact there is only one conviction, and it was appealed all the way to the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg); they also wrongly claim that the offences are "equivalent" to those covered by section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which makes Public Incitement of Hatred an offence. This is also untrue: for the purposes of the Act, such equivalency has to be absolute.
The Wiesenthal Centre continues by claiming in its letter that Mr Irving's "prior convictions" (sic) together with his past activities and his "reputation as a disseminator of false information" are likely to incite hatred, and he should be banned from Canada. They admit that they have no exact information on his date and means of arrival.
"However we do know that he will be one of the featured speakers at the annual conference of the revisionist Institute for Historical Review in Los Angeles."
They also sends a copy to Canada's minister of external affairs, Barbara McDougall.
October 6, 1992 Valcourt's staff respond in the cautious terms dictated by Canada's Privacy Act. "I do want to let you know," they however write, "that this Government finds any type of hate-mongering totally reprehensible." The minister has alerted the RCMP, he assures the Wiesenthal Centre, and the police will take any necessary action should Mr Irving violate Section 319 or any other statute during his meetings. Should any criminal convictions result, he will be barred from admission to Canada in the future:
When criminal convictions [sic] render a person inadmissible to Canada, we can inform a person of his or her inadmissibility and warn transportation companies to deny passage to this person. Nevertheless, such persons may still appear at one of our Ports of Entry
As for the precise section of immigration law that the Wiesenthal lawyers have evidently suggested in the interim, paragraph 19(1)(d), the minister admits that this does prohibit the entry of persons where there are "reasonable grounds" to believe they might commit certain offences, but the presumption of innocence means that a person reported under this paragraph will "only be detained if he or she were a danger to public security."
![[Global Vendetta]](../../pictures/GVtitle.gif)
Read David Irving's draft manuscript, Global Vendetta, for the whole story!
   write
to David Irving |
