[source]November 15, 2007
Lancaster UAF
Poor Old Soul: The
return of David Irving
Posted
by "Antifascist" [Gerald Gable]
THE late comedian Frankie Howerd was
well known for saying, "it's wicked to mock the
afflicted".
It has long been tempting not only to call the
rightwing quasi-historian David Irving a liar, in
the words of the judgment in his failed libel
action against Dr Deborah
Lipstadt, but also to question his grasp on
reality, particularly about his past and present
political associations.
I admit I have a personal axe to grind. In 1964 I
pleaded guilty with a colleague
[arsonist and burglar
Manny Carpel] at
Middlesex Sessions of entering Irving's north London flat
"by artifice" (not burglary as the far right insist). I
also admitted stealing by finding a GPO telephone
engineer's pass. Charges against a third defendant,
David Freedman, were dismissed, but for the past
44 years Irving has insisted that Freedman was also
guilty. Well let's not let the facts get in the way
of Irving's warped thinking.
Around ten years ago Irving said
[Website: No he
didn't] I had made his life a Holocaust
for the previous 30 years, an accusation I happily
accept. Now in his dotage Irving appears to be making a
late bid to gain fame in place of his infamy -- which
brings to mind another Frankie Howerd phrase, from Up
Pompeii!: "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for
me". Too right.
Some years ago Irving threatened
[Website: No he
didn't] to sue me and the publisher
Pearson Longman over a chapter I had written in a book on
the far right in Europe. I was able to provide
documentary evidence of the truth of each of the points
he claimed were defamatory of him, and demonstrate that
he was associated with the extreme right in Britain.
[Website: Gable is confusing
Mr Irving with somebody else]
What puzzled our libel lawyer was another reference to
something Irving claimed I had written. It was at this
point we wondered whether he was suffering from early
symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, as the passage
complained of did not exist.
Irving is keen to distance himself from the BNP and
claims on his website that he has "no point of contact
whatever" with Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, or
the BNP itself. Yet when he last tried to take the
country by storm with a speaking tour in the early 1990s
it was the BNP that made the arrangements for his
meetings in London and Brighton.
[Website: No it
wasn't]
One of Irving's rallies was to be at Chelsea Old Town
Hall. He had invited the US Holocaust denier and
all-purpose fruitcake Fred
Leuchter despite a ban on him entering the
country. Leuchter claimed to have proved there were no
gas chambers in the Nazi death camps in Poland. The
meeting was packed with leading nazis from around the
world, including John Tyndall, then the leader of
the BNP. It broke up after a few minutes when Home Office
officials and several police officers entered to remove
Leuchter. He was deported a few days later.
Video evidence shows Griffin with Chris Marchant, a
former Balkans War mercenary, telling Thames TV's This
Week that Irving had hired their new security firm to
protect the meeting.
[Website: No he didn't, this
is totally untrue; security outside was provided by the
Metropolitan Police, and inside by Mr Irving's
colleagues]
Irving's failed attempt to hold a meeting at the Royal
Warwicks Club in Coventry on 21 September in the wake of
a small meeting in Rugby shows that he still has dealings
with far-right extremists.
[Website: The Coventry
meeting went ahead at its proper location. The RWC was
the decoy for which Gable's thugs fell]
The Rugby meeting was organised by Steve Kerr, a
long-time nazi, as was the Coventry meeting booked under
the guise of the "Military History Book Club".
[Website: No he
didn't]
Irving's speaking tour was set to continue with a
meeting in Birmingham on 26 October followed by a second
attempt in Coventry on 14 November, Liverpool on 26
November and Halifax. His website does not advertise that
he has been invited to take part in a "free speech forum"
at the Oxford Union on 27 November, to which an
invitation to Griffin has already been withdrawn.
[Website: No it
hasn't]
Irving recently moved into a ten-bedroom house in
large grounds in Windsor, where he has already held a
meeting and garden party for the rich suckers who
continue to support this liar.
Irving's position on the Holocaust has become a
movable feast. He
has threatened to sue The Jewish Chronicle if it
calls him a Holocaust denier, though he reproduces on
his website without comment a recent Guardian
article that does just that. He now says he is not sure
of the numbers killed. Our view is that to minimise the
Holocaust by claiming that "only" two million died, or
whatever number he plucks out of the air, is just another
version of Holocaust revisionism. And two million in a
planned genocide would still be two million too many.
I am sure all decent people will oppose this apologist
for Hitler wherever he goes. Watch the
Searchlight websites for news of his
movements.
Searchlight
write
to David Irving