Closing Speech
by David Irving
Part
VI The allegations of racism and
anti-Semitism The Defendants have resorted to the allegations
that I am anti-Semitic and racist. Mr Rampton's
highly paid experts have found one 1963 diary entry
four lines written thirty-seven years ago, about a
visit to my lawyer Mr. Michael Rubenstein, to
discuss a satirical magazine article, after which I
commented. "Thick skinned these Jews are!"171 This
is all that they could Þnd from the millions
of words available to them? When I remarked, on
March 2, upon the obvious paradox that an alleged
anti-Semite would have retained Michael Rubenstein
as his solicitor and respected adviser for over
twenty years, Mr Rampton's comment, which Your
Lordship may remember, was: "Many of my best
friends are Jews too, Mr Irving."172 This stock
line does not disguise the paucity of his evidence
against me. In further support of this contention they have
taken isolated remarks made in lectures and
speeches - of which they have transcribed around
half a million words. I trust that your Lordship
will in each case consider both the context in
which the remarks are made, and also the broader
surrounding countryside, if I may put it like that.
For thirty years, as I set out earlier, I have
found myself subjected to vicious attack by bodies,
acting as they freely admit as Jews. For thirty
years I endeavoured to turn the other cheek, and I
hope I succeeded. Mr Rampton drew attention to the fun I poked at
Simon Wiesenthal, a joke made explicitly about his
other-than-good looks.173 He called that remark
"anti-Semitic". It was not, it was a joke about his
looks, of the same genre that Mr Rampton made on
Day 28 when he inquired rhetorically of Professor
Funke whether a certain outer-fringe Swedish
revisionist seen, in one video shown to the Court,
with long blonde hair was a man or a woman.174 In view of the manner in which the two Simon
Wiesenthal Centres have been abusing my name in
their fund raising leaflets, and endeavouring to
destroy my own livelihood, the Court might think
that my fun-making, while tasteless, was not
undeserved, possibly even rather reserved. It was
not anti-Semitic, and Mr Wiesenthal is no more
immune from criticism either as a person, or as a
public figure, than I am. Searching hopefully for
evidence of "anti-Semitism" in me, the
investigators of the Board of Deputies in 1992 came
up empty-handed in their secret report to be
planted on the Canadian government: they confirmed
that I had dealings with Jews in my professional
life, and added that I "use this as an excuse" to
say that I am not an anti-Semite. These people are
hard to please: "He is far too clever an opponent,"
the Board writes, "to openly admit to being an
anti-Semite." "We endorse all condemnation of
anti-Semitism," they quote me as writing in my
newsletter issued on January 31, 1982. All of these
things, including this secret 1992 Intelligence
report filed by the Board of Deputies, were
disclosed to these Defendants in my Discovery. The Defence quoted a passage from a speech
delivered, they said, in May 1992. In fact, as my
diary conÞrms, it was delivered in May 1993,
by which time my family and I had been subjected to
a catalogue of insults by the leaders of these
various bodies. If a writer's books are banned and
burnt, his bookshops smashed, his hands manacled,
his person assaulted, his printers burned down, his
access to the world's archives denied, his family's
livelihood destroyed, his phone lines jammed with
obscene and threatening phone calls and death
threats, his house beset by violent and angry mobs,
the walls and posts around his address plastered
with stickers inciting the public to violence
against him, and a wreath sent to him with a foul
and taunting message upon the death of his oldest
daughter, - then it ill behoves people to offer
cheap criticism if the writer finally stops turning
the other cheek and rounds upon his tormentors. I single out in this respect, the Executive
Director of the Board of Deputies, Mr Michael
Whine, whose organisation staged the demonstrations
outside my home of such a violent and ugly nature
that police reinforcements had to be called. Whine
had caused defamatory documents about me to be
placed in the Þles of foreign governments
with the intention that my free access to those
countries should be impeded. He had caused the
surroundings of my home to be stickered with labels
bearing inþammatory slogans inciting violence
against me. Some of these offensive items have been
before the Court. Whine had issued a Press release
in January 1993, no doubt one of many, in which he
accused me of attending "Nazi Training Camps". My
only response, as Your Lordship has seen, apart
from a failed and very costly attempt to sue his
Board of Deputies in libel, during which they did
not plead justiÞcation, but merely that I was
out of time, was to make fun of Whine's name. That
may have been tasteless, but it was not
anti-Semitism, and it was certainly justiÞed
under the circumstances. The references that I have made to what is now
formally called the instrumentalisation of the
Holocaust have also been adduced as evidence of
anti-Semitism. Are non-Jews disbarred from making a
criticism that is being made increasingly vocally
by others like Professor Peter Novick?175 Or by
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New
Republic? He wrote there on May 3, 1993, at page
20: "'It's a sad fact,' said the principal
philanthropist of the grotesque Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Los Angeles, 'that Israel and Jewish
education and all the other familiar buzzwords
no longer seem to rally Jews behind the
community. The Holocaust, though, works every
time.' His candour was refreshing, even if it
was obscene. On the subject of the extermination
of the Jews of Europe, the Jews of America are
altogether too noisy." I would also draw your Lordship's attention to
the article by Norman Finkelstein in the London
Review of Books, published as recently as January
6, whose title gives the whole tenor of the piece:
"How the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a
memorial industry." Finkelstein makes in this piece
the sarcastic comment: "Every questioning of the
uniqueness of the Holocaust is taken by American
Jews to be an example of Holocaust denial."176 I
could produce a sheaf of such quotations; they are
all equally near the knuckle, equally true, and no
more anti-Semitic than my own remarks on the
matter. As for the allegation that I am racist, I have
produced to the Court enough evidence that I am
less reluctant to hire Coloured personal staff
than, for example, certain legal teams evidently
are. I hire personal staff on a form that has
always stated my policy that we are an equal
opportunity employer, - "We do not and will not
discriminate on the basis of race, religion,
national origin, sex, age, handicap, marital
status." I shall not comment at length on these evil
allegations and slurs, which lend fire and fury to
the original libel complained of. I submit that the
word "racism", in the ears of that man on the
Clapham omnibus, is about Stephen Lawrence and
cone-heads and burning KKK crosses. It conjures up
images of murder, thuggery, violence, and
foul-mouthed graffiti. In deliberating on the
conduct of the case and on the appropriate scale of
damages Your Lordship will however bear them in
mind. I voluntarily provided all my private diaries to
the defendants after securing the proper
assurances. Those diaries total some twenty million
words. Mr Rampton produced from them one
nineteen-word ditty, attached to another quite
harmless one about the "messica dressica" of my
infant daughter Jessica. To find in all those
diaries and telephone conversations written since
1959, just one nineteen-word ditty that Mr Rampton
could trot out for the media does not suggest that
I am as obsessed with race and racism as he, and
for that matter the newspapers that report these
things, are. Your Lordship will recall that, on what I would
call a pretext, Mr Rampton formally handed to you
his own opening statement, containing this
allegation, at midday on the first day of this
trial, well before I had concluded my opening
statement, in order, as he admitted, that his words
should therefore come into the public domain. His
intent was to ensure that from the very first
moment his remarks, both fair and foul, were given
the maximum worldwide media coverage; his speech
was released prematurely to the media for that
precise and prejudicial purpose. I repeat: this
multi-million dollar defence team found one
nineteen-word nonsense poem, recorded in my diary
with other Lear- or Belloc-type rhythmic verses as
having been recited to my own nine-month infant who
has, I am glad to say grown into a delightful and
open minded six year old, bearing none of the
traces of the "poison" that Mr Rampton recklessly
suggested that I had fed to her. It is fortunate I
did not sing to her "Three Blind Mice," where the
farmer's wife cuts off their tails with a carving
knife. Similarly, from my hundreds of lectures and
talks, these very proper spaniels have sniffed out
a few lines of music-hall wit of the type that a
Dave Allen might indulge in, with Mr Trevor
Macdonald as the butt. That, in Mr Rampton's words,
is racism. One wonders which well-shielded part of
the modern world is inhabited by learned Counsel.
Can anybody go and live there? The speeches and
lectures My Lord, the Defendants have also fished into my
lectures and writings and books, all of which have
been provided to them - literally millions of words
- and they have put into evidence a minute fraction
of those words, comparable to the one-millionth
part of the diaries which the ditty
represented. I am not going to defend or justify those
utterances seriatim. In general I would invite your Lordship to pick
out one such utterance as a sample; to reach then
for the transcript of the entire speech - to take
note of the rest of its content, its clear
references to the very real sufferings of the Jews,
the liquidations, the Bruns Report and the rest;
and then ask, Was the remark true, was it
explicable, was it rhetorically justified as part
of the skilled lecturer's armoury. Your Lordship has been told of my remark that
more women had died on Kennedy's back seat than in
that gas chamber at Auschwitz - the one shown to
the tourists. It is tasteless but, quite literally,
true. It is, as I have now shown in this court,
even true if the main "gas chamber" at Birkenau is
brought into the equation, the notorious Krema II
"factory of death", because the eye-witnesses lied
about that one too. The Poles have admitted that
the Auschwitz building and its chimney are a
post-1948 fake. My colourful language was a
rhetorical way of bringing that extraordinary
revelation home to audiences. Extremist organisations and
people My files confirm that I occasionally addressed
audiences of the Association for Free Journalism
(GfP), the National Democratic Party (NPD), and the
German People's Union (DVU). As documents Nos.
1716, 1717, 1721, and 1723 I disclosed to the
Defendants English translations of the policy
leaflets and manifestos of these bodies, which in
my submission do not show them to be extreme in any
way.177 These were furthermore bodies which were
accepted at that time under Germany's very strict
laws as being legal and constitutional. The Court is more concerned, I believe, with
individual personages. I have not the slightest
doubt that the Court will find that I did not have
any meaningful contact with the ugly ragbag of
neo-Nazi extremists mentioned by Professor Hajo
Funke people with whom, to make the point quite
clearly, the Defendants, their experts, and their
legal team seem more familiar than I. Most of the
names were completely unknown to me, and the
defence have sought in vain for them in my diaries
and papers, to which, I emphasise yet again, I gave
them unlimited and privileged access. This has not
stopped them from bringing them forward, and
mentioning these alleged links in open Court, in an
attempt to smear me still further - with an eye
particularly to the German media178 and I urge that
this, their conduct of the case, be held against
them. Characteristically of the weakness of their
case Funke listed one entry in a diary where I
noted a road journey with a "Thomas", whose second
name I never learned; Funke entered the name
"Dienel" with a question mark behind it. So far as
I know, I have never met a Dienel, but it
illustrates the kind of evidence that the defence
were hoping to rely upon. As for Michael
Kühnen - the documentary evidence before both
Funke when he wrote his report, and before this
Court, is that I explicitly said that I would not
attend any function at which he was even present; I
never did and I never met him. By way of evidence, the Court has been shown a
number of videos. Shorn of their commercial packaging, they do not
amount to very much. In view of the weight attached
to it by learned Counsel and his witness Professor
Funke, I have re-examined the raw video of the
Halle function of November 9, 1991 at which I
briefly spoke, and I have timed and listed the
scenes it shows. Your Lordship may wish at some
time to have the video to check that these timings
are correct, or the Defendants' solicitors may wish
to submit any corrections they feel are
needed.179 The raw details are: when the camera's meter
shows 17:00:21 I am first seen, arriving at an
unnamed hotel restaurant (in Halle) accompanied by
Mrs Worch and David Leigh of The Observer; at
17:14:40 I am again glimpsed, still at the hotel,
speaking to a reporter. The cameraman and David
Leigh then go off to film the rival processions,
during which I am no time seen on film (in fact I
remained, lunching, at the hotel). At 18:11:00 a
truck is seen being rigged as an open-air platform
and at 18:14:26 I am seen with two reporters
watching from the edge of the square. At 18:16:00 I
walk over to the platform, hands in pockets, and
mount it. The man whom Professor Funke tells us is
"Dienel" is seen to get off to the left, and there
is no contact whatever between him and me. Mr Worch
briefly introduces me, I begin speaking at 18:16:39
and the filmed portion of my speech ends three and
a half minutes later. When the offscreen chanting
of slogans begins at 18:18:59 I am clearly seen to
interrupt my speech, shake my head at them, and
gesticulate with my left hand to them to stop, and
I am clearly heard to say: "You must not always be thinking of the
Past. You must not keep coming out with the
slogans of the Past. We are thinking of the
future [voice emphasised] of Germany, we
are thinking of the future of the German people.
As an Englishman, I have to say
...[etc]". Six seconds after ending my brief speech I am
seen to leave the platform without further contact
with anybody. My diary notes that I at once left by
car and drove back to the Ruhr, in western
Germany. Heavily edited, for example to remove my rebuke
to the slogan-shouting people, whom I took and take
to have been paid agents provocateurs, this
sequence was shown on November 28 and 29, 1991 to
British TV audiences in a "This Week" programme
entitled Hitler's Children, the new Nazis directed
by the German, Michael Schmidt - Professor Funke's
star witness - and with none other than Gerald
Gable, of Searchlight, listed as a "consultant,"
and in "Despatches," on the other channel. This
indicates whose hands were behind the editing.
Again heavily, the film has been shown around the
world against me. This was the thrice-edited film
to which I drew your Lord's attention, in
suggesting that it was evidence of dubious
admissibility. 
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