Johannesburg, South Africa, Monday, May 5, 2003

Leon: Judge likens Mbeki to Holocaust denialist

By Donwald Pressly

South African judge Edwin Cameron has effectively compared the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, with a Holocaust denialist, says opposition leader Tony Leon.

David Irving comments: I WONDER if there is something we ought to know about Mr Leon's pedigree?    I am not sure what a denialist is, but we get his drift. Journalist Pressly (a son of Elvis?) has not bothered to check my books or he would notice I have never written one on what the Jews call the Holocaust, or even an article. But like wildebeest, these things just run and run.    South Africa teems with more anomalies than such fauna: in 1993 the government banned me from speaking there, after huge audiences gathered to hear me in Pretoria, Cape Town, and elsewhere; then the government relaxed and allowed me to enter -- provided I gave a signed undertaking not to speak.    This ban was thrown out by the far-left African National Congress leadership when they came to power, saying that the ban had been imposed by the discredited outgoing apartheid regime. ON a more serious note: During the Deborah Lipstadt trial in London, I was mocked (on February 2, 2000) by her Counsel, Richard Rampton QC, for a passage I had written in my private diary about disclosures made to me on November 10, 1987 by a doctor from Swaziland, who told me -- years before the rest of the world was allowed to know it -- that the country's Black population was being decimated by AIDS. Overwhelmed by the unstoppable tragedy of the AIDS holocaust, he later killed himself.    Rampton (who did not have a single Coloured or Black face to be seen amongst his 40-strong legal team or advisers for three months) accused me of racism (which even Lipstadt, in her book, had not). Related file: Transcript, of Day 14 of Lipstadt trial (February 2, 2000) | and Day 32

Writing in his weekly column SA Today on the DA website, Leon said Cameron had recently made a speech to members of the Bar in London -- at the time "an extraordinarily unreported speech" by a judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal in South Africa -- in which the judge had explicitly stated:

"Holocaust and Aids denial have each been challenged in court with momentous consequences," Leon reported the judge as saying. "President Thabo Mbeki has publicly countenanced and officially encouraged it (denialism). The president's stand has caused predictable confusion and dismay among ordinary South Africans - with unavoidably devastating consequences."

But Leon said that instead of taking immediate and unflinching action to stem the epidemic and minimize the devastation it was wreaking, "the government has continued to respond with ambivalence and inaction and distraction and evasion".

He paid tribute to the Mail & Guardian for belatedly covering the judge's speech.

Leon said for some time the president "has maintained silence in regard to his endorsement or other of the Aids denialists". Yet "in one of his rare references to Aids earlier this year, he described it as 'a disease of poverty and underdevelopment'," said Leon.

This Leon described as echoing one of the key dogmas of denialism.

"So now we have a situation in South Africa where a senior member of the judiciary accused the President of the Republic of behaving in a fashion not dissimilar to ultra-rightwing and neo-Nazi historian David Irving.

"One denies or doubts the cause of Aids; the other denies or doubts the facts surrounding the Holocaust," said Leon.

Noting that Aids was no longer a fatal disease if it was carefully treated with appropriate medical care, he noted that Aids activist Zachie Achmat had referred to the government's policies as "a Holocaust against the poor".

The David Katz Version: Extracts from a lecture tour given by David Irving in Johannesburg, South Africa, 1987

David Irving's diary on the 1987 South African tour