 Christichurch, New Zealand, Wednesday, August
11, 2004 [Written in Key West,
Friday, August 6, 2004]
Irving: Fuss
about visit "distraction" [This is the complete
edited version of the article, which may differ in
detail from the published text:] By David Irving
 THIS
is not a controversy of my own making. I gave
notice of my coming to New Zealand on my website
last year. I have friends in New Zealand, and
scores of Australians have also expressed to me an
interest in flying over the Tasman to meet me
again. As of this morning, ninety-one have
pre-registered and asked for more
details.
In April or May I wrote to the New Zealand
archives about permission to use the papers of
Peter Fraser, the wartime premier. I
purchased back in May the Qantas tickets that will
take me from Los Angeles to Auckland next month. I
had made no actual speaking plans, and fixed no
locations, until I received an invitation from the
National Press Club in Wellington to speak. I had
no idea there would be this knee-jerk reaction,
this sudden flare-up in parts of the New Zealand
community. I suspect that had it not been for the trial of
the two alleged Mossad
agents in the passport fraud case, and the
precipitous
flight to Israel of the Kiwi accused of being
their accomplice, none of this would have occurred.
Like the gravestones
outrage, making a fuss about my visit provides a
useful distraction for New Zealanders from the grim
business of what the Mossad may have been up to in
their back yard. The small NZ Jewish community is not a body that
I had intended visiting, speaking to, or indeed
even speaking about. I had been assured by the London travel agents I
have dealt with for nearly fifty years that "any
British Passport holder with the right of abode in
the UK is entitled to travel into New Zealand visa
free for a stay of 6 months." Two weeks ago they
confirmed this. Which was as I thought. 
BUT then, I was once wrong about Australia too. I
had visited that country twice, seen my Churchill
biography's first volume sweep to the top of the
Sydney Morning Herald best-sellers -- and
then I was banned.
I fought four legal actions, won two and lost
two.
The Full Federal Court court admonished Canberra
that the ban on me was illegal. Rather than let me
in, Canberra changed the immigration law. It gets worse. One of my five daughters has
married an Australian; she lives in Brisbane, is an
Australian citizen and civil servant: I have an
automatic "next of kin" right to enter, right? Wrong -- John Howard has announced that
they will change that law too, if necessary. He
knows which side his party's bread is buttered.
So how is it with New Zealand? I have visited
New Zealand peacefully before, caused no riots,
broken no laws. "Nobody died," as they now say in
England, comparing others with Tony Blair
and his more egregious misdemeanours. I have a
clean criminal record; have had a clean driving
licence for fifty years; and I don't smoke, I've
never done drugs, and I don't commit any of the
other solecisms upon which modern society
frowns. But NZ, it turns out, is a tough country to get
into (unless, it seems, you use the stolen identity
of a quadruple paraplegic and wear dark glasses). I
have read in the newspapers -- in other words it is
still rather wooly and unofficial -- that some
mid-level immigration official has defined that I
"can" be barred from the country because I have
"been deported." DeportedThat is true: twelve years ago, in 1992, under
very dark and mysterious circumstances, I found
myself being paraded before the media across three
thousand miles of Canada
from Vancouver to Ontario, tried there by an
immigration
court for three weeks on a pretext, and bundled
out of the country on the floor of an Air Canada
plane.  I
managed to hold a pen in my manacled hands, as a
small statement of protest. After all, I am a
writer, and how many writers are subjected to this
kind of thing?
I would like some journalist one day to ask that
mid-level NZ Immigration official -- the one who
says I "can" be barred: "How
many people has your service actually barred
recently on the grounds that they have 'been
deported' elsewhere?" Or is it just me? Suppose some friendly country's fine journalist
is deported from Iran for writing about their
uranium-enrichment plants: Barred from New Zealand
now? BBC journalists are constantly being deported,
for instance from a certain Middle East country,
because of BBC reporting about Palestine: if they
want to holiday in New Zealand, are they going to
find themselves tossed onto the floor at the
Heathrow check-in counter, trussed and handcuffed
and dumped on the sidewalk outside? Of course not. Thinking people may even regard
what such journalists write as being that much more
reliable, as they are willing to go the extra mile,
even if it offends national or other vested
interests, when they want to find out and publish
the truth. Which brings us to the crunch point: I fancy I
hear that mid-level immigration official say,
that's a different story: the BBC guy was
writing views of which we approve; this David
Irving guy doesn't, he's a denier. A
denierWell, actually he isn't that either. I deny
it. It all began in 1990 when I said in
a public meeting in Munich, Germany (alright,
it was in a huge beerhall), that the "gas chamber
they show to the tourists in Auschwitz
concentration camp is a fake, built after the
war." Under Germany's
current laws, I was fined DM.30,000 (around
$25,000) for that one remark, and in 1993
permanently excluded
from Germany: which caused my enemies much glee, as
most of my sources, archives, and publishers are
there. That ban is illegal under United Nations human
rights treaties, under the Helsinki Accords, and
under European law, but what the hell: I can live
without the Germans. I have of course abided by the
ban -- even though the Polish Government admitted
in 1995 that the building in question, the one
shown to the tourists, was erected by the Polish
communist authorities in 1948, three years after
the war ended. But it was used to justify the proceedings in
Canada. So effectively you are allowing Germany to
decide who can visit New Zealand and speak to
audiences there -- a privilege most of us would
consider Germany to have forfeited consequent on
the events of 1939-1945. PoisonousIn her 1996 book Denying the Holocaust,
American scholar Deborah Lipstadt called me
the most dangerous of "their" opponents. She called
me a "Holocaust denier." It is a poisonous label,
like "paedophile," and I fought back.  From
January to April 2000 I fought a historic three-month
libel action in London, at great personal
expense, to shake off that easy smear. The
defendants, funded (as they admitted) by Stephen
Spielberg and all the usual media oligarchs,
poured around ten million NZ dollars into the
London High Court to defend themselves. Ten
million. If it was that obvious, they could have
done the job in a day at a fraction of the
cost.
In the end I lost. Loser pays all, that's the
rule in the UK. My Mayfair home of 38 years was
seized and sold, along with my library and research
archives and everything that I and my family owned.
But I don't regret having fought back. I would do it again. I had to act as a litigant
in person, as I could not afford the million-dollar
fees that the great libel counsel charge. One of
them, the late great George Carman QC, told
his son that he thought on the evidence that I
should have won. For three months I was outnumbered in that court
room, forty to one: forty barristers, lawyers,
solicitors, historians, graduate students,
assistants, and the rest, on one side of the
courtroom, and myself on the other. The other side have already produced six books
on the Lipstadt Trial (including four written by
their expert witnesses who swore
on oath, when I cross examined them as to their
neutrality, that they were not planning to write
such books) and two films, and I hear that HBO are
making a film too, with Anthony Hopkins,
"Hannibal Lecter," playing myself.
I HAVE never written either a book or article
about what they call the Holocaust. Anybody who has
read my books knows what I have written on the
Jewish tragedy of WW2, and what my position is:
Much of the popular version of events is true,
horribly so; about some of it we are entitled to be
sceptical; and some of it is just plain made
up. A historian can't, or at least he shouldn't,
ignore that, if he's going to do his job right: and
few experts in my field have denied my qualities as
an historian. Even Sir Charles Gray, the
judge in the libel action, whose words
against me are quoted with such profligacy by
my opponents, also stated emphatically in his
333-page judgment that my knowledge of World War II
is "unparalleled". In my Hitler and Goebbels biographies I gave
full details of the anti-Jewish atrocities
committed by the Nazis, in fact fuller than most
accounts (and, by the way, just try to buy my books
in any NZ high-street bookstore, and then read
again where David Zwartz says, as he does in
a letter to an American professor this morning,
that my books, tapes, and videos "are available to
anyone who wishes to access them, so there is no
question of suppressing his [my]
ideas.") That is why the "denier" taunt is so offensive
to me. It is a poisonous label, and Zwartz and his
ilk fling it around at will to silence their more
dangerous critics, and the skeptics, who are then
robbed of any means of defence by the bans,
deportations, and other devices which the puzzled
New Zealanders are now seeing being deployed in
their own country. New Zealanders should say, If Mr Irving is free
to visit the whole of Africa, South America, Asia,
the United States (where I now commute, research,
and live six months of every year) and Russia, why
is he being kept from us and we from him? Even Nelson Mandela's South Africa has
lifted the ban imposed on my speaking there,
stating that it had been imposed by "the
discredited outgoing apartheid regime." If a small community despises me, they do not
have to come and hear me. They can build a wall and
retreat behind it until I am gone. I am not
interested in them. In fact I am not going to be
saying anything about them or their history at
all.  © David Irving 2004 
Dossier:
attempts by New Zealand Jews to stop David
Irving's 2004 visit FAQ:
Answers to frequently asked questions about Mr
Irving's visit-
-
Flashback
Wealthy
Jewish organisation drafted a secret plan to
"destroy David Irving's legitimacy" | "Don't let
this fall into the wrong
hands"
[documents
from the Lipstadt trial]
-
Aug 3, 2004 Jerusalem Post: Israel
Government applauds Irving ban
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