Shofar FTP Archive File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day002.05
Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day002.05
Last-Modified: 2000/07/20
A. So I have added no colour, I have turned up no volume.
These are the extraordinary words used to describe me by
the Defendants. They say, "that the Plaintiff", myself,
"is an historian who has inexplicably misled", in other
words, the word "inexplicably" is in the original book,
"misled academic historians like Ernst Nolte into quoting
historically invalid points contained in his writings", my
writings, "and who applauds the internment of Jews in Nazi
concentration camps". I am accused of having applauded
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the internment of Jews in Nazi concentration camps which
is a particularly perverse allegation in my view.
No. (iii) "that the Plaintiff", David Irving,
"routinely perversely and by way of his profession, but
essentially in order to serve his own reprehensible
purposes ideological leanings and/or political agenda",
and here are the allegations, "distort accurate historical
evidence and information; misstate; misconstrue; misquote;
falsify statistics; falsely attribute conclusions to
reliable sources; manipulate documents; wrongfully quote
from books that directly contradict my arguments in such a
manner as completely to distort their author's objectives
and while counting on the ignorance or indolence of the
majority of readers not to realize this".
Q. May I interrupt and ask you this? Am I right in thinking
(and I may be quite wrong) that really that is the
imputation against you which causes you the most concern?
A. Professionally, clearly so, my Lord.
Q. Yes.
A. I mean, the name calling is neither here nor there and
your Lordship may make of it what your Lordship wants,
I submit. Clearly, some of the name calling will stick,
but it would be a real waste of this court's time if
I take each of the names I have been called in turn and
try to prove that is not so. This is what has cost me my
career, unless the court disposes otherwise at the end of
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this trial, my Lord.
I complained that the work complained of
describes me as an Adolf Hitler partisan who wears
blinkers and skews documents and misrepresents data in
order to reach historically untenable conclusions
specifically those that exonerate Hitler.
I am accused of being an ardent admirer of the
Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, an ardent admirer of the Nazi
leader, Adolf Hitler; that I conceive myself as carrying
on Hitler's criminal legacy and that I placed a
self-portrait of Hitler over my desk; that I
have described a visit to Hitler's mountain top retreat as
a spirit experience; that I have described myself as a
moderate fascist. These are the allegations contained in
the book.
Further, that before the Zundel trial began in
1988 in Toronto, I, the Plaintiff, compromising my
integrity as an historian, and in an attempt to pervert
the course of justice and one Faurisson, Robert Faurisson
whom we saw in the video, that I wrongfully and/or
fraudulently conspired together to invite an American
prison warden and thereafter one Fred Leuchter, an
engineer who is depicted by the Defendants as a charlatan,
to testify as a tactic for proving that the gas chambers
were a myth".
The loaded words in that sentence, my Lord, are
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words that are actually contained in the book.
"That the Plaintiff after attending Mr Zundel's
trial in 1988 in Toronto, having previously hovered on the
brink now denies the murder by the Nazis of the Jews". So
I deny the murder by the Nazis of the Jews, this is one of
the allegations. That I described the memorial to the
dead at Auschwitz as a tourist attraction; that I was
branded by the British House of Commons as "Hitler's
Heir", and that I was denounced by the same British House
of Commons as a Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler
apologist and accused by them of publishing a fascist
publication, and that this marked the end of my reputation
in England.
My Lord, it may possibly not be familiar to the
Defendants that there is a distinction between an early
day motion being put in the House of Commons by a group of
disgruntled members of Parliament and the House of Commons
actually voting and reaching a decision. It is nothing
more than a propaganda move by people who wish to draw
attention to something within the privileged atmosphere.
It is rather like the privileged atmosphere that exists in
this court, my Lord; people can say what they want about
me and the newspapers are free to print it.
Q. Yes, well, I certainly do know about early day motions,
so....
A. That some other person had discovered in a Russian archive
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-- this is the allegation in the book -- that some other
person had discovered in the Russian archive in 1992 the
Goebbels' diaries, that it was assumed that these would
shed light on the conduct of the Final Solution, but that
I was hired and paid a significant sum by the London
Sunday Times to transcribe and translate, although I was a
discredited and ignominious figure and, although by hiring
the Plaintiff, the newspaper threw its task as a
gatekeeper of the truth and of journalistic ethics to the
winds and, although there was thereby increased the danger
that the Plaintiff would in order to serve his own
reprehensible purposes misstate, misconstrue, misquote,
falsify, distort and/or manipulate these sets of documents
which others had not seen, namely, the Goebbels' diaries;
I would do all that in order to propagate my reprehensible
views and that I, the Plaintiff, was unfit to perform such
a function for this newspaper.
Finally, the book contained the allegation that
I violated an agreement with the Russian archives, and
that I took and copied many plates without permission
causing significant damage to them and rendering them of
limited use to subsequent researchers.
Q. Mr Irving, the first of those imputations that you say
that Professor Lipstadt makes against you in her book is
one that links you with Hamas and Hezbollah, and again
I think you indicated earlier on that you wanted to say
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something about those organizations?
A. My Lord, I put to your Lordship a small bundle of
documents ----
Q. Yes.
A. --- on those organisations.
Q. I have read it.
A. It is probably not necessary for me to go in detail
through them. I will indicate to your Lordship that
reliable sources, like the BBC or other news media
organizations, have consistently described the Hezbollah
and Hamas, which are two Muslim fundamentalist terrorist
organizations, as being criminal organizations whose
members are not allowed into other countries and are
actively pursued by the forces of law and order and,
indeed, actively pursued with less law and order by the
forces of the Mossad, who sometimes dispose of them by
jabbing the aforementioned hypodermic needle laden with
nerve gas into their neck which is one of the documents
which I put before your Lordship.
Q. Yes, I have read them.
A. So anybody who is described in this reckless way as being
a member of the Hamas or the Hezbollah or some other
similar terrorist organization is at risk of being
declared fair game with the forces of law and order or, at
the very least, for the immigration authorities and
countries who already look askance upon people for various
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reasons and, at worst, they are having their life put at
risk or they are going to be ruffed up in the street by
people who disagree with the Hezbollah or the Hamas.
I do not share your Lordship's earlier opinion
at the pretrial review that is a matter which falls under
section 5 of the Act, my Lord.
Q. I did not express any concluded view, obviously.
A. I am sorry, my Lord. This was totally misquoted.
Q. Can you help me on something else? You will have the
opportunity to make submissions about that later on. You
supplied documents relating to the bombing in Oklahoma
City. Does that feature in Professor Lipstadt's book?
A. It does not feature in the book, my Lord, but I thought
this was the appropriate bundle to put them, in February
1996 the media in the United States, where such
allegations can be made with impunity, raised the
allegation that I had supplied the trigger mechanism for
the Oklahoma City bomb.
Now, the Oklahoma City bombing features in some
of the documents quoted, I believe, by Professor Evans or
by Professor Brian Levin, because they quote from my diary
on that particular day; and to be accused of having
anything to do with that crime was something I found
particularly repugnant and I regard it as being part of
the general campaign to vilify me and blacken my name
which originated from the same sources which have funded
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the Defendants with the material they have used to smear
me. It is no more directly associated with them than that.
Q. Thank you very much.
A. But it is like trying to put a hook into a custard
pie.
You cannot really pin anything down until you stand
back
and you see the whole continuum of the onslaught to
which
I have been subjected.
Q. The next thing you might want to deal with, Mr Irving,
is
the effect that that the publication of the book of
which
you complain has had on you. I have seen what you say
in
your witness statement about that, but if you want to
expatiate on that, then please do.
A. My Lord, people have said to me, "Why have you picked
on
that book and those particular Defendants?" and the
simple
answer is because it is an open and shut case. I have
been accused of doing things which they cannot
justify.
If we admittedly find it more difficult to disprove
the
subjective claims, ad hominem statements that are
made,
there are certain specific claims that are made, like
the
Adolf Hitler portrait or like the misquoting of
documents
or deliberate and reprehensible mistranslation or
distortion, which are easy to disprove and they are
the
ones which reflect on my professional integrity and on
my
career and on my livelihood, which is precisely what
the
Defamation act, as I understand it, is about.
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This is one reason why I decided that the
time
had come after 30 years to take some kind of action
which
I did with the utmost reluctance because Penguin
Books,
the First Defendants, have published books of my own
in
the past and you are not eager to go and sue people
who
have published your own books.
The book, undoubtedly, had caused me serious
damage. When I consider, admittedly, this was not
damage
within the jurisdiction, and it is possible the
Defence
counsel objected and it is, therefore, relevant, but
in
view of the fact that the publication of this book and
the
author of the book were widely quoted in justification
by
the American publishers for cancelling my Dr Goebbels'
biography, which was for me a particularly wounding
and
injurious event, when I wrote the biography of
Dr Goebbels, it was a task of nine years, my Lord.
We have just spent three years preparing
this
case, writing that one book which your Lordship has
seen
took me nine years. It went through, I think, six
different drafts; the first draft entirely in
handwriting,
the drafts of the manuscript which the Defendants have
seen fills some ten cubic feet of boxes, as it was
refined
and refined and then finally totally rewritten when I
came
into possession of the diaries. The book was set to
restore my reputation completely until the United
States,
because your Lordship may well agree that the book
cannot
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be described as "anti-Semitic", the book, in my
submission, cannot be described as justifying the
Holocaust or admiring Hitler or exonerating Hitler in
any
kind of way, the book was, I consider, one of the most
well-founded and well-researched and watertight
accounts
of the higher leadership of the Third Reich that I
have
ever written. It was the crowning point of my career.
We
waited with the utmost eagerness for publication day
in
the United States, shortly before which the publishers
contacted me and said, Mr Irving, we are beginning to
come
under attack from all quarters. One of the quarters
was
from the second Defendant.
Q. Your evidence is, is it, that the -- I think you said
"the
author" did you mean...
A. The Second Defendant.
Q. The American publishers of the Goebbels book told you
that
Professor Lipstadt and --
A. No, my Lord, media accounts have linked Professor
Lipstadt
with this particular event.
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