Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day014.16
Last-Modified: 2000/07/20

   Q.   Yes, exactly, and in exactly the same terms with the same
        sneer in your voice.
   A.   I disagree.
   Q.   We all heard it.
   A.   I disagree.  I am not accustomed to sneer.  I do not stoop
        to the hypocrisy or sarcasm when I speak.
   Q.   The same sarcastic jokes which evoked laughter from you
        sympathetic audience about the suffering of the Jews at Auschwitz?
   A.   I am prepared to take lessons in sarcasm from you,
        Mr Rampton.
   Q.   Mr Irving, I have no interest in a sober academic argument

.          P-139

        which I believe to be hopelessly ill-conceived any, but
        that is completely beside the point, about whether or not
        the Jews are in some sense to blame for what has happened
        to them through the pages of history.  I am interested in
        your motivation, your attitude and nobody else's.  You
        notice I did not cross-examine your nice Mr McDonald.
        That is the reason, Mr Irving.
   A.   Well, I think we know the reasons why you did not
        cross-examine Professor McDonald.
   Q.   If you would look, please, at page 19, it is the last
        reference I want to make to this transcript.  Towards the
        end of the big paragraph at the top of the page there is a
        sentence which begins: "If you", that is Jews:  "If you
        [Jews] had behaved differently over the intervening 3,000
        years, the Germans would have gone about their business
        and would not have found it necessary to go around doing
        whatever they did to them, nor would the Russians, the
        Ukranians, the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians and all
        the other countries where you have had a rough time."
                  Why do you propose that in any sense, whatever
        the Jews might have done or not done, differently or
        otherwise, made it necessary for them to be exterminated
        by these other central Europeans?
   A.   I agree "necessary" is the wrong word.  The point I am
        trying to make there, it is exactly the same question as
        I put to Goldhagen in New Orleans.  I said to him, not

.          P-140

        just the question that why have all these nations found it
        so easy to kill the Jews, why have all these nations found
        it so easy to unburden themselves for their Jewish
        population, for example the Slovaks and the Dutch and the
        Hungarians and Romanians and so on, when the Nazis said
        "Give us your Jews", all these surrounding countries
        said, "Take them off us", that would have worried me if
        I was a Jew.  Also why the British and the Americans and
        the other nations refused to accept the boat loads of
        Jews, like the famous episode with the St Louis, the ship
        laden with Jews, these kinds of things would have
        concerned me as a Jew.  I would have wanted to know what
        is it, why do people not want to accept us, why do people
        not want to rescue us. I would have wanted to know that
        far more than I would have wanted to know the sordid story
        of who pulled the triggers.  But maybe I am different from
        Goldhagen in that respect.  He wants to look at the
        immediate effect and I would have wanted to look at the cause.
   Q.   Thank you, Mr Irving.
   A.   I agree that the word "necessary" is totally misplaced there.
   Q.   Indeed so.  You used it, nonetheless, to a different audience?
   A.   I am not speaking, as you will have noticed, from the
        film, I am not speaking from a prepared script.

.          P-141

   Q.   No.
   A.   Any more than I am speaking from a prepared script now.
   Q.   Mr Irving, do you have, only because I do not have a
        transcript in the file, that clip of extracts which
        I handed in this morning?
   A.   Do I have that clip of extracts?
   Q.   Yes, this little clip of extracts?  If you do, could you
        please turn to page 24 of it, to the extract marked 1.7/A
        in a square bracket.
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   I want you to look at the top of the page.  There are some
        words in German in a square bracket which are said to come
        from a video cassette of your having said something
        entitled the: "Ich Komme Wieder" about 1994.
   A.   Yes, rioters standing outside my home against whom the
        West End Police had to put up steel barricades, yes, very
        nice people.
   Q.   I am sure you were not feeling in the best of moods
        because you had just lost your contract with the Sunday
        Times for the serialization of the Goebbels' Diary, had
        you not?
   A.   Not true.  This is two years before that.
   Q.   So it is not 1994?
   A.   No.  The contract with St Martins -- I am sorry, the St
        Martins Press contract was lost in April 1996.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, this is the Sunday Times contract.

.          P-142

   A.   The Sunday Times episode was, if this is referring to July
        1992, yes, the "Gas Irving" posters and so on.
   MR RAMPTON:  I am sure you were under pressure, as you are now,
        reasons for stress.
   A.   On the contrary, I would use exactly the same phrase now.
        Anybody who comes ----
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us see what the phrase was because I have
        not seen this before.
   MR RAMPTON:  Let us see what you said:  "The whole rabble", you
        read the German and then you can correct the translation
        if it is wrong: "The whole rabble, all the scum of
        humanities stand outside.  Homosexuals, the gypsies the
        lesbians" ----
   A.   This is a typical example of how objectionable it is to
        produce something out of context.  Outside what?  The
        answer is outside my family home at 3 a.m. in the morning
        we hear the police bringing the barricades.  I get phone
        calls from the police say, "Mr Irving, if your home is
        invaded this is the emergency number you have to phone".
        I get a phone call from Scotland Yard saying, "Mr Irving,
        we need to come and photograph the inside of your apartment
        in case we have to come rescue because we have had secret
        intelligence about what they are going to do to you."
        This is the kind of nightmare I went through in July 1992,
        when I see the barricades going up outside my house during
        the middle of the night and my family says, "What's the

.          P-143

        sound?", and I say:  "It's lorries unloading barricades
        again.  Tomorrow the scum are going to be outside again",
        and here they are described.
   Q.   Now under stress, a perhaps little frightened, certainly angry?
   A.   I am not easily frightened but I get angry at this kind of thing.
   Q.   Right, angry when under stress.  Do you know the
        expression, I am sure you do, which is sometimes used, it
        is Latin but it is not legal Latin so I can use it, in
        vino veritas?
   A.   Are you accusing me of drinking?
   Q.   No.  Please do not always try to fifth guess me.  In vino
        veritas, what does it mean?  It means that we sometimes
        get better truth from people when they are pickled.
   A.   When they are drunk.
   Q.   No, in wine it means, in their cups.
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   Do you not agree sometimes when a man is angry or under
        stress the mask may slip?
   A.   That is precisely why I prefer to carry on talking this
        evening so that his Lordship knows that I am talking from
        the heart.
   Q.   I suggest this came directly from the heart, Mr Irving.
        This is when the mask slips.  Mr Irving is under stress.
        He is angry.  He thinks people are getting at him.  He is

.          P-144

        feeling persecuted.
   A.   I think people are getting at me?
   Q.   Yes.
   A.   Well, what evidence does one need before one stops
        thinking and starts realising?
   Q.   He has got a grudge against the Sunday Times and some
        people are causing a nuisance, and so what he says is
        this: "The whole rabble, all the scum of humanity, stand
        outside.  The homosexuals, the gypsies, the lesbians", and
        now this is where you interrupted me, "the Jews, the
        criminals, the communists, the left-wring extremists, the
        whole commune stands there and has to be held back behind
        steel barricades for two days."
                  That is Mr Irving's true mind, is it not?
   A.   This is a literal description of who was visible on the
        other side of those barricades.  Shall I show you the
        photographs?  We can identify who they are, the banners
        they are holding, the placards, the leaflets they are
        holding out, the stickers they are putting on all the
        lampposts:  Irving speaks Rostock burns.  That is what
        I had to put with day after day.
   Q.   Are we going to see gypsies?
   A.   They were there. They were there in the photographs.  They
        were holding up placards saying "Gas Irving".
   Q.   What, the sort of "Gay liberation wants Irving gassed"?
   A.   I will bring the photographs in and you can satisfy

.          P-145

        yourself.  I have quite a folder of them.
   Q.   This is the plain language of a plain unvarnished racist?
   A.   On the contrary.  This is the language of somebody who can
        see the evidence with his own eyes, the people who he has
        got to put up with, the people who are harassing everybody
        in that street for two days, being held back by the forces
        of law and order.
   Q.   Right.
   A.   I will give you one clue as to the conditions of terror we
        were living in, my family.
   Q.   Do not.
   A.   I am sorry, I am going to tell it to you.  We had basket,
        a Moses basket in the corner of my drawing room with a
        length of wire rope so I could lower my child out of the
        window in case my house was set on fire.  That is the
        conditions we were living under at the time I made that speech.
   Q.   Of course.  I understand that.
   A.   It cannot be very nice.  I am sure this very seldom
        happens to leading counsel.
   Q.   I will not respond to that either.  Mr Irving, I want to
        look at some other little things that you said, if I may.
        Page tab 10 of this file, please.  Page, I hope this is
        going to be right, page 57.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am in the wrong file.  Which file are you in?

.          P-146

   MR RAMPTON:  It is K4, my Lord.  You are in the right file, my
        Lord.  I am in the wrong one.  I meant K4.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Is this in the clip?
   MR RAMPTON:  Yes, it is my Lord.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Give me the reference?
   MR RAMPTON:  It is the bottom of page 24 and the top of page 25
        of the clip.  This is from your publication Action Report,
        Mr Irving, is it not, for July 1997?
   A.   What page are we looking at, 24?
   Q.   57.
   A.   Page 57.
   Q.   Tab 10, page 57.  It is the column: "Going for Gold".
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   I will read the first paragraph as your Lordship has not
        got that in the clip, but it does no matter.  It is very
        short:
                  "Mr Winston Churchill is rumoured to have
        observed that he could listen to arguments about the
        merits of different breeds of tea with complete
        disinterest.  Action Report finds it can view any dispute
        between New York politicians, lawyers, wealthy Swiss
        bankers and the international Jewish community with the
        same lack of passion.  What is remarkable is that this
        community have considered it worth taking such a long- term
        risk, possibly evening sowing the seeds of future
        Holocaust in the name of short-term gain in gold.  All the

.          P-147

        elements of anti-Semitic stereotype are there.  The
        cosmopolitan, rootless millionaire, bereft of any local
        patriotism, flinging his unpopular perception, ill-gotten
        gains outer head as he escapes from the country where he
        has briefly rested.  The demand for 'unclaimed Gold'
        regardless of whose it is", note those words, Mr Irving,
        "regardless of whose it is, whether wedding rings eased
        off the lifeless fingers of Hamburg or Dresden air raid
        casualties for identification purposes and stored by the
        bucket in the Reichsbank vaults or dental fillings ripped
        out of the bodies of gas chamber victims by SS dentists,
        somehow immune to the Zyklon fumes which had dispatched
        the others." That is July 1997.
   A.   Yes.

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