Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day018.06
Last-Modified: 2000/07/24

   MR IRVING:  That is not quite so, my Lord.
   A.   I have the passage here:  "Irving has been obliged to
        disclose an enormous mass of material in addition to the
        list of documents he initially agreed to supply".
        I understood that you were indeed obliged to hand over
        your private diaries to defence by court order.
   Q.   Did you understand that I was ----
   A.   Is that not the case?
   Q.   --- obliged to hand over my entire diaries?
   A.   That is my understanding, yes, because they were deemed to
        be relevant to the case.
   Q.   Yes.  Was it not the case, in fact, that originally the
        Defence asked to see any diary references to, I believe,
        half a dozen or a dozen people in my entire diaries?
   A.   I cannot really answer that.  I have not been privy to
        every move that the defence has made, but I am aware of
        the fact that the Master of the Queen's Bench did order
        you to hand over all the diaries because they were deemed
        to be relevant to the case.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you attach any criticism to Mr Irving for

.          P-46

        his reluctance to hand over his entire diaries?
   A.   My Lord, I think it is quite understandable.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So do I.  Are we gaining anything by this?
   MR IRVING:  My lord, there was no reluctance to hand over the
        diaries at all; quite the contrary.  Will you accept,
        witness, that, in fact, when I was asked to provide the
        diary references to these dozen people, which would have
        involved me in an inordinate amount of labour, looking
        through 49 volumes of diaries for 10 names, will you
        accept that I volunteered to provide the entire diaries to
        the defence whereupon Mr Anthony Julius said yes?
   A.   If you can show me the documents in which you did so.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am going to stop this because I do not
        think this is helping me at all.  I do not think any
        criticism attaches to you in relation to the diaries and,
        even if it did, it really would not bear on the issues we
        have to decide.
   MR IRVING:  I am sorry I am being so obtuse, my Lord, but I am
        reaching a point which I will now bring forward by one or
        two sentences, if I may?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, do.
   MR IRVING (To the witness):  You have had at your disposal,
        have you not, witness, therefore, either jointly or
        severally as a defence team, something like 20 or 30
        million words of my private diaries which I made no
        attempt to conceal, is that so?

.          P-47



   A.   Which were disclosed by a court order, that is right, yes.
   Q.   Will you accept that the court order concerned only the
        limitations on whom these diaries could be shown to apart
        from yourselves, and that they should be destroyed after
        this case was over?  In other words, a court order was
        requested by myself to protect the privacy of those
        documents?
   A.   I understood that the Defence went to court in order to
        obtain access to the documents.  There may have been an
        additional -- I think there was an additional court order
        which restricted access yes.
   Q.   You have had 20 or 30 million words of my private diaries,
        also complete transcripts of my telephone conversations
        where they were recorded on tape and transcribed.
        You have also had transcripts of enumerable speeches and
        public lectures that I delivered.  Out of this enormous
        documentation, you and the entire defence team have picked
        one or two sentences which you then displayed for the
        delectation of the entire world, have you not?
   A.   Well, I think it is more than one or two.  I think I made
        a distinction between the diaries which, as I said, were
        not really very useful for my report because my report is
        mainly concerned with your published work as an historian
        and, clearly, your private diaries are concerned with many
        other things.  So you will have noticed as you look
        through my report that I do not really say very much about

.          P-48

        them and I cite them in just a handful of cases and they
        are really not very central.  What you have on the
        published record, in terms of speeches and writings, is a
        very different matter.  And in 740 ----
   Q.   Would you agree that diaries go to the state of mind more
        than speeches, private diaries?
   A.   In the 740 pages of my report, I do cite all of these
        other things extremely extensively.  I think it is more
        one or two sentences.  It is more like several hundred,
        including some very lengthy extracts.
   Q.   We are at present dealing just with the diaries.  We will
        deal with the other matters bit by bit.  But will you
        accept that if you had 20 or 30 million words of diaries
        in front of you -- I have to confess, I have not counted
        them; I have just done a back of an envelope calculation
        as to how many words are involved -- but you have had all
        these diaries which go very clearly to my state of mind,
        my private state of mind, and you have found at the end of
        this enormous mountainous task, one ditty?
   A.   That is not my report.
   Q.   To prove that I am racist?
   A.   I am sorry, that is not quoted in my report.
   Q.   Well, I am afraid I have to put to you this question
        because you have had access to these and, unfortunately,
        the person who put that in his report is not presenting
        himself for cross-examination.

.          P-49



   A.   But, Mr Irving, my Lord, I hope I can say that I really do
        not feel I should answer or can answer questions on
        other  ----
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There is a question that you can be asked
        which you would have to answer and I think -- may I ask
        it?  No, you do not have to answer for other people's
        thoughts, but I think the question is this -- Mr Irving,
        tell me if I am wrong -- the use that is made of the ditty
        is unrepresentative of the diaries in their totality.  Is
        that really what you are asking?
   MR IRVING:  That is precisely the point I was going to make, my Lord.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is a question you may or may not be able
        to answer, but ask the question.
   A.   Yes.   One thing I want to say is that your diaries,
        Mr Irving, are not introspective diaries.  There are many,
        many different kinds of diaries but you do not fill them
        with agonising over your own state of mind, so that it is
        often rather difficult.  They are not primarily sources
        for your state of mind.  Indeed, that is not what I in
        particular used them for.  I cannot answer for witnesses
        and what they will have used your diaries for.  I used
        them principally for identifying, such as I could,
        contacts that you had had with Holocaust deniers.  That
        was my main purpose of looking through them.
   Q.   We are going to come to that later.

.          P-50



   A.   But for other things, for views that you express and so
        on, I had all your published work, and that surely is
        enough.
   Q.   We will come to that in a minute.
   A.   There is a mass of more work there.
   Q.   Can I ask you at this point, if, for example, you had come
        across in the diaries sentences like "Zundel is a lunatic"
        or "Faurisson is completely irresponsible or
        incorrigible", or something like that, would you have
        quoted that in your report, or would you have left it out?
   A.   Can you point to me the places in the diaries where you
        make those----
   Q.   It is a hypothetical question and we will come back to
        chapter and verse next week.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Maybe the best way of dealing with it is to
        ask the witness to answer the question that I put, namely
        do you think that the ditty is selected and that it is an
        unrepresentative entry in one of the diaries, if you look
        at the totality of what is in the diaries?
   A.   It depends, my Lord, what you mean by "unrepresentative".
        There is not a ditty a day.
   Q.   I think the word is fairly clear in the context of my
        question.
   A.   There is not a ditty a day, it is one ditty, but there are
        many other remarks of that sort.  That is only one ditty.
        It is not full of these things.

.          P-51



   MR IRVING:  You say there are many other remarks of that sort?
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   Did you quote any, or did any of the witnesses to your
        knowledge quote any of these other remarks?
   A.   I only know what I have been reading in the court
        transcripts.
   Q.   From the diary.  We are just talking at this stage about
        the diaries.
   A.   I really cannot answer for other witnesses.
   Q.   I have had held up around the world as a racist who has
        poisoned the mind of my infant.
   A.   Not by me, Mr Irving.  I have not quoted your offensive
        racist comments in my report.
   Q.   Or the Defence team of which you are part.  You have not
        quoted my----?
   A.   Offensive comments in my report.
   Q.   Which offensive racist comments have I made then?
   A.   You just referred to them.
   Q.   Apart from the ditty?
   A.   You just referred to them yourself.
   Q.   We are referring here to the ditty from the diary.
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   I have been held up by the defence in this case to obloquy
        around the world.  In yesterday's Guardian there is this
        photograph of me and the headline which his Lordship can
        read, "The Bogey Man in the Nursery", the Guardian

.          P-52



        newspaper again.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think that is legitimate.  I think
        I have asked the question that can be asked.  I am sorry,
        Mr Rampton, I did not see you were on your feet.
   MR RAMPTON:  I agree, and what is quite wrong is for Mr Irving,
        once again if I may say so and I will say it bluntly, to
        distort the record by referring to just one of the
        goodness knows how many examples that I have
        cross-examined him about and that have been noticed in the
        newspapers.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There is a limit to what you can achieve by
        this cross-examination.  You can put it, and I hope I have
        put it for you, that really they have picked out -- it is
        cherry picking.  That is what you are really accusing the
        Defence of.
   MR IRVING:  This is the one cherry that they have found in the
        diaries, my Lord, and I insist on this.  If Mr Rampton
        wishes to produce others from the diaries?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  In due course he will.  He cannot do it now.
   MR RAMPTON:  I am just going to be going through it all again.
        I suppose Mr Irving remembers how God was reaching the
        Final Solution of the black problem with Aids in South
        Africa.
   MR IRVING:  We will deal with that when the time comes.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, please, we must focus on what this
        witness is here for.

.          P-53



   MR IRVING:  You said that it is unrepresentative?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I have not said it is unrepresentative.
   MR IRVING:  I am sorry, you have used the word
        "unrepresentative".  I say it was unrepresentative?  It
        was 19 words out of 30 million.
   A.   It is not quoted in my report, Mr Irving.  I am here to
        answer questions on my report.  You may ask other
        witnesses on their reports.
   Q.   Do you know what percentage of me is therefore racist?
         .00016 per cent of me is racist.
   A.   Is that a question?
   Q.   Which means that 99.9984 per cent of me is not, according
        to the diaries.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I do not think this is really
        helpful.  Can we leave it this way?  I have got a clip of
        what the Defendants rely on for their allegation that you
        are a racist.  I will have to make what I can of that.
        You have asked the question that this witness I think has
        answered and I personally think that we would do well to
        move on.
   MR IRVING:  That is right, my Lord.  The reason for asking this
        witness is that he said yes, he read the diaries, as much
        he needed to.  He says this because he has formed the
        opinion that they are not very introspective.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He has given his answer.  You may not agree
        with it but he has given his answer.

.          P-54



   MR IRVING:  Can I now put to the witness the photographs, or is
        this not the appropriate moment?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not know what you are going to put.
   MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, this is something the witness cannot
        possibly answer questions upon.

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