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Aus israeli review 0395
Further to recent postings on the book by Nigel Jackson on David Irving:
1. Nigel Jackson
Nigel Jackson is the author of a booklet, “The Case for David Irving: the
Selective Censorship of History and Free Speech”, published by Veritas
Publishing in Australia in 1994. Jackson, a founding member of the
Melbourne University Rhodesian Society which supported the racist Smith
regime, is also the author of a number of works of poetry.
He has had many years’ involvement with Australia’s leading antisemitic and
racist organisation, the Australian League of Rights, and promotes the
League of Rights theses in the media. The League of Rights distributes
speeches by Nigel Jackson in addition to the Irving book.
He wrote a “report and comment” on the 1993 Australian federal election for
“Spearhead”, the newspaper of the British National Party. He has promoted
the works of David Irving and Fred Leuchter. He is the author of a quartet
of poems in praise of “Eric” (presumably League of Rights leader Eric
Butler) which glorifies assorted antisemites including Nesta Webster,
Oswald Mosley, Douglas Reed and John Tyndall. In the context of a series
of letters to mainstream publications defending David Irving, he claimed
Australia is “governed by weaklings who are in the pay of the international
elite (in which Jewish interests appear to be dominant)”.
Jackson was prominent in attempts to block the passage by the Australian
Government of anti-racism legislation. In a written submission he argued
that the law is promoted by Jewish leaders “in order to try to consolidate
in the public mind and in history a hoax that ought to be thoroughly and
completely exposed for what it is”. The “hoax” he referred to is the mass
murder of Jews in the Holocaust. Well before his book was published he
wrote that “Mr Irving is not a Nazi but a Christian and British
traditionalist”.
[I have copies of letters defending the Australian League of Rights over
the past 12 years (that is not to say that he has not been doing this for
longer) and documentation and/or references for all the above. My earliest
example of his defence and/or advocacy of Holocaust Denial goes back to
1986.]
2. Veritas
According to one of their published authors, Cedric Jacobs, Veritas is run
by and for the Australian League of Rights. Veritas itself has claimed on
a number of occasions to be independent of the racist and antisemitic
League, despite having a number of personal and institutional links with
it. The catalogues of Veritas include Holocaust Denial, racial
antisemitism such as Richard Kelly Hoskins’ “War Cycles, Peace Cycles” and
Christian Borg’s “Who are the Jews”, anti-immigration, anti-Aboriginal,
anti-Masonry, and conspiracy theory books by authors such as Gary Allen,
Alfred Lilienthal, Douglas Reed and a number of Australian authors.
Veritas published the paperback version of David Irving’s “Uprising” and
publish a number of that writer’s other books. Veritas is currently run by
two sheep farmers, Jan and Murray Pope, who came into the public spotlight
when David Irving was refused an entry visa for Australia in 1993, and
during subsequent court appeals. Veritas has been run by a series of
different individuals since its founding as a clearing house for imported
antisemitic and conspiracy theory texts in the early 1980s.
3. The following article, which includes reference to Nigel jackson and his
booklet, appeared in Australia/Israel Review, Vol 20 No 5, 23 March – 13
April, 1995
Under Privilege
by Jeremy Jones
To receive an invitation to give testimony at a hearing of a Parliamentary
Committeeis an honour granted a select few among those who make submissions
to the many inquiries the parliamentr conducts annually.
Once at a hearing, members of the public receive elevation, if temporary,
into the ranks of those covered by “parliamentary privilege”, which is
designed to allow a freer exchange than is generally available, given the
everyday restrictions on free speech members of the public encounter daily,
such as libel, defamation and threats to public safety. Under privelege, at
the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee’s recent
hearings into the Racial Hatred Bill 1994, Senators heard from a range of
legal experts, civil libertarians and prominent members of peak ethnic and
ethno-religious bodies. In melbourne, they also heard two witnesses
associated with extreme right-wing bodies with no substantial numerical
following and with nothing intelligent to say.
Geoffrey Muirden, the Secretary of the deceptively-named Holocaust-denial
outfit “Australian Civil Liberties Union” (ACLU), gave sworn testimony that
“similar legislation in overseas countries has been used selectively
against the white race and against the Anglo-Saxons”.
Describing the Nazi apologists who indulge in pseudo-historical rewriting
of the Holocaust as “scholars who have an interest in establishing the
truth about World War II”, he claimed that the accusation that such people
are “anti-Semites” is “a pure gimmick to suppress free speech”.
Mr Muirden, who this time last year was mimicking the Malaysian
government’s claim that the film “Schindler’s List” was anti-German
propaganda, made clear his low opinion of “the Jews”. “The Jews do not
like what [David Irving] says”, the ACLU representative commented, as if
for a moment the Senators present would have thought “the Jews” would
enjoy the group libel of holocaust denial. He even had a solution for
racism which did not include the introduction of laws, saying”the Jews”
should “meet the revisionists in open debate”.
Floundering in the face of criticism from both supporters and opponents of
the legislation, Mr Muirden awaited the arrival of his more verbose
colleague, Nigel Jackson.
When Mr Jackson arrived, he described himself not only as “a teacher and a
writer” but as “a representative of a long tradition of writers who have
striven to defend intellectual freedom”, linking himself with some of the
giants of world literature.
Mr Jackson’s magnum opus is the unintentionally comic “The Case for David
Irving” and it is interesting to ponder what George Orwell, James Joyce,
Mikhail Bulgakov, D. H. Lawrence or the others would make of this pretender
to their mantle, who is also a sometime correspondent for “Spearhead”, the
journal of the extreme right-wing British Nationalist Party.
Unless his Irving volume wins one of the plethora of prizes for fiction for
which it is no doubt eligible, this hearing is likely to be the high point
of Mr Jackson’s public recognition.
Recognising this, he seized the moment, thundering (under privilege) that
“Jewish Zionist influence on our national politics has become excessive and
needs to be curbed”.
Warming to his theme, he told Senators that there appears to be “a
worldwide campaign to inhibit as much as possible the expression of certain
controversial views on various topics associated with race” including “the
degree of Jewish influence in national and international politics”,
prompting one participant to comment that he personally had “never been
before a Senate committee and listened to something which is really
straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and another to remind
the chair that he was “here to talk about this bill and not the
international Zionist conspiracy”.
In what may have at first glance appeared to be a change of heart, Mr
Jackson poetically exclaimed “a hell of a lot of work has to be done in
order to reverse stereotypes”. He then complained that he had “made a
number of points which have certainly not been answered by anyone here”,
but “people have gone merrily along their way using the old stereotypes
that I have queried”.
A week earlier, in Canberra, John McNicol, the National Coordinator of the
Network for Christian Values, stated that “those from the Jewish
background” were “set out and not others” in the second reading speech of
the Government Bill.
This “privileged testimony” is, of course, incorrect, as the second reading
speech included references to the findings of the Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, to disruption of public gatherings of ethnic
communities and to teenage gangs targeting Australians of Asian background.
Having made this comment, McNicol felt it necessary to tell the Committee
that “we have no anti-Semitic interest whatsoever”, a disclaimer neither
of the Tweedledum nor Tweedledee of anti-Jewish rhetoric in Melbourne
bothered to include in their testimony.
During the course of the hearings, there was much useful and intelligent
discussion of the philosophy, pragmatism and appropriateness of legislation
in principle and the government’s Bill but the curious decision to invite
eccentrics and extremists wasted some of the valuable, already limited,
time available to those entrusted with making recommendations to their
parliamentary colleagues.
Jeremy Jones
[email protected]
