History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt

Author:Deborah Lipstadt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

FIGHTING WORDS

"They clamor 'Ours! Ours! Ours!' when hoards of gold are uncovered. And then when antisemitism increases and the inevitable mindless pogroms occur, they ask with genuine surprise: 'Why us?' ”1

When Rampton read this from Irving's July 1997 Action Report, I recalled how a few months earlier, Thomas had come to me one day at the Mishcon offices. With an uncharacteristically serious look on his face, he handed me a file and said, "I've just finished compiling this. You ought to read it.” Intrigued, I began to peruse it. It was a compendium of Irving's antisemitic and racist comments and was drawn from Irving's diary entries, letters, speeches, and tapes. I had seen some of them before, but reading them as one corpus was terribly sobering. When I returned the file to Thomas, I told him that I believed that there was no separating between Irving's antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The two were inexorably linked. During the fourth week of the trial it became Rampton's job to prove that to Charles Gray

A MAN FROM MARS

Rampton asked Irving if his 1997 statement about Jews clamoring "Ours!” about hoards of gold was not the equivalent of him "saying antisemitism is justified on account of the fact that the Jews are greedy?” Irving, insisting Rampton had it wrong, said he was not justifying; he was explaining. Ramp- ton proceeded to read an excerpt from an interview Irving had given Errol Morris for his film on Leuchter. Here too Irving engaged in "explaining.”

"You people . . . have been disliked for 3,000 years. . . . No sooner do you arrive ... in a new country, then [sic] within 50 years you are already being disliked all over again. Now what is it?. . . Is it built into our microchip? When a people arrive who call themselves the Jews, you will dislike them?... Is it envy because they are more successful than us? I do not know the answer, but if I was a Jew, I would want to know what the reason is. . . . [T]hat no sooner do we arrive than we are being massacred and beaten and brutalized and imprisoned.”

Irving had told Morris that he was speaking as an "outsider” who was trying to understand the situation. "I come from Mars and I would say they are clever people. ... I would say that, as a race, they are better at making money than I am.” Rampton looked at Irving with contempt: "That is a racist remark, of course, Mr Irving.” Irving, again insisting that he was explaining, not justifying, told Rampton that these statements were his way of

investigating the reasons why people may become antisemitic in my own rather clumsy and incoherent way. ... Is it because the Jews are better than us? Is it because they play the violin or the piano better than us, better at making money than us?

Hearing these words roll off Irving's tongue, so extemporaneously, was chilling. Rarely, if ever, had I encountered it face-to-face in such a "civilized” setting and in such an unfettered fashion.

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