Hitler Apologist and Neo-Nazi Sympathizer David Irving To Visit Bay Area

According to his website (see URL below), the internationally notorious British Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist David Irving will attempt to speak at an engagement on Wed. evening, May 22, somewhere in the Bay Area. He is an icon of the international neo-Nazi moveent, and a dangerous racist extremist who has incited nazi skinheads in Germany to carry out violents acts against immigrant workers.

On Saturday evening, Irving and his band of neo-Nazi followers were kicked out of the Salmon Creek Brewery in Vancouver, WA, a Portland suburb, after a spirited and militant picket outside by 30 antiracist protesters. The owner of the brewpub, who had been duped into renting a banquet room to the racists, gave the gathering the boot in the middle of their meeting after she learned its real agenda. It turned out that her mother had been interned in one of Hitler's concentration camps during her youth.

The time and location of Irving's hate rallies are generally kept secret by their cowardly racist organizers, but in Portland an Emergency Anti-Nazi Mobilization Committee worked diligently and uncovered its whereabouts and start time, and coordinated the response to Irving’s appearance. Like you, we had two days' notice. We got the word out through our local Indymedia, where we alerted local antiracists and advertised a Mobilization Hotline number we had set up. We asked Portland antiracists to monitor the hotline number and to hurry to an assembly point when we announced it there. For security reasons, we did not announce the actual location and start time of the neo-Nazi shindig, but rather asked people to gather in a nearby park about 45 minutes prior to its beginning. It's important to take this step in order to keep the people on our side safe - we don't want our people to be hurt because they wander up to a Nazi meeting in small groups.

One of our organizers found out the details on the Irving event by "pre-registering" for admission to the lecture, by emailing Irving's crew (there is a link from his website to do this, URL below) and expressing interest in attending his talk. Irving then emailed this comrade back, asking for personal details. The comrade took security precautions and emailed Irving back with an address and a friend's cell phone number, and then Irving called the friend and gave him the information.

Another group of local antiracists actually infiltrated the gathering in the same way, in order to gather information about the local neo-Nazi organizers for future use.

Irving, a so-called “revisionist historian” has written books that glorify German dictator and Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler and other war criminals like Josef Goebbels. His pseudo-scholarly works contend - among other things - that the Nazis didn’t really murder 6 million European Jews, and that no gas chambers existed in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. His writings seek to vindicate Hitler personally of the mass slaughter of Jews and others during the Holocaust, asserting that the Fuehrer had no knowledge of the death camps until at least 1943, if at all.

Irving is banned from entering Germany, Canada and Australia. He has lectured to violent racist and rightwing groups around the world, including William Pierce’s National Alliance in the U.S., the neo-Nazi Heritage Front in Canada, and groups like the German People’s Union (DVU) and the National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany and Austria.

Irving has long assisted and associated with antisemites, racists and neo-Nazis around the world. In 1988 he testified in Toronto on behalf of Ernst Zundel, a Canadian publisher who illegally smuggles neo-Nazi propaganda into Germany through Denmark, on trial for denying the Holocaust occurred. In 1992, German authorities fined Irving for claiming British intelligence had spread the ''propaganda'' that the Germans were using gas chambers to kill millions of Jews and other so-called undesirables.

Although Irving rhapsodizes about “historical truth”, “free speech” and “freedom of inquiry and scholarship”, his real goal is not to tell the truth. The objective of the Holocaust denial movement is to promote a hateful political agenda. Most deniers are the Nazis’ philosophical and political heirs. Their concern is not with the past as much as with shaping the future. As Harold Covington of the National Socialist White People's Party admitted, "The real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again."

In 2000, Irving sued the publishing house Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, an American professor and author of "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory", for libel in a British Court. The court found that he had intentionally falsified history to exonerate Hitler, driven by antisemitism and his own pro-Nazi views, and ordered him to pay legal fees amounting to 150,000 British pounds to cover part of the defendants’ legal fees. He has since declared bankruptcy.

Irving’s website:
http://www.fpp.co.uk

Irving’s webpage announcing the Bay Area appearance:
http://www.focal.org/speaks/index.html

Websites that expose Irving as a racist liar:
http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/i/irving-david/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/irving/