ThoughtCrime: 10/13/94
Free Speech Denied at Berkeley
On October 13, at the University of California at Berkeley, the university
chancellor cancelled a hall contract for British historian
David Irving. It was claimed
that the last minute cancellation was due to insufficient security resources.
The organizers of Mr. Irving's lecture were forced to move the evening's
event down the street to the main meeting room of the YWCA at 2600 Bancroft
Way.
Intimidated by the hostile picketers outside the Alumni House,
only 100 of the original audience, some of whom had come from as far as
Nevada and Oregon, reached the YWCA hall.
As Mr. Irving was about to speak two hundred people including
members of the Jewish fraternity Alpha-Epsilon-Pi and mobsters hired by
the Anti-Defamation League and its strong-arm gang, the Jewish Defense League,
arrived and stormed the building; one thug had the specific task of throwing
over the book tables and trampling books, cassettes, and the speaker underfoot.
Although Leslie Katz of the Jewish Bulletin claimed afterwards that the
protest was "reportedly organized by a student communist group, Young Spartacists",
many of the thugs were in fact in their fifties, and the language of their
leaflets was taken straight out of ADL literature with vicious embellishments.
In the ensuing disturbance Mr. Irving was thrown around violently,
but escaped serious injury. Several members of his audience were less fortunate
and had to be taken to the hospital, to the jeers of the mob, as the newspapers
reported. The university's Daily Californian identified the
"Spartacist" leader as Barbara Frank; the student newspaper also quoted
Shadow Moyer of the International Socialist Organization as saying: "I think
what happened here was 100 percent justifiable."
In the ten minutes that passed before police in riot gear arrived
damage estimated at several thousand dollars was done to the YWCA building:
every table was splintered, its legs torn off for use as clubs; lamps were
smashed, chairs were ruined, pictures ripped from walls, windows and mirrors
smashed. Tapes spilling out of smashed cassettes littered the floor with
torn book jackets and books.
"It was horrible, just horrible", Katz quoted YWCA director Sharon
Bettinelli as stating. Vicious tomcat girls with cameras wildly kicked out
the panels of doors as members of the audience tried to force them shut.
A reporter of the Berkeley Daily Californian interviewed Mr. Irving as he
knelt to pick up the pieces and quoted him as saying: "You can judge for
yourself who's using the facist methods. What are they afraid of, free speech?"
He added (not reported by the newspaper): "You should ask who puts up the
money to stage demos like this- and why."
Then he delivered his talk to a rapt if disheveled audience:
one man had blood streaming down his forehead, the speaker himself had blood
on the bridge of his nose - he found three pairs of spectacles in his pocket
afterwards, of which only one was his.
He has promised Berkeley to return: to show that he cannot be
intimidated.
adapted from : David Irving's Action Report Supplement Nov. 2,
1994
The THOUGHTCRIME ARCHIVES is a series designed as a cooperative effort
to aid and assist the Revisionist community by reporting acts of censorship,
violence, and other outrages perpetrated against revisionists.
"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death." George Orwell
|