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 fascist 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
"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death."
George Orwell
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