DURING the mid-1990s DAVID IRVING was invited several times to address functions at the University of California, at Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech movement of the 1960s. The local Jewish and communist organisations staged violent protests to prevent audiences from hearing him.

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A special ACTION REPORT on the Berkeley disturbances for DIFF contributors living in California, Nevada and Oregon, October 1994

On October 10, 1994 David Irving spoke in a church hall at Portland, Oregon, filled to overflowing with around 120 people. There was a crowd of demonstrators outside. He went out to try to debate with them, and got spat at for his pains; the police arrested Alaric Brown for disorderly conduct, and evening TV showed the incident.

On October 13, 1994 at the University of California at Berkeley the traditional enemy staged more determined violence. Faced with their threats, vocalized by Berkeley’s Hillel director Rabbi Rona Shapiro, the university chancellor cancelled Mr Irving’s hall contract at the Alumni House at the last moment, citing insufficient security resources, forcing the organisers to move the evening lecture down the street to the main meeting room of the YWCA at 2600 Bancroft Way.

The intimidation of the mob outside the Alumni House held off all but 100 of the original audience, some of whom had come from as far as Nevada and Oregon. 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 Defence League, arrived and stormed the building; many of them had their faces concealed in stocking masks like bank robbers or the violent Marxist thugs familiar in street riots in Germany in the seventies. One thug had the specific task of throwing over Mr Irving’s book tables and trampling books, cassettes and the speaker underfoot.

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 Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley, accompanied by the jeers of the mob, as the Chronicle reported. The university’s Daily Californian quoted 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.”

Ten minutes passed before police in riot gear arrived. Eventually, according to the San Francisco Examiner, forty police officers were involved and several blocks were cordoned off until nine p.m. as the rock and bottle throwing mob spilled back out of the building onto the streets.

Damage to the YWCA building was estimated at several thousand dollars: “It was horrible, just horrible,” Katz quoted YWCA director Sharon Bettinelli as exclaiming. What a spectacle; vicious tomcat girls with cameras kicked out wildly at the panelled doors as members of the audience tried to force them shut. 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.

Henry Lee, 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.”

“It is extremely unfortunate when students lose a chance to listen to well-known figures speak on campus just because a small segment of population decides to transfer its antagonism toward these orators into violence.”

The newspaper’s columns were filled for days with letters both pro and con. Typical comments:

“The cops protected swastika-waving Nazis and viciously attacked the anti-fascists.””That the police made no arrest is just unbelievable. Why have a police force if they can’t protect basic individual rights such as free speech?”

The rioters had got off scot free. Making no secret of their Marxist sympathies, these dinosaurs of the left held a series of “victory” meetings in Berkeley and the State university of San Francisco (ignoring the fact that for all their efforts Mr Irving had managed to deliver his speech as planned). Typical of their inflammatory and libellous statements in the Spartacists’ publicity material were these:

Irving has been a star attraction at meetings of fascist terror gangs from the British National Party, to the Hitlerite “Nationale Offensive” in Germany, to the white-supremacist Heritage Front in Canada to the Klan and Nazis in the U.S. He whips up fascist thugs who have been waging a campaign of terror and murder against immigrants, minorities, gays, blacks, and anti-racist protestors around the globe.

[[ Mr Irving has had no connections whatever with the British National Party, the Nationale Offensive, the Klan, or “Nazis in the U.S.”, nor with the Heritage Front in Canada. Investigators there have now discovered that the latter was directed and set up by …, acting on the instructions of the Canadian intelligence authorities … ]]

The students formed an ad hoc Free Speech Coalition, consisting primarily of Blacks and Muslims, under the leadership of Aftab Malik, graduate of Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, and Arash Darya-Bandari, a senior majoring in Near Eastern studies. All of these students freely identified the principal enemy of free speech as being their old adversary, the Jewish community, whose leaders had organised and paid for the criminal violence at the YWCA building.

After conferring with Sergeant Celaya of the U.C. Police Department, who assured them that security would not be a problem, the coalition reserved the Zellerbach Auditorium and alternatively the Wheeler Auditorium to host a lecture by Mr Irving on Nov. 19. The police indicated that fifteen to twenty extra police officers would be needed, and the coalition guaranteed to meet the additional expense.

A further meeting was scheduled with Police Captain Bill Foley for Nov. 2, but it was cancelled: that same day, at the Vice-Chancellor’s meeting, without any consultation, the decision was taken to prevent Mr Irving from speaking due to “campus safety and health concerns.” This ukase was handed to the new coalition’s spokesman Arash Darya-Bandari at a meeting with the university’s Student Activities & Services body on Nov. 7.

“Given the history of events featuring David Irving in Berkeley [wrote Karen D Kenney, director of Student Activities & Services] we could not identify a campus facility in which the public’s safety could be ensured.”

This history, she continued, included injury to persons and destruction to property at the University YWCA in 1994 and (unspecified) problems at the International House in 1989. The coalition had ten days to appeal against the new ban to the Chancellor under campus regulations.

On Nov. 14 the students lodged their appeal with W Russell Ellis, the university’s Vice-Chancellor.

“It is a shame [they wrote] that on the thirtieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the administration of the University of California at Berkeley is denying a historian the opportunity to speak and the right of students to listen to him speak on the Berkeley campus. This denial sends a clear message that after 30 years, the University of California’s alleged support for freedom of speech is empty and hollow.”

Students could read twenty of Irving’s books in their university libraries, yet they were being denied the right to hear him speak in person. The University of California at Berkeley had a long history of accommodating controversial and high security-risk speakers. Former Presidents, politicians, foreign leaders, civil rights activists and revolutionary leaders have spoken on campus despite the security risks and despite the controversial nature of the views that man of them espoused. If the University could ensure security for speakers like Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Nelson Mandela, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, it could certainly do so for Mr Irving.

The coalition accused the university of applying a double standard. “It appears,” wrote the coalition, calling on the chancellor to reverse the university’s decision, “that the same political pressure exerted by Rabbi Shapiro in canceling the Alumni House event is being directly or indirectly exercised here as well.” Freedom of speech, they concluded in their four-page letter, which quoted weighty Supreme Court precedents, did not exist of itself, but needed to be fostered, especially by the Government. “When the Government itself no longer has the will to ensure the freedom of speech, then freedom of speech no longer exists.”

University officials told the Daily Californian on Nov. 14 that they did not want another “full-scale riot” like Oct. 13. “At that time,” explained the newspaper’s Rita Goldberg in a generally sympathetic report, “dozens of people stormed the room where Irving was speaking, damaging property and injuring three people.”

“If they are alleging that we are not letting him here because of his views,” said campus spokesman Jesus Mena, “that’s absolutely false.”

On Nov.21 Chang-Lin Tien, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, replied to the Berkeley Free Speech Coalition — which he recognised as a registered student group — confirming that he was considering their appeal. “The decision to deny your request,” he summarised, “required careful consideration of freedom of speech and public safety. I share your deep concern for the protection of our right to free speech. That right is essential to the intellectual pursuit of ideas. Berkeley is proud of its long tradition supporting free speech.”

He added that the university also felt an obligation, however, to provide members of the campus community with a safe place to study, teach, work, and learn; that having been said, he asked the Vice Chancellor, W Russell Ellis, to meet with the coalition to reach a “mutually agreeable solution.”