No Irving in Stirling
Denier’s date cancelled
Moves by Holocaust denier David Irving to hold a lecture in Stirling look to have come to nothing.
The 78-year-old far-right historian arranged a speaking tour of Britain aimed at cashing in on the release of the film Denial.
He gave a secret talk earlier this month at the Double Tree by Hilton hotel in Glasgow and there were reports he had also planned an earlier lecture in Stirling.
He was quoted as saying : “I am going to Stirling, then Glasgow and all the way down to Plymouth. It will take three weeks.”
However, the venues and dates for the speaking engagements were shrouded in secrecy.
And this week Stirling Area Police Commander Lynn Ratcliff said they had been monitoring the plans by Mr Irving to visit Stirling, but added: “We were aware he was coming to this area but as far as we know, the meeting was cancelled along with the second half of his tour.”
Irving currently lives just outside Nairn where he is writing a book about Hitler’s right-hand man Heinrich Himmler.
During the meeting in Glasgow, Irving was reported to have made a series of “disgusting” remarks about Jews.
He also said he liked living in the north of Scotland because it reminded him of the England he was born into, when “England was white”.
Denial, which stars Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall, tells the story of the infamous court case in 1996 in which Irving attempted to sue historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for calling him a Holocaust denier.
The court ruled Irving’s claim of libel relating to English defamation law and Holocaust denial was not valid because his deliberate distortion of evidence had been shown to be substantially true.
In the film, Spall repeats Irving’s 1991 outburst: “I say quite tastelessly that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.”