http://revisionistreview.blogspot.co...id-irving.html
Printable View
13.106 I have concluded that the allegation that Irving is a racist is also established for broadly analogous reasons. This is unsurprising for anti-semitism is a form of racism. It appears to me that the sample quotations set out in paragraph 9.6 above provide ample evidence of racism. The ditty composed by Irving for his daughter is undeniably racist in putting into her mouth the words “I am a Baby Aryan …I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastifarian”. Similarly, Irving’s reference to “one of them” reading the television news strikes me as evidence of racism of a more insidious kind. The same applies to Irving’s proclaimed queasiness on seeing black men playing cricket for England. The manner in which Irving speaks of the AIDS epidemic wiping out blacks, homosexuals, drug addicts and others has in my view a distinctly racist flavour. Irving’s statements about coloured immigration are also racist in their overtones even if less overtly so.
13.107 I cannot accept that the various explanations put forward by Irving for what he said and wrote deprive his words of their racist quality. It is possible to employ members of ethnic minorities and yet hold racist views. I do not accept that the statements relied on by the Defendants can be defended as expressions of patriotic sentiments. I reject Irving’s explanations, set out at paragraphs 9.19 and 9.21 above, of his comments about the spread of AIDS in Africa and about the feeling of humiliation he experienced when his passport was checked at Heathrow by a Pakistani.
13.108 I accept that Irving is not obsessed with race. He has certainly not condoned or excused racist violence or thuggery. But he has on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist. Racism is to be condemned even if it is confined, as in Irving’s case, to expressions of the kind which I have mentioned