About 100 people turned out to hear Holocaust denier David Irving speak on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene the evening of June 9, an event sponsored by the Pacifica Forum, a Eugene group not affiliated with the university.

Reportedly part of a national tour by the British citizen who was imprisoned in Austria for publically denying that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, his topic was what he characterized as the “real history” of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.

Pacifica Forum’s promotional material described Irving as “a legendary British historian and martyr for free speech.”

UO Associated Student Body President Sam Dotter-Katz attended Irving’s approximately 90-minute presentation.

Dotter-Katz said Irving spoke first of his arrest, conviction and imprisonment in Austria where he spent 400 days behind bars prior to his early release in December 2006.

In the second half of his remarks Irving touched on some of his beliefs relating to the Holocaust, according to Dotter-Katz, who characterized those remarks as “just wild lies, inappropriate things.”

Dotter-Katz, who said he has attended other Pacifica Forum meetings in his capacity as student body president to learn about the controversial group, said the audience for the Irving event was very different from what he had seen at earlier Forum gatherings.

He said the group’s weekly meetings on the UO campus are usually attended by a small number of very elderly people.

“This time there was a huge cross-section of the campus—students, Pacifica members,” said Dotter-Katz. “The overwhelming majority of people there were in protest to his (Irving’s) teachings. Very few people gave a positive response at any time.”

While Irving spoke in the Walnut Room of Erb Memorial Union, about 50 demonstrators gathered outside to express their opposition to the Irving appearance.

The peaceful gathering was organized by Eugene’s Community Alliance of Lane County and its Anti-Hate Task Force, the latter of which includes the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Lane County.

Craig Weinerman chairs the CRC and took part in the June 9 demonstration. He characterized the Pacifica Forum as “a bigoted, anti-Semitic and racist group.”

Noting that Pacifica Forum last October hosted speaker Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review—what has been called the world’s leading Holocaust denial organization, Weinerman said that Pacifica represents its agenda as free speech but it “always involves bringing in Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.”

Besides being imprisoned in Austria, Irving also sued American Jewish studies scholar Deborah Lipstadt in 1996 in Great Britain for alleged libel after she described Irving as one of the most dangerous spokespersons of the Holocaust denial movement. The courts found for Lipstadt, concluding that Irving was a Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite and a racist.

Dotter-Katz said the student leadership gathered prior to Irving’s appearance to formulate their response.

“While David Irving’s right to speak was unquestioned, we do not support anyone who comes to sow the seeds of hate on our campus,” said Dotter-Katz. “David Irving, you are not welcome at the University of Oregon.”

That wasn’t quite the sentiment expressed by the UO administration, which distanced itself from the event.

Phil Weiler is UO’s senior director of public and media relations. He said, “The University of Oregon simply was the venue for this speech. We in no way endorse the content; we in no way endorse the organization itself.”

He explained UO’s policy.

“There is a policy that says retired professors have the ability to use rooms on the University of Oregon campus. A retired University of Oregon professor is one of the leaders of the Pacifica Forum and he exercised his ability to use our public meeting space.”

That professor is Pacifica Forum founder Orval Etter, 92.

Asked if it was appropriate for a public university to make its facilities available to a speaker whose message is demonstrably a lie and arguably hateful, Weiler said, “Our philosophy is it’s better for that kind of speech to be seen in the light of day and to allow people to counteract those claims than it is to allow it to fester and try to propagate it in the dark.”

Weiler reiterated a perspective quoted in other media sources the day after Irving’s UO appearance.

“I think it is safe to say that the University of Oregon’s position is that hate speech is countered by more speech. That’s actually what we had happen on campus.”

Weiler also shared an earlier letter from UO President David Frohnmayer in which Frohnmayer addressed three recent prior incidents of intolerance or bias in the campus community, including an earlier incident involving the Pacifica Forum.

“Groups such as this that use university facilities from time to time do not speak for the University of Oregon,” wrote Frohnmayer. “Nor does the appearance of any invited speaker or the use of our facilities imply the institution’s endorsement, support or even its moral indifference to the content of a message.”

The Forum came under especially critical scrutiny in 2006 when Etter invited Lithuanian writer Valdas Anelauskas, now a U.S. resident, to deliver a series of lectures on the general theme of Zionism in Russia.

Earlier this year Anelauskas posted a reply to an opinion piece about the Iraq war in the UO student newspaper by student Deborah Bloom in which Anelauskas wrote, “Even if the author’s name wasn’t Deborah Bloom, after reading your opinion piece in the Emerald (Feb. 7) there is no doubt that it was written by someone who is Jewish. Because only from people of that peculiar tribe can we expect such Talmudic hatred for humanity. There is even a famous saying that wars are the Jews’ harvest.”

In a 2006 Register-Guard opinion article Etter wrote, “Jewish and other monitors attended the (Anelauskas) lectures and took a dim view of them. Some voiced the view, widespread in Eugene, that certain topics are so reprehensible that they should not be offered a public platform.” He added, “That view I cannot accept.”

Etter characterized the Anelauskas invitation as the “acid test” of free speech in Eugene. “The community passed the test,” he wrote, noting that “no one, not even the Anti-Hate Task Force, barred Anelauskas from entering the room. No one tried to shout him down.”

If Eugene “passed the test in 2006,” why was it necessary to put the community to the test again last October and now?

Etter chose not to respond to this specific question. Instead, he wrote to the Jewish Review, repeating Pacifica Forum’s founding principles, “A basic reason (Irving was invited) has been that PF has had for 15 years the central purpose of providing infomation and points of view regarding war and peace, militarism and pacifism, violence and nonviolence. Most PF attendants regard Irving as highly competent to lecture in this realm.”

A source close to the Forum who asked not to be identified told the Review, “Nothing I heard...(at the Irving event) sounded like seeds of hatred.”
However, the same source allowed, in reference the Forum’s earlier repeated presentation of Anelauskas, “When you invite a person with an anti-Semitic slant who seems to read distortions into history back seven more times, you have gone beyond free speech to promoting a particular point of view.”

The CRC’s Weinerman said the presence of Irving on the UO campus “embarrasses the university,” but added, “The thing this group (Pacifica) would love most is to be censored.”