Freedom of Speech?

Don't worry, I'm not going to be talking about cartoons that feature the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist, I really don't want a fatwah put on my head. But for what it's worth, I do think that these protests and violence that the media report upon are extremists hijacking a platform to further their own causes.

However, I read this today and I couldn't help but cheer. For years, I've been disgusted and well, sustained in complete disbelief at this guy. I could never understand how anyone could truly say that the Holocaust never happened, or that the gas chambers in concentration camps never existed, or that the number of Jews killed in the holocaust was grossly exaggerated. To top this off, this guy called himself a historian. Now please forgive me if I'm wrong, but I always thought a historian was someone who tried to find out the truth about past events. So how could he produce something that COMPLETELY contradicted everything else that had been said about the Holocaust? If he was trying to be clever and/or controversial, there are surely other ways to achieve that? But to deny something that is universally acknowledged as fact is pure stupidity.

Now, I believe that he had a right to express his views ( no matter how wrong I personally believe them to be), but if he was stupid enough to express them in a country where Holocaust Denial is outlawed, then he's just begging for trouble isn't he? Thus, I thought it was completely right that he be jailed for it. Express your views all you want, but if in doing so, you break the laws of that Country, then you need to pay the consequences of breaking the aforementioned law.

There's a quote in the article saying how "Holocaust denial is anti-semitism dressed up as intellectual debate." Completely right. Don't try to dress up or deny what happened in the Holocaust. Millions of jews were killed in concentration camps in Europe because they were the "wrong" religion. I remember a scene from the film "Everything is Illuminated" (BRILLIANT film, btw) where the scene is at a grass verge where in the ground, is a plaque dedicated to the people of Trachimbord who were wiped out by the Nazis. The old lady tells the story of her sister Augustine and how the Nazis held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her unless their father spat on the Torah. This was a Torah that was over 200 years old and brought there by their ancestors - And he was being forced to spit on it, or his daughter would be shot in front of him. OK, this was from a film, but it did happen. It may not have happened at Trachimbord, but it happened in real life elsewhere.

My final thoughts are of 2 places.. Anne Frank's House in Amsterdam where I got the sense of what living conditions were like for her at the time, and of the Holocaust Memorial in Miami. You can read about that here . Finally, I just hope that Irving doesn't become some sort of martyr for the Far Right. The man is a criminal. I still live in the hope that we, as people, are better than that now.