Posted on 02/21/2006 7:06:38 AM PST by veronica
European press split over Irving
Irving has said he will appeal against his sentence The three-year prison sentence handed down by an Austrian court to British historian David Irving for denying the Holocaust divides opinion in Europe's press.
In Austria, a commentator on a leading daily has no doubts that the sentence was fully justified, notwithstanding that the country is a democracy.
But elsewhere, commentators worry that the sentence has undermined the fundamental democratic right of freedom of speech, and argue the principle should be upheld however abhorrent the views expressed.
Hans Rauscher in Austria's Der Standard
Holocaust deniers like David Irving want to trivialise these inconceivable crimes and make them politically acceptable. That is the decisive point. Whoever wants to render National Socialism harmless wants to revive it as a political option. It's just too much to ask of democracy to tolerate this. And it is deplorable treatment of the victims.
Editorial in the UK's The Independent
Few in this country will shed many tears for an academic who never cared to hide his despicable views... But (the sentence) is three years more than anyone should have to serve for exercising freedom of speech in a democracy... We have deep misgivings about the classification of Holocaust denial as a prosecutable offence.
Editorial in UK's The Times
As a spectacle, Irving's squirming while pleading, unsuccessfully, for his freedom would have been entertaining if the subject matter were lighter. Yet it remains significant. It is not often the influential are forced publicly to recant odious views. And yet because of the manner in which Mr Irving's new views were elicited and the three year sentence he received, there are serious reservations. Curbs on free speech are always regrettable.
Czech Republic's Mlada Fronta Dnes
He should not have been brought before the court. The European countries should shake off the Holocaust taboo and the Muslims should stop hating those who make fun of the Prophet... There only appears to be a difference between the rioting of furious Muslim activists and a sophisticated court in Austria.
Editorial in Spain's El Mundo
It goes without saying that Irving's harebrained historical theories deserve none of our respect. But perhaps for that very reason, one cannot fail to wonder if, today, there is any point in keeping in force legislation conceived in a very different historical context. Fifty years after the end of Nazism, Holocaust denial - not, of course, incitement to or glorification of genocide - must stop being a crime in Europe. Can it be right that someone should go to prison for saying Auschwitz did not exist, when those who deny the crimes of Stalin or the tortures of the Inquisition go unpunished?
European laws against anti-Semitism have become a nefarious exception which various Islamic intellectuals have recently seized upon as an example of the West's double standards. Far from giving in to demands to establish new restrictions to combat 'Islamophobia', European governments must eliminate this obsolete legislation and reaffirm the West's support for freedom of expression.
Germany's Die Tageszeitung
What David Irving said yesterday in the Vienna court represented a first-class burial of the myth of the "Auschwitz-lie": Irving apologised for his earlier views and withdrew the statements that brought him before the court... Neo-Nazis around the world have lost an icon.
Sweden's Sydsvenska Dagbladet
His criminalisation can be said to have met one objective: if Irving is humbly apologising, then neo-Nazis around the world have lost an important ideologue. There will be alarming views and the falsification of history will continue to flourish. What is really significant is that false claims - such as that the gas chambers never existed and the Holocaust never happened - can be contested and exposed in an open public debate.
French daily Le Monde
Several factors explain the huge interest that the trial has sparked across the English Channel. The boycott of the Holocaust Memorial Day by Muslim groups decreed by Prime Minister Tony Blair and the controversy over a decision by the Imperial War Museum in Manchester to devote a part of its building to the history of the extermination of Jews has prompted another debate on the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom. The publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad has also demonstrated the survival of anti-Jewish sentiment among a section of British Muslim opinion. Finally, Jewish organisations have reported an increase in racist and anti-Semitic acts in the United Kingdom in 2005.
Noah Klieger, 80-year-old Holocaust survivor quoted in UK's The Guardian
This is a big day for Israel and all Jews, as the Pope of Holocaust deniers has finally been brought to justice. The sentence is not important. What is important is to send out the message while we, the Holocaust survivors, are still alive.
Headline in UK's The Guardian
The resistible rise of the historian who rejected plain facts.
Italy's La Stampa
In upholding unsustainable ideas, Irving is not being an 'ingenuously' stubborn academic. He is a character who has intentionally put his historical intelligence at the service of neo-Nazi, racist and anti-democratic movements.
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Anti-Semitism dressed up as philisophical debate.
My dad liberated 2 camps... they DID exist!
I thought there was freedom of speech in Europe?
It is truly disturbing to see how many otherwise rational people have no problem with imprisoning somebody for their beliefs. This is what happens when you get too fat and happy on your freedoms----you begin to take them for granted and eventually lose your perspective on what freedom of speech actually means. To say that he deserves imprisonment because these particular beliefs of his "cross the line" is just short-sighted beyond belief.
Excellent point. Or as "free speech." God bless your dad, and all others who served. Holocaust denial denigrates them, as well the murdered, the survivors, and the resistance.
You have to understand the Austrian and German mentality over this situation.
In the aftermath of the Second World war as more and more details came out the whole of Germany and to a lesser extent Austria were made to feel collective guilt.
They had just lost a very destructive war most of Germany was destroyed and then in the aftermath of coping with this fact they were bought face to face with the horror of the final solution.
It still runs deep today my wife is German but was raised in England , many years ago she made a joke remark about some one being a Jew because he was tight with his money. It was the most angry she had ever seen her father.
You have to understand the Austrian and German mentality over this situation.
In the aftermath of the Second World war as more and more details came out the whole of Germany and to a lesser extent Austria were made to feel collective guilt.
They had just lost a very destructive war most of Germany was destroyed and then in the aftermath of coping with this fact they were bought face to face with the horror of the final solution.
It still runs deep today my wife is German but was raised in England , many years ago she made a joke remark about some one being a Jew because he was tight with his money. It was the most angry she had ever seen her father.
See reply 6 and 7
In light of this man's imprisonment, it is not difficult to understand why so few authority figures in Europe would come to the defense of the Danish cartoonists. If you can be thrown in prison for saying grossly insensitive things about the holocaust, why should it be ok to draw insensitive cartoons about Mohammed?
I don't know if you caught "Auschwitz: Inside The Nazi State" on PBS.
It was a good documentary which included one former SS guard that
really ticked me off in his current interviews about his involvement
as a guard/clerk at the camp.
BUT...at the end of the film, he said the reason that he participated
in the documentary was to fight back against anyone that denied that
the camps and the liquidations occurred.
A better move than throwing him in jail would have been to simply ostracize him as an historian. He's obviously a quack. Should be pumping gas, not writing history.
Of course, an even better move might have been to figure out that he is a quack before he gave this opinion on the subject. But that's academia for you. You're considered an expert until even the layman can see that you're not.
Holocaust deniers and Islamic defenders are cut from the same cloth. One refuses to see what has happened, the other refuses to see what is happening.
David Irving as a historian is farcical at best. Elie Wiesel's "Night" is a most compelling historical fact. Freedom of speech is not about re-writing history.
Even a day in jail is too much, no matter what stupid things roll out of your mouth.
Noah Klieger, 80-year-old Holocaust survivor quoted in UK's The Guardian:
This is a big day for Israel and all Jews, as the Pope of Holocaust deniers has finally been brought to justice.
How many years in the pokey is Noah going to do for this anti-Catholic slander?
1) America was not almost totally destroyed in a destructive war she had caused
2)America did not carry out one of the most heinous crimes ever committed.
Americans were not made to feel real social lepers.
To truly understand this law its background you have to take your self back to 1945.
Also read up on the American denazification program carried out in the late 40s in Germany.
David Irvin as a historian new these sensibilities only too well which is why he wanted to challenge them.
Before you criticize you have got to put your self into that mentality mind set.
My father in law after the war in the 50s traveled as a salesman around Europe he new what it was like the collective guilt made to feel a social leper made to feel ashamed of being a German because of the monstrous crime carried out by the Nazis with the German people compliance.
No wonder they made it a crime to deny it, can you imagine the outcry if any German dared to challenge it.
This is the salient point. This is why Austria and Germany have these laws. They understand that Holocaust denial is not about righting historical wrongs, it's about rehabilitating Nazism. This cannot stand in nations where Jews were slaughtered by the millions.
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