Free Speech Denial is not the answer to Holocaust Denial
I have to express disagreement with Karl Pfeifer. Gerd Honsik shouldn’t spend a day in prison. As Honsik’s lawyer put it, ‘To impose five years in prison for exercising one’s freedom of opinion is just intolerable’.
He’s now become another ‘martyr‘ and celebrity for neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites. Cranks shouldn’t be – and in fact are not – beaten through laws, but through exposing their lies for all to see:
I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don’t believe in winning battles via censorship … The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth.
- Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
If these people want to speak, let them. It only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that’s useful for us. I have quoted Eichmann references that come from a neo-Nazi publishing house. I am not for taboos and I am not for repression.
- Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews
Genocide denial laws suggest that we do not have the facts and the documentation to prove that these people are liars. We defeated David Irving in court not with law but with facts. We followed his footnotes and demonstrated that, in the words of Professor Richard Evans, Irving’s work on the Holocaust was a ’tissue of lies’.
And if you want proof of how counterproductive these laws are, here’s Arthur Kemp of the BNP:
An increasing number of historian dissidents are challenging the claim of mass exterminations of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War Two, to the point where such revisionism has been declared illegal in many European countries. This in itself is cause to question the allegations, as truth should not need to be defended by law.
And this is from an article by Paul Grubach (who has written for Press TV), reproduced on a ‘One State Solution’ website:
All throughout the so-called “free West” people can suffer severe persecution or even a prison term for simply questioning it.
Fred Leuchter, at one time the foremost expert in the United States on gas chamber technology, had his career destroyed and marriage ruined because he published a report that shows the so-called “Auschwitz gas chambers” never existed. German scientist Germar Rudolf and Revisionist activist Ernst Zundel are presently in German prisons for rejecting the Holocaust ideology. British historian David Irving spent thirteen months in an Austrian prison for allegedly violating “Holocaust denial laws.” In numerous countries throughout Europe, one can end up in prison for years for rejecting the Holocaust ideology. Jewish groups were behind the creation and implementation of these oppressive laws.
