From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Bill Lucy"  wrote in message
news:MPG.1e678feca4925acf989684{at}news.barkto.com...
> In article , gauszka{at}hotmail.com says...
>> I agree
>>
>> "The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and
with truth."
>
> Bingo.

George Will had a good op-ed piece on it today


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR2006022401800
.html

Less Freedom, Less Speech

By George F. Will
Sunday, February 26, 2006; Page B07

In some recess of David Irving's reptile brain, he knows that his
indefensible imprisonment is helping his side. His side consists of all the
enemies of open societies.

Irving, born in England in 1938, was a prodigy of perversity, asking for a
copy of "Mein Kampf" as a school prize. He grew up to be a
"moderate fascist" -- his description -- historian who has made a
career of arguing, in many books and incessant speeches, that although many
Jews died of disease and hardship during World War II, nothing like the
Holocaust -- 6 million victims of industrialized murder -- occurred.

Holocaust deniers, from crackpots to the president of Iran, argue that the
"so-called" gas chambers were only for showers or fumigation;
that Zyklon B gas was too weak to produce mass deaths; that it was too
strong to be used -- it would have killed those emptying the chambers; that
Poles built the crematoria after the war as a macabre tourist attraction or
by Jews to extort compensation; and that Germans concocted
"evidence" of "genocide" to please their conquerors.

Holocaust denial, which is anti-Semitism tarted up with the trappings of
historiography, is a crime in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech
Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania,
Slovakia and Switzerland. And in Austria, which criminalizes speech that
"denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify" Nazi
atrocities.

In 1989, in two speeches in Austria, Irving said, among much else, that
only 74,000 Jews died of natural causes in work camps and millions were
spirited to Palestine after the war. An arrest warrant was issued. Last
November Irving was arrested when he came to Austria to address some
right-wing students. Last week, while Europe was lecturing Muslims about
the virtue of tolerating free expression by Danish cartoonists, Irving was
sentenced to three years in prison.

What folly. What dangers do the likes of Irving pose? Holocaust denial is
the occupation of cynics and lunatics who are always with us but are no
reason for getting governments into the dangerous business of outlawing
certain arguments. Laws criminalizing Holocaust denial open a moral pork
barrel for politicians: Many groups can be pandered to with speech
restrictions. Why not a law regulating speech about slavery? Or Stalin's
crimes?

Some defenders of the prosecution of Irving say that Europe -- and
especially Austria, Hitler's birthplace -- rightly has, from recent
history, an acute fear of totalitarians. But that historical memory should
cause Europe to recoil from government-enforced orthodoxy about anything.

American legislators, using the criminal law for moral exhibitionism, enact
"hate crime" laws. Hate crimes are, in effect, thought crimes.
Hate-crime laws mandate enhanced punishments for crimes committed as a
result of, or at least when accompanied by, particular states of mind of
which the government particularly disapproves. Governments that feel free
to stigmatize, indeed criminalize, certain political thoughts and attitudes
will move on to regulating what expresses such thoughts and attitudes --
speech.

For several decades in America, the aim of much of the jurisprudential
thought about the First Amendment's free-speech provision has been to
justify contracting its protections. Freedom of speech is increasingly
"balanced" against "competing values." As a result, it
is whittled down, often by seemingly innocuous increments, to a minor
constitutional afterthought.

On campuses, speech codes have abridged the right of free expression to
protect the right -- for such it has become -- of certain preferred groups
to not be offended. The NCAA is truncating the right of some schools to
express their identity using mascots deemed "insensitive" to the
feelings of this or that grievance group. Campaign finance laws ration the
amount and control the timing and content of political speech. The right to
free political speech is now "balanced" against society's
interest in leveling the political playing field, or elevating the tone of
civic discourse, or enabling politicians to spend less time soliciting
contributions, or allowing candidates to control the content of their
campaigns, or dispelling the "appearance" of corruption, etc.

To protect the fragile flower of womanhood, a judge has ruled that use of
gender-based terms such as "foreman" or "draftsman"
could create a "hostile environment" and hence constitute sexual
harassment. To improve all of us, people with various agendas are itching
to get government to regulate speech of this or that sort.

Even open societies have would-be mullahs. But the more serious threats to
freedom are mullahs who control societies: Irving, expecting a suspended
sentence, had planned to travel to Tehran to participate in a conference,
organized by Iran's government, to promote Holocaust denial.

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