BCT Editorial – 2/24/06

This page was last updated on February 25, 2006.

Thought police; Editorial; Beaver County Times; February 24, 2006.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“Sentencing of Holocaust denier is a blow against freedom of speech

“David Irving is going to prison for what he said, for what he thought, for what he wrote.

“And that’s wrong. His anti-Holocaust calumnies are unforgivable and unpardonable, but they are not criminal.”

[RWC] As the editorial notes below, they are criminal in Israel and at least 10 European countries. I’m sure this will escape the Times, but all of these are socialist countries. It is liberals who tend to ban ideas and speech they don’t like.

“It also was unnecessary. Irving and all he stood for were routed years ago where such battles should be fought in democracies - the free-speech marketplace of ideas. Even Irving has had to own up to his defeat. He now acknowledges that he was wrong.

“For years, Irving was the historian who gave Holocaust deniers the tiny shred of academic respectability they needed to proclaim and spread their hateful anti-Semitic propaganda.

“Irving’s past caught up with him this week in Austria when he was sentenced to three years in prison on charges that he denied the Holocaust.

“Like at least nine European countries, as well as Israel, Austria has a national law that makes it a crime to deny or diminish the reality of the Holocaust.

“The 67-year-old Irving is going to jail because of a 1989 lecture in Austria in which he said the gas chambers at Auschwitz were a fairy tale. That was just one of his Holocaust-denier arguments. Basically, if there was an anti-Holocaust claim, Irving was there to back it up, either directly or indirectly. He made his name and his career out of it.

“But all that Irving built came crashing down when his hubris led him to sue American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Press for libel after she wrote he was a Holocaust denier.

“When all was said and done, he lost the case in 2000, with the judge adding much-deserved insult to Irving’s self-inflicted injury by calling him an ‘anti-Semite and racist’ who twisted history. To add to Irving’s woes, his legal fees left him broke.

“The decision was even more significant because Britain’s libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, not the plaintiff.

“Some may see Irving as the victim in the Austrian case. That would be a mistake. He deserves no sympathy.

“The real loser, though, is freedom of speech. When the free exchange of ideas is restricted, democracy is diminished. People should be punished for what they do criminally, not for what they say or think.”

[RWC] This conclusion, with which I agree, is interesting given a Times “Salutes & Boots” editorial published four days before this one. In that editorial, the Times gave a “salute” to eliminating a course requirement that would have required science students to formulate arguments for and against the theory of evolution. It’s OK to lie about the Holocaust, which is a historical fact, but it’s not OK to discuss alternatives to evolution, which is only a theory? Never let it be said the Times lets logical consistency get in the way of promoting an agenda.

I also wonder what the position of the Times is on so-called “hate speech” spoken during a crime. For example, is the crime worse if a racial epithet is spoken during a crime? For most of the Times’ fellow travelers, the answer is “yes” as long as the epithet is directed at a member of a liberal-approved victim group.