Europe has much to learn about freedom of speech from the USA.
I was wondering just that! Arrested for his thoughts? As if jailtime is going to remove it!
I wonder if there's something else to it...
That's what democracy looks like. Theirs won't look like ours. Turkey has restrictions on speech and religion that we as Americans would find onerous, but they've helped maintain the only stable, secular democracy in the Muslim world.
Ernst Zündel is a vile creep. That said, I don't think anyone should be jailed for expressing an opinion. But that said, he knew the law and knowingly broke it. If intentionally breaking an unjust law is an admirable act of civil disobedience, part of that process is taking the punishment.
No, many countries in Europe just have different free speech laws than the U.S. It doesn't make one or the other more right or more wrong. Europeans would say that the US has much to learn from them about the sanctity of life, since we still put people to death.
I've covered American and European free speech laws in my (graduate school) classes here in France and most students see no problem with the prohibitions on denying the Holocaust or the Nazi Party. They're usually a bit appalled when I show pictures of neo-Nazis or the KKK parading in the US.
The Holocaust happened here, on their soil, at the hand of their people against their people. I think that makes a difference in the way normal, sane people think about it. My students were opposed to a proposed French law imposing criminal penalties for denying the Armenian genocide, because they found that to be an undue burden on free speech. The Armenian genocide didn't occur in France and didn't involve French people, so they thought that France didn't have enough interest in the matter to penalize speech.
I personally prefer the American approach to free speech, but just because we do it one way in our country doesn't mean the rest of the world is wrong for not doing it our way. That is the typical arrogant attitude some people find so annoying about Americans.