Posted on 02/20/2006 12:58:55 PM PST by aculeus
British historian David Irving has been found guilty in Vienna of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry and sentenced to three years in prison.
He had pleaded guilty to the charge, based on a speech and interview he gave in Austria in 1989.
"I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," he told the court in the Austrian capital.
Irving appeared stunned by the sentence, and told reporters: "I'm very shocked and I'm going to appeal."
An unidentified onlooker told him: "Stay strong!".
Irving's lawyer said he considered the verdict "a little too stringent".
"I would say it's a bit of a message trial," said Elmar Kresbach.
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the UK's Holocaust Educational Trust welcomed the verdict. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism dressed up as intellectual debate. It should be regarded as such and treated as such," Ms Pollock told the BBC News website.
But the author and academic Deborah Lipstadt, who Irving unsuccessfully sued for libel in the UK in 2000 over claims that he was a Holocaust denier, said she was dismayed.
"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," she told the BBC News website.
Fears that the court case would provoke right-wing demonstrations and counter-protests did not materialise, the BBC's Ben Brown at the court in Vienna said.
Irving arrived in the court room handcuffed, wearing a blue suit, and carrying a copy of Hitler's War, one of many books he has written on the Nazis, and which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.
Irving was arrested in Austria in November, on a warrant dating back to 1989, when he gave a speech and interview denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
He was stopped by police on a motorway in southern Austria, where he was visiting to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity. He has been held in custody since then.
'I've changed'
During the one-day trial, he was questioned by the prosecutor and chief judge, and answered questions in fluent German.
He admitted that in 1989 he had denied that Nazi Germany had killed millions of Jews. He said this is what he believed, until he later saw the personal files of Adolf Eichmann, the chief organiser of the Holocaust.
"I said that then based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now," Irving told the court.
"The Nazis did murder millions of Jews."
In the past, he had claimed that Adolf Hitler knew little, if anything, about the Holocaust, and that the gas chambers were a hoax.
COUNTRIES WITH LAWS AGAINST HOLOCAUST DENIAL Austria Belgium Czech Republic France Germany Israel Lithuania Poland Romania Slovakia Switzerland
The judge in his 2000 libel trial declared him "an active Holocaust denier... anti-Semitic and racist".
On Monday, before the trial began, he told reporters: "I'm not a Holocaust denier. Obviously, I've changed my views.
"History is a constantly growing tree - the more you know, the more documents become available, the more you learn, and I have learned a lot since 1989."
Asked how many Jews were killed by Nazis, he replied: "I don't know the figures. I'm not an expert on the Holocaust."
Of his guilty plea, he told reporters: "I have no choice."
He said it was "ridiculous" that he was being tried for expressing an opinion.
"Of course it's a question of freedom of speech... I think within 12 months this law will have vanished from the Austrian statute book," he said.
Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2006/02/20 20:19:07 GMT
© BBC MMVI
You gotta remember that Europe fears, above all else, the resurrection of fascism. Holocaust denial is in their minds tantamount to neo-Nazism. (Probably not without cause.) In order to prevent fascism in general, and Nazism specifically, from taking root again, Europe has outlawed anything that cold conceivably aid it. Including Holocaust denial.
It's funny how lefties don't get imprisoned for also making up stuff!!
Eesh. "cold" = "could."
"It's funny how lefties don't get imprisoned for also making up stuff!!"
Case In Point: Noam Chomsky
Yes, I saw that idiot in an interview on Irish TV recently, what a moonbat!!
I could not agree more,this idea is just plain damm stupid
Intelligent of them to create martyrs for the neo-Nazis... Not to mention there is something just a little problematic about acting fascist to prevent fascism...
Mere cranks don't get this kind of treatment. People who swear on a stack of Bibles they've seen Elvis or Bigfoot, or have been abducted by aliens, or have proof that the U.S. government have been lying about UFOs get IGNORED. I'm not sure this is a good move on the part of the authorities.
Mere cranks don't get this kind of treatment. People who swear on a stack of Bibles they've seen Elvis or Bigfoot, or have been abducted by aliens, or have proof that the U.S. government have been lying about UFOs get IGNORED. I'm not sure this is a good move on the part of the authorities.
The guy had obviously not read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer either.
EXACTLY! This man and his ludicrous views are no more dangerous than the pathetic band of Nazis that cause so much fuss with their silly marches.
Making them criminals for stupid ideas only raises their status to martyrs, and gives them the legitimacy of at least being taken seriously by the legal system.
This action was wrong.
I find it very hard to believe that in 2006, someone could go to jail for denying the Holocaust happened.
Freedom of speech remains an ideal only. Europe, a continent of hypocrites, has determined by law what a person can think and say about the holocaust. How dare they now cry out for freedom of speech for their cartoons?
It's about knowledgeable public personnae proclaiming things which have long been proven irrefutably false, having been attested to by millions of brutally massacred victims, who can no longer speak on their own behalf.
Such deniers are reasonably analogized to someone falsely shouting, "Fire!" in a crowded theater just to witness the stampede, mayhem and near-certain human injury.
Don't bother telling the police you "honestly thought" there was a fire when the evidence for fire is nowhere to be found.
HF
Agreed. The man may be despicable, but no government should be arresting someone for having a wrong opinion like this. Until his opinions result in an action that harms another person, he should be free to think and say whatever he wants. But this is communist Europe and we all know what they are about.
Totally unacceptable. I wonder if the State Department will include this wrongful imprisonment in its Human Rights Report for Austria. It will be interesting to see what the MSM has to say about it, if anything. It certainly should be a free speech issue.
Our hate crime laws come to mind.
I was just thinking..... a great effort that I will concede. It was not Irving who rounded up the Austrian Jews and who loaded them into trucks for the concentration camps. Oh me, oh my- who could have done such a thing?
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