David Irving, The Holocaust And The Cartoons

The conviction of David Irving and the resulting jail sentence has made many free speech advocates uncomfortable. Unquestionably, a three year jail term for advocating a belief is bound to put advocates of free speech on the defensive.

As has been noted repeatedly, if the Holocaust is 'off limits,' why not give the criticizing of Islam or Mohammed- clearly offensive to Muslims- the same 'sacred cow' status?

Offending Muslims- or Jews, or Christians, is about the right to express one's beliefs, no matter how stupid or offensive those beliefs might be.

Holocaust denial is about denying the truth- and what the cost of that denial of the truth to society, really is.

No country that has laws relating to Holocaust denial, has any laws on the books outlawing any form of religious hatred, no matter how vile or repulsive. No one is precluded from believing whatever it is they wish. There is no fear of punishment for one's beliefs, however outside the mainstream.

Denying the truth, however, has consequences.

When, for example, science is used to propagate a lie, as it was during Hitler's reign of terror, the consequences can be horrifying. Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and the mentally retarded were classified as 'inferiors'- and thus could be removed from society without a second thought. Add to the mixture wild conspiracy theories, relentlessly reinforced by a media controlled by a murderous regime and the end result in inevitable.

That kind of rewriting of the truth was in the end, to cost 50 million lives.

Denying the truth can take different forms.

While Holocaust denial is an active form of denial of the truth, there are also passive forms of truth denial.

The slaughter in Darfur is barely written about. There is a concerted effort to downplay what it is another holocaust- the deliberate extermination of a people for their beliefs. If the Arab and Muslim world are determined to deny the truth of Hitler's Holocaust, is it unreasonable to believe they will deny the slaughter in Darfur, at the hands of the Muslim-Arab Janjaweed? There is barely acknowledgment of the atrocities now- even as they happen. Will the truth be remembered in even 15 years? Is the slaughter of up to 30,000 in Hama, Syria- a crime of outrageous proportions- destined to become a fairy tale of the disenfranchised? Bashar Assad and Mustapha Tlass certainly hope so.

Will the GIA atrocities in Algeria- the deliberate rape and dismemberment of children, be denied too? Will the savagery against the Christians in East Timor be forgotten? Will the reality of gang rapes, acid attacks, honor killings and massacres committed against Christians and Shia in Pakistan be referred to as a hoax?

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So goes the most often repeated quote issued by George Santayana, poet, philosopher and writer.

The denial of the Holocaust is a license for the other truths and atrocities to be denied. It is a fact that those most anxious to deny the Holocaust are themselves guilty of either participating in atrocities, encouraging atrocities, funding atrocities or turning a blind eye to atrocities. That is why Holocaust denial is so important to them.

Deny the truth of one Holocaust and you open the door to deny the truth of others.

David Irving, the professor emeritus of Holocaust denial, wasn't sentenced to three years because he is a professed anti Semite. He wasn't sentenced to three years in prison because he is the patron saint of neo Nazis the world over and he is not being punished for writing about conspiracies and idiotic ideas.

David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison for yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theater. He was sentenced for denying a truth that cost millions of innocent lives, now forgotten and unacknowledged. He was sentenced to prison because his denial of the truth and horror of that time is a kind of equivalent of blaming the rape victim for the assault.

David Irving is the poster boy for Iranian and Arab holocaust denial. They are societies for whom denial of the truth is a necessary tonic, so that they might deny their own culpability.

Everyone is free to sit in movie theater and make a fool of themselves, behaving badly. They can making rude comments and otherwise disturb the other patrons with their boorish behavior. We must tolerate the fools. That said, they cannot falsely yell 'FIRE!' in that crowded theater because their words can have disastrous results. They are free to be obnoxious fools- they are not free to incite or impact others in a way that is potentially dangerous to others.

In what is perhaps the most egregious example of hubris, Iranian President Almadinejad (and virtually all of the Arab world), claim that in denying the truth, they are seeking 'truth.' In fact, if Almadinejad and the Arab world really cared about the truth- and were so eager to honor the truth- they would examine and address their own regimes and the other murderous regimes in the regimes in the region. The daily atrocities committed are an outrage to humanity.

Clearly, Almadinejad and the Arab world do not engage in that exercise because they have a self serving agenda. The 'truth' is whatever it needs to be and is no more than a tool used to serve that particular agenda.

That is the difference between western free societies and much of the Islamic and Arab world. In a free society the truth is not a negotiable instrument, to be defined and used whenever necessary. That notion is antithetical to everything a free society stands for. There is a big difference between Holocaust denial and those that espouse that belief and the publication of editorial cartoons.

Irving's denial of the truth has served to fuel an agenda of religious and cultural hate that has already infected an entire generation of willing believers- a kind of hate that has killed and will continue to kill. There are tens of millions throughout the Muslim world that take Irving's revisionism as Gospel- and conclude that the Holocaust is a fraud foisted upon the world by those perfidious Jews. That alone, is used to justify the most vitriolic of hatred directed at Jews and Christians.

David Irving, the inheritor of Goebbels hate and ideology, got off easy.

See our update, here.