Hooray!
Nazi apologist gets what's coming to him, why am I not sad?http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4733820.stm
normal service will be resumed shortly.
Update:
It would seem that Mr Irving hasn't been aprised of the concept of 'when you're in a hole, stop digging', not judging by his interviews post-sentencing at any rate. Let's be grateful for free speech, he seems incapable of controlling his.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4757506.stm
The world of serious holocaust historians seems to have made what to me is a somewhat perverse decision, which is to decry the extremity of the sentence. I know full well that I have no knowledge of the politics underlying this (I am probably about as ayrian as it is possible to be in this textured island), but any hero of the propagators of hate deserves what he gets in my opinion. It's too damn easy to sit in a cosy arm-chair in Britain or the US and pontificate about numbers; these are dead people we are talking about, and all over Eastern Europe there are forests full of unopened graves.
I have serious problems with what the state of Israel has become, but when you look at the backstory it's not hard to understand. In the meantime I fully support Mr Irving's (I have no idea if he actually has a qualification*) right to express his views, and even more so, I'd encourage him to continue to express them in countries which operate a less tolerant attitude than mine. Full marks to Austria (which hasn't an unblemished record: ref: Georg Heider/Kurt Waldheim etc), for enforcing its law, null points to Mr Irving for having the arrogance to think he could mince in and address a neo-nazi student rally and get away with it.
He said in his interview on the BBC that his cell was comfortable, he was able to write without interruption, and was served three hot meals a day, long may this continue.
*subsequent researches indicate that Mr Irving studied physics at Imperial College, and his elder brother is a muslim and chairman of Wiltshire Racial Equality Council. I cannot find any reference to further education.
Juicy quote from the Lipstadt libel trial (1998):
Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
I rest my case...
Oh, and I'll stop going on about it too.
posted by Lampy @ 2/20/2006 09:04:00 pm
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