Irving released

Holocaust denier David Irving has successfully appealed his prison sentence:

The jailed British author David Irving will be freed today after an Austrian court reduced his prison sentence for Holocaust denial.

The Regional High Court in Vienna upheld an appeal by Irving yesterday, converting into probation the three-year sentence handed down last February. Irving, 68, was arrested in November last year during a visit to Austria on a warrant dating back to 1989, when he held two lectures in Austria denying the existence of death camps and the organised mass murder of Jews during Nazi rule. He was held under a 1992 law that makes denial of the Holocaust a crime.

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He now plans to hold a news conference tomorrow evening, calling for an academic boycott of German and Austrian historians until their governments stopped putting historians in prison.

David Irving, calling for a boycott of the Germans. Now I've heard everything.

It's understandable why Austria, of all countries, would have laws against Holocaust denial - but as we learned from the "conference" in Iran last week, putting the likes of David Irving in jail gives anti-Western tyrants a rhetorical club with which to beat Western democracies. I bet Ahmadinejad believes he was responsible for "shaming" Austria into releasing Irving.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at December 21, 2006 07:26 AM