HOLOCAUST HISTORIAN GÖTZ ALY

A wonderful day for the West. Western journalists and academics, having given up on the ideal of intellectual freedom, now have Muslim journalists forwarding the idea that there should be an open debate on historical issues, including the the Holocaust story. If the Holocaust is not an historical issue, what is it? A fantasy?


SPIEGEL ONLINE: Critics from Iran, for example from the Union of Muslim Journalists, have accused western countries of limiting freedom of opinion by having laws against denying the Holocaust. With this conference they want to offer historians "a free and democratic platform."

Aly: As an historian I regard laws which forbid someone from denying anything as complete nonsense. In the same way that I believe that the law in Turkey which says the Armenian genocide never happened, is absurd. Laws against denying the Holocaust don't do anything anyway. You are always going to have a few crazy people who ignore the facts.

Read more