ROOM FOR ALL VIEWS

The Australian
August o7 2006

Antony Loewenstein

The Israel lobby's attempt to silence contrarian voices is counterproductive and undermines freedom of speech

TRULY free societies are defined by the limitations placed on free speech. What is permissible or illegal often determines the way we view subversive, extreme or outrageous opinions. The US is the most open nation on earth. Other countries are not so tolerant.

Disgraced historian David Irving languishes in an Austrian prison for denying the severity of the Jewish Holocaust. It is illegal in Austria to minimise the crimes of the Third Reich and Irving once claimed the gas chambers never existed in the Nazi death camps. (He now claims to have recanted this egregious position.) More>>

Robert Faurisson prosecuted--again--for thought crimes

In the XVIIth Chamber of the Paris Correctional Court,
the CRIF and Yahweh against Professor Robert Faurisson

(July 11, 2006)


They came to grief for it. Quite a bad idea, picking a quarrel with Professor Faurisson. That is what they have learned to their cost, “they” being, first, Madame le substitut du procureur (“assistant public prosecutor”) of the French Republic in Paris, Anne de Fontette, initiator of the proceedings, then the three civil plaintiffs – the LICRA (“International league against racism and anti-Semitism”), the MRAP (“Movement against racism and anti-Semitism and for friendship among peoples”) and the LDH (“League of human rights”) – and, finally, the new presiding judge of the XVIIth chamber, Nicolas Bonnal.

Professor Faurisson’s knowledge and determination

For four and a half hours on this very hot July afternoon, in a sweltering XVIIth Chamber of the Paris Correctional Court, slightly more than a hundred revisionists, who had come from France, Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Iran and still other countries to support the professor, attended a legal bout that, from the start, was to swing in favour of the defence. 77 years of age but endowed with a fierce energy, Robert Faurisson is a retired . . . .
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