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 . . . .
More >>

L.A. TIMES - ALL HISTORY IS "REVISIONIST"

Three cheers for Jonathan Zimmerman and the L.A. Times who was bold enough to proclaim, "all facts require interpretation and that all history is "revisionist" history." The Bush brothers seem to have a real problem with Revisionism. Could it be that they have some vested interest in not wanting history to be written in accord with the facts?

All history is 'revisionist'
A Florida law banning relativism in classes ignores reality and 75 years of academic tradition.

By Jonathan Zimmerman
June 7, 2006


JUST WHEN YOU thought it was safe to study American history again … the revisionists are back!

You know, those relativists who distort or simply fabricate the past to make it fit their present-day biases. For instance, shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, President Bush attacked "revisionist historians" who questioned his justifications for using force against Saddam Hussein. He did it again on Veterans Day in 2005. "It is deeply irresponsible," he declared, "to rewrite the history of how the war began."


And just last week, in an unprecedented move, the president's brother approved a law barring revisionist history in Florida public schools. "The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth," declares Florida's Education Omnibus Bill, signed by Gov. Jeb Bush. "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed."

Read More

NEVER MIND THE HOLOCAUST

Hunker Down With History

By Richard Cohen
Washington Post
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; Page A19

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
More>>

ACADEMICS SURVEYED TO DISCOVER WHAT THEY REALLY THINK ABOUT HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM

MediaSyndicate.com

World's first survey of attitudes to Holocaust revisionism

July 13, 2006

A group which stubbornly refuses to identify itself is launching the world's first survey of the attitudes of academic historians to Holocaust revisionism. A spokesman for the group says, 'We read daily in our newspapers and online news sources about Holocaust revisionists being arrested, put on trial or imprisoned for their views, and we get told a lot how very awful these people are and so on, but no one seems to have thought to ask historians what they actually think about Holocaust revisionism.

'Our aim is, first of all, to find out how much historians know about Holocaust revisionism, and then, second, whether their views are supported by an actual encounters with revisionism - or whether they're simply based on prejudice.' More>>

THEY BURNED THE WRONG BOOK

Anne Frank diary burning sparks outrage in Germany

By Dave Graham

July 7, 2006

BERLIN (Reuters) - The ceremonial burning of the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank by far-right extremists in eastern Germany was condemned by the German government on Friday amid calls to intensify efforts to stamp out neo-Nazi activity.

"This act was beneath contempt and could scarcely have been more primitive," the German Interior Ministry said in a statement to Reuters. More>>

HOLOCAUST COPY-WRITE

THE FORWARD / 07 July 2006
Iowa Pol: I Said Holocaust, Not the Holocaust

By Ori Nir


WASHINGTON — A Republican congressman from Iowa alleges that the Anti-Defamation League defamed him over claims that he compared illegal immigrants to Nazis.

The ADL has been highly critical of a May 27 speech delivered by Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, in which he argued that illegal immigrants have killed many more Americans since September 11, 2001, than were killed in the Al Qaeda attacks that day. King, who was speaking to a gathering of anti-immigration activists in Las Vegas, warned that "we have a slow motion holocaust on our hands."

In response, the ADL's director, Abraham Foxman, sent King a June 6 letter arguing that it was "inappropriate and insensitive" for him "to suggest that the conduct of undocumented individuals in America in any way resembles the systematic, genocidal actions taken by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party."

King, who has referred to Senator Joe McCarthy as a "great American hero," countered that he used the word "holocaust" in a generic sense, meaning a great destruction, and that he was in no way referring to World War II."
More...

Challenging Peter Singer's views on Holocaust deniers

Australian Jewish News
04 July 2006

At the Sydney Writers’ Festival last month, philosopher and ethicist Professor Peter Singer spoke about “What makes a civil society” and said that Holocaust-denier David Irving should not be censored, despite his absurd views. MELINDA JONES, research director of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission [how much more do we need to know?], takes issue with Professor Singer.

Professor Peter Singer may be one of the world’s greatest philosophers, but on the issue of Holocaust denial he has simply got it wrong. Law constraining freedom of speech are consistent with a civil society, without detracting from the fundamental importance of the principle of free speech for a democratic society. [ ... ]

Holocaust deniers such as David Irving are powerful players who effectively silence the voices of the less powerful, by encouraging hatred and by legitimising antisemitism. The market place on its own cannot change this imbalance of power, so we need law. Silencing holocaust deniers increases the net amount of free speech by emboldening those who would be and are targets of racial hatred. More

THE FREEDOM TO RIDICULE--WHAT?

Council for Secular Humanism
03 July 2006

The Freedom to Ridicule Religion-and Deny the Holocaust
Peter Singer

Freedom of speech is important, and it must include the freedom to say what everyone else believes to be false, and even what many people take to be offensive. Religion remains a major obstacle to basic reforms that reduce unnecessary suffering. Think of issues like contraception, abortion, the status of women in society, the use of embryos for medical research, physician-assisted suicide, attitudes towards homosexuality, and the treatment of animals.

In each case, somewhere in the world, religious beliefs have been a barrier to changes that would make the world more sustainable, freer, and more humane.So, we must preserve our freedom to deny the existence of God and to criticize the teachings of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha, as reported in texts that billions of people regard as sacred. Since it is sometimes necessary to use a little humor to prick the membrane of sanctimonious piety that frequently surrounds religious teachings, freedom of expression must include the freedom to ridicule as well. More

ILLIBERAL EUROPE

Weekly Standard
10 April 2006

By Gerard Alexander

On February 20, an Austrian court sentenced the notorious British writer David Irving to three years in prison for denying in a 1989 speech that Auschwitz contained gas chambers. Many American observers had mixed reactions. They saw Irving as a loathsome anti-Semite but were uncomfortable with the thought of a person serving time behind bars for something he wrote or said, no matter how noxious.

Journalist Michael Barone probably spoke for more than a few when he said that he “shuddered” at the news of Irving’s imprisonment, “yet I can understand why Austria, like Germany, has laws that criminalize Holocaust denial and glorification of Nazism. History has its claims--heavy ones, in the cases of Germany and Austria.” In other words, criminalizing speech might not be the American way of doing business, but it’s understandably Austria and Germany’s way of dealing with their unique Nazi past. More

ISRAEL'S SICK JUDICIARY

The Jewish Press
Wedensday, June 28 2006

Plaut Verdict A Symptom Of Israel's Sick Judiciary
By: Allyson Rowen Taylor

In section 24 of said verdict Judge Naddaf [an Israeli-Arab woman] wrote the following, cited here verbatim and with no embellishment:

At times we are witness to the phenomenon in which some people “dare” to re-examine the Holocaust and its dimensions, from various aspects, whether it be the human, historic, scientific, political, etc., and where such people automatically are turned into objects for attack and accusations of being anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers, deserving of being called Judenrat or Jews for Hitler. More

THE WATCH DOGS OF WAR

Swans Commentary » swans.com

June 19, 2006

by Diana Johnstone


Memory or history?

The transformation of "memory" into a sacred cult silences dissent and prevents open-minded examination of recent events and their context. To understand the conflicts that tore apart Yugoslavia, there needs to be much more free inquiry, more information, more analysis. But all that would imply "revisionism." The ideological watch dogs are there to bark and snarl at any deviation, frightening the mass of conformists back into the sheepfold. More

A GRISLY BUSINESS IN AUSTRALIA

First it was the grisly business of the downward sprial of murders at Auschwitz, now the same grisly business is being forwarded with respect to the murders of the Aboriginal populations of Australia and Tasmainia. Where will this evil end?

THE AGE, AUSTRALIA

The man behind the history wars takes on Aunty
David Rood and Simon Mann
June 16, 2006

JUST when the history wars that have gripped the Australian academy seemed to be quietening, the Howard Government has rolled a fresh grenade into the debate. There could have been few greater acts of provocation than the appointment of historian Keith Windschuttle — so-called martyr of the right — to the ABC board.

Mr Windschuttle is charged with starting the history wars with his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which argues frontier warfare between Aborigines and colonial settler is a myth. He accuses historians — Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan among them — of inaccuracy and dishonesty. In the book he rejects suggestions that the history of settlers was one of genocide. He says that between 1801 and 1834, 187 Europeans were killed and 120 Aboriginals in Tasmania.

His critics have drawn the bow, aimed, and all but fired the arrow of historical revisionism. "This is a grisly business," wrote Melbourne University professor Stuart Macintyre. "The downward revision of deaths in the Holocaust is an industry that has brought censure on David Irving and the revisionist school". (More..)

INTERDISCIPLINARY HOLOCAUST HISTORY

(I have only perused this article but it looks pretty interesting. Mr. Aly may respect the work of Hilberg rather more than some, but we'll forgive him that. I met Hilberg briefly in Toronto when I appeared as a witness at one of Ernst Zundel's trials in the mid-1980s [when I get the date right I'll put it in here]. I was struck by Hilberg's response to my question about whether he supported the right of the State to prosecute a man for thought crimes. Hilberg asked me to repeat the question. When I did, he waved his hand in a dismissive manner and said: "Oh, I'm not interested in that." He may have meant that he was not interested in intellectual freedom in that moment, or with respect to Zundel, or with respect to revisionism generally. I'll never know.

The Logic of Horror

The time is ripe for a complete overhaul of the historical contextualisation of the Holocaust.

By Götz Aly

Die Zeit
1 June, 2006.
Translation: Nicholas Grindell

Historians, like journalists, ask their questions from a position in the present, but in the case of historians, these questions are directed backwards. Most history books quickly reach their sell-by date. Future generations will still be reading Goethe, Benn and Grass when Treitschke, Stürmer and Nipperdey are gathering dust. But Raul Hilberg's unwieldy three-volume work "The Destruction of the European Jews" will remain. The reason is simple: this book embodies the work of a man who has spent his entire life trying to see something that many of his contemporaries did not see and did not want to see. Hilberg does not judge, he reconstructs political processes. (Read more)

GERMAN MAGAZINE DEFIES HOLOCAUST HATE LAWS

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher

The German magazine Der Spiegel has landed a major coup in its latest edition not for doing a rare exclusive interview with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, but for allowing him to express views which would have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence had they been stated by a German national. It is not clear whether this was the intention of Der Spiegel, which in an editorial distanced itself from the remarks by the Iranian president, but the publication will have been as decisive a step towards scrapping the thought crime laws dating from the period of allied occupation as the publication of "Crabwalk" by the famous German author Günther Grass a few years ago. (Read more)