A DANGEROUS ROAD TO GO DOWN

"Funny people, the Austrians. If you're Kurt Waldheim—a former Nazi military officer linked to a genocidal massacre during World War II—they elect you president. But if you're David Irving—a British author who claimed that there never was a Nazi genocide during World War II—they throw you in the slammer. On second thought, not funny at all. Austria disgraced itself when it elected Waldheim president in 1986, apparently unconcerned by the revelation that he had served in a German military unit responsible for mass murder in the Balkans and been listed after the war as a wanted criminal by the UN War Crimes Commission. In a very different way it disgraced itself again last week, when a Vienna court sentenced Irving, a racist and an anti-Semite, to three years in prison for denying that the Nazis annihilated 6 million European Jews... [A]s a matter of law and public policy, Irving's sentence is deplorable. The opinions he expressed are vile, and his arguments about the Holocaust—perhaps the most comprehensively researched and documented crime in history—are ludicrous. But governments have no business criminalizing opinions and arguments, not even those that are vile or ludicrous... [F]ree societies do not throw people in prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting historical lies."
—Jeff Jacoby