So, as it happened, a few hours before his trial, renowned British historian David Irving retracted today, his denial of the Holocaust.
For those who don't know him, Irving was arrested in Australia under a warrant issued in 1989 for denying the Holocaust in remarks 17 years ago. Some people say tha he risks a 1-10 year prison sentence for denying the Holocaust under Austrian law. Yes!! This was his sole crime..believe me!!
Just to recap a bit, the commonly used figure for the number of Jewish victims is six million. However, this figure is questioned by some historians and intellectuals, chiefly French author Roger Garaudy.
Irving's book, Hitler's War, sparked widespread world controversy when published in 1977 for saying that the Nazi German ruler did not know about the mass killings of Jews until 1943 and that he never ordered the Holocaust. In 2000, the British historian lost a high-profile libel case in London against US historian Deborah Lipstadt, who had called him a "Holocaust denier, anti-Semitic and racist."
Irving's retraction, is however seen as a desperate attempt to avoid a jail sentence.
In another case of 2003, a French court jailed Jean Plantin, editor of a magazine called Akribeia, for publishing works that called into question the scope of the Holocaust. Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Danish mass-circulation Jyllands Posten, which published cartoons mocking Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), was sent on an indefinite leave one day after he told CNN he would consider publishing Holocaust cartoons.
So what does this all mean? Where is the much talked about freedom of speech.
The world has come be "stinking in gutters of hypocrisy" in the last decade.
Or maybe, we now have a quite "close up" view of it.
