To a certain extent I agree with Norm when he says.
Not that I'll be wasting any sympathy on him, but for Holocaust denial he should not be going to jail. Poisonous and untrue as it is, Holocaust denial is a form of opinion.
My problem is that I don't believe Irving's views on the Holocaust can de dismissed as simply 'a form of opinion'. What ever else he is he is not stupid - for the story that the ovens were built by the Allies after the war to be true, he knows that would involve a conspiracy of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people. He knows that not to be the case and his only motive for saying it nevertheless is that he is racist and an anti-semite - exactly as Judge Irving said.
The judge said said it appeared to him to be "incontrovertible" that Irving qualified as a Holocaust denier.
"Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms," he said.
To illustrate his point, the judge quoted comments by Mr Irving, including:
- his claim that "more people died in the back of Ted Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz"
- his "dismissal of the eyewitnesses en masse as liars or as suffering from a mental problem"
- his reference to an "Association of Auschwitz Survivors and Other Liars or 'Asshols' "
- the question he asked of Holocaust survivor Mrs Altman, as to how much money she had made from her concentration camp tattoo.
The judge said he also accepted the defendants' case that Mr Irving was anti-Semitic. "His words are directed against Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references to Semitic people, their characteristics and appearances," he said.
Racism and anti-semitism are not forms of opinion to Irving. He has willingly associated with all sorts of vile people over the years and supported actively racist activity. I'm not shedding any tears.
