February 22, 2006

A matter of opinion?

There's a lot of stuff doing the rounds on the Irving business. Check out letters here and here. I'm not comfortable with holocaust denial being a crime, especially while other forms of genocide denial are perfectly legal. However, denying genocide as well documented as the holocaust ia not simply the expression of an opinion but the mis-statement of a fact: a lie in other words. We then need to ask, why lie? It's then that we are in the realm of incitement to racial hatred. The question then becomes, what should we do about incitement to racial hatred? And my answer is, I don't really know but in this instance I'm not going to be losing much sleep over it.

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