The David Irving Trial

In the course of the next few months, the British revisionist David Irving will go on trial in Austria. He faces up to 10 years in prison for denying the Holocaust. Michael Bach Henriksen, head of the cultural desk, says he should be acquitted in the name of freedom of expression. "There are obvious parallels between this trial and another controversial case, namely that of Orhan Pamuk in Turkey. Officially, the Turks never committed genocide resulting in the deaths of up to a million Armenians during the First World War. Pamuk questions this official version of history and says it was indeed genocide. He is entitled to defy the official version of history. And so is Irving. No matter how crazy or distorted his views are, he's entitled to express them. The only thing achieved by imprisoning those who deny the Holocaust is to make martyrs of extremist groups."

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