Holocaust denier awaits trial in Austria

Columnist Ben Macintyre calls upon Austria to release the revisionist British historian David Irving from a jail where he has been held since his arrest in November on charges of denying the Holocaust. "The trial of Irving, due to start next month, risks saving him from the intellectual oblivion he and his views so richly deserve. Before the Austrian police arrested him, he was a fringe academic addressing a group of loopy far-right radicals wearing silly hats in a basement in Vienna. Now there is a real danger that he will become a martyr for the extreme Right. (...) Let Irving go. He is a blip, a tiny spot beyond the outer edges of rational debate that has attracted unwarranted attention. He has a right to be wrong ; and once he is at liberty, we can all exercise our own inalienable right to ignore him."

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