'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.'

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 10 December 1948.

Hello Nikunj

To be accurate in the light of current events, that UN declaration needs to be rewritten. It should now read:

'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, except those with opinions that don't suit our agenda; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, unless we decide otherwise, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers, except where we decide otherwise.'

In the face of the gathering attack on freedom of expression many more people are beginning to see what I have been writing about in these newsletters over the last few weeks: we only have freedom of speech and view when everyone else enjoys the same rights. The freedom to agree is no freedom at all.

Charles Glass, writing in the UK Independent newspaper this week, recalls reporting on a student strike at the Robot Radical-dominated London School of Economics. Whenever a student spoke against the strike, he says, the crowd chanted ‘No free speech for fascists’. In the dumbo world of the cliché-ridden, slogan-chanting Left, it never occurs to them that the very idea of ‘no free speech for fascists’, is blatantly fascist. It is the most enormous example of Orwell’s doublethink, which I featured last week, in which two fundamentally contradictory views are held at the same time and both are believed to be true.

In an article headed ‘David Irving Should Be Protected By Free Speech Laws’, Glass writes:

‘So, get ready. I am about to defend the right, remember, the right, not the views, of David Irving, who today languishes in an Austrian holding cell for the crime of stating a view that most of us find disgusting. He has stated that Hitler knew nothing of the genocide of Europe's Jews. It is a crank outburst here, but a crime in Austria, Germany, Poland and France. Another anti-Semitic, and much more vicious, Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, awaits trial in Germany on a similar charge.

Irving is a historian of the Second World War, who has uncovered important Wehrmacht documents, but defended the Nazis. He supported Zundel in court, not his right to speak, but what Zundel actually said: that the Holocaust was a myth. This places them both beyond the realm of reasonable argument. Their errors could be demonstrated in open debate, as historians have done with Irving's work. Indeed, open debate, without fear of imprisonment and fines, helps to make an open society.’

Some may disagree with some of Glass’s analysis, not least because the all-encompassing smear of ‘Holocaust denier’, is so often used to describe those who question the scale, not the fact, of Jewish persecution by the Nazis. But his general point is spot on. If someone’s views are so obviously nonsense why throw them in jail and not simply demolish their claims in free and open debate? As I have said many times before, I always get more interested in a subject when someone is telling me what I can and can’t hear about it. The alarm bells do ring on all such occasions.

In Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and some other European countries, it is, as in Israel, a crime to publicly dispute the official version of Holocaust history. David Irving and Ernst Zundel are currently in jail for their views and among others fined, imprisoned, or forced into exile for ‘Holocaust denial’ are Robert Faurisson and Roger Garaudy in France, Siegfried Verbeke in Belgium, Juergen Graf and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz in Switzerland, and Guenter Deckert, Hans Schmidt and Fredrick Toben in Germany. German citizen Germar Rudolf was deported from Chicago to Germany, where he faces imprisonment for questioning the Holocaust.

So this week, in the interests of free speech and your right to make your own decisions on what to believe, I have put together a debate you are not allowed to have elsewhere without the goons in uniform knocking on your door. Please note: I am not saying which side of the debate is nearer the truth, merely offering the opportunity for you to make up your own mind. If we want a free society then we have to live it.

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