Editorial: Irving ought to be freed, and ignored

Austria for much of history has been a tolerant, cultivated centre of European thinking, writing and music. It bears, like other nations of central Europe, a sorry stain on that heritage during the second quarter of last century. No doubt it is in the hope of assuaging that stain that Austria holds Holocaust denial to be a crime, and this week an Austrian court sentenced the discredited British historian David Irving to three years in prison for the crime of speaking his mind.

It is hard to think of a worse moment for a liberal European state to undermine one of the principles of Western freedom. The fires are still burning in the Islamic world over the misuse of press freedom by European newspapers who ran gratuitously offensive cartoons.

The continuing protests are out of all proportion to the offence caused but they underline the fact that right now Muslim societies are in a mood to seize and nurture any grievance the West may give them. They will note that no Western critic of those newspaper cartoons ever suggested the errant editors be brought before a court, let alone sentenced to jail.

David Irving and those who similarly study the Holocaust pose a particular problem of free speech. However dubious their scholarship - and Irving's was thoroughly condemned by the British court that heard his libel case in 2000 - no subject of history should be immune from critical reconsideration. Yet the response of Jewish organisations everywhere to any questioning of the historical account leaves little doubt that it is as deeply offensive to them as any racial or religious slur could be.

If "Holocaust denial" was simply what the term suggests, it would pose no problem to publishers or university administrators. The death camps discovered at the collapse of Hitler's Germany are beyond denial. But Irving and his ilk deny they are deniers. They question evidential details of the generally accepted account and say they do not doubt the greater truth that a Holocaust happened.

Irving was charged under an Austrian law which declares it a crime to diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust. He pleaded guilty to the charges, which arise from a speech he made 17 years ago, and said he had been mistaken in one contention - there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Offensive as that claim must have been to all Jews who lost relatives in that way just two generations ago, it is not a jailing offence. It is an offence to be met with evidence, reasoning and a fair degree of contempt for the error.

The risk in over-reacting to any offence is to generate sympathy for the offender. That is what prolonged protests against the Danish cartoons are in danger of doing to sympathy for Muslim sensitivities in the West. And that is what the prison sentence has begun to do for Irving. His lawyer, who intends to appeal against the sentence, says Irving was getting 300 items of supporting mail a week even while he was in custody awaiting trial.

Offensive speech, which can encompass printed matter and television programmes, has become a subject of moment, mainly because of tensions within the Islamic world. Jihadists are in need of examples of Western antagonism to Islam for their own purposes and those who deliver needless offence play into their hands.

Governments and media in liberal democracies need to keep their heads, recognise all religious sensitivities and deal with them as consistently as is possible in free and competitive societies.

To imprison somebody for uttering sentiments that are, incidentally, heard commonly in Islamic countries at loggerheads with Israel, sends the wrong message to the Muslim world, quite apart from the offence it gives to our codes of free speech. Irving should be released, and ignored.