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LONDON - Police, protesters and free speech advocates descended on Britain's famed Oxford University where convicted Holocaust denier David Irving was due to speak in a debate on freedom of expression.
Riot police manned the approach to the Oxford Union, a 184-year-old debating society in the centre of Oxford, where hundreds of demonstrators, including Muslim and Jewish students, turned out to protest against the evening event.
Irving has been invited to speak along with Nick Griffin, the leader of the far-right British National Party, whose anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views have sparked heated argument in the past. Four others will debate against them.
Irving, a 69-year-old historian, has written 30 books, several of which defend Hitler and deny the Holocaust - the systematic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis.
Irving, who served a jail sentence in Austria in 2006 for glorifying the Nazi Party, has been branded anti-Semitic and a racist by a British judge.
Politicians have lined up to condemn the union for staging the debate, saying the student organisation is giving a platform to extremism partly in an effort to attract attention.
One Conservative politician has resigned his life membership of the union, and several prominent people have cancelled engagements to speak in future debates.
Oxford Union President Luke Tryl has defended the decision to invite Griffin and Irving saying the best way to counter extremism is to defeat it intellectually in debate.
"These people are not being given a platform to extol their views but are coming to talk about the limits of free speech," he wrote in a letter to union members who had expressed concern.
"It is my belief that pushing the views of these people underground achieves nothing ... Stopping them speaking only allows them to become free speech martyrs."
Britain's interior minister, Jacqui Smith, herself an Oxford graduate, stopped short of condemning the debate, but said that Irving's and Griffin's words would be closely watched, saying there was legislation that should prevent them "overstepping".
"The Oxford Union society is, of course, a debating society," she told parliament when asked for her opinion.
"I think it is up to them to make their own decisions but I completely deplore the views and attitudes of those who will be speaking there in this debate.
"I'm pleased to say during the three years I was at Oxford University I never actually even attended the Oxford Union society."
- REUTERS
