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Heaven On Earth
Holocaust-denial law: Violation of free speech (for British professor)
Ronald Dworkin, professor of law at University College London, writes that Muslims might have a point about the Holocaust:
Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons point out that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European convention on human rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.
Only an intellectual or a lawyer could twist their mind around to believe that publishing cartoons that are mildly mocking of Mohammed are the equivalent of denying the historically established fact that 6 million European Jews were rounded up from their homes and either slaughtered or worked to death. The former is making light of a religious fetish; the latter is a baseless slander against the actual genocide perpetrated against a recongized group.
Thanks for the pointer. Dworkin’s essay is one of the most robust and uncompromising defences of free speech I have come across in recent writings over the Danish cartoons affair. I read it with great pleasure!
[...] toon Scandal (Danoongate). It is a perfect example of moral equivalence. Much like our British commentator, whose respon [...]