Holocaust denier kicked out of book fair
The International Herald Tribune reports that last Friday, organizers of the Warsaw International Book Fair gave the boot to British author David Irving, who was sentenced to a three-year prison term in Austria in February 2006 for breaking the country’s laws against “whoever grossly plays down, approves, or tries to excuse” the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes. (In December 2006, he was permitted to serve the last two years of his conviction on probation.)
Irving was to present his books at an event hosted by his publisher, Focal Point Publications, but organizer Grzegorz Guzowski said Irving was asked to leave once the event’s managers realized the content of his works.
“I told him his message was in violation of Polish law and that I would not allow him to deliver it at the book fair premises, and I asked him to leave,” Guzowski said.
“At first he refused and started shouting that there is no freedom of speech and that Poland is not a democratic country, but eventually he left,” he added.
According to the BBC (scroll down the article for the chart), Poland and Austria are two of 11 countries to have laws against Holocaust denial. Others include France, Germany, Israel, and Switzerland.
Irving’s books include 1977’s Hitler’s War, where he somehow argues that Hitler didn’t know about the Holocaust until 1943, and that the orders for the murder of millions of Jewish people didn’t come from the Fuhrer.
In 1992, Irving was banned from entering Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and in 2000 he was bankrupted by a libel case he lost to Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she called him a Holocaust denier.
