Three free speech stories in the BBC News and Guardian websites caught my eye this morning. Indeed, the first two were almost side by side on both sites. In the first, there is widespread dismay at the arrest of a British school teacher in the Sudan accused of insulting Islam’s Prophet, after she allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad (BBC | Guardian). In the second, protests are expected later outside the Oxford Union (see also wikipedia) when Nick Griffin (see also wikipedia), Chairman of the British National Party, and David Irving (see also BBC | Holocaust History | Kizkor | wikipedia), Holocaust denier, arrive for a forum on The Limits of Free Speech (BBC | Guardian).

There is an inconsistency here; and the incongruous but serendipitous placement of these two stories side by side demonstrates it: we cannot be outraged both at the arrest of the teacher and at the speech of Nick Griffin and David Irving. Society cannot have it both ways, it is not free to pick and choose which speech to support. Those in favour of speech must afford it both to the teacher and to Griffin and Irving. Of course, those against speech would deny it both to the teacher and to Griffin and Irving. But if the arrest of the teacher doesn’t illustrate the absurdity of that position, the third story on the BBC and Guardian websites that caught my eye this morning graphically illustrates the danger of repressing disfavoured speech: it all too easily and rapidly leads to totalitarianism. Former world chess champion and Russian opposition figure Garry Kasparov has been jailed for five days, as he and other opposition figures were detained during rallies organised by Kasparov’s Other Russia coalition (BBC | Guardian).

Indeed, the controversy over these three otherwise unrelated events demonstrates the importance of the process of free speech. Read the rest of this entry »

My colleagues in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, the Herzog Centre for Jewish and Near Eastern Religion, Trinity College Dublin, and the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland (HETI) will host their annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture for 2007 on Thursday, 25 October 2007 at 7:30pm in the Emmet Theatre (Room 2037) of the Arts Building (map here), Trinity College Dublin; and all are welcome to attend.

The speaker will be Professor Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland (pictured left), and he will speak on the topic of




The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda in Germany and the Middle East during World War Two and the Holocaust




Jeffrey Herf is Professor of History at the University of Maryland and currently a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has published extensively on the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and on West and East Germany during the Cold War; and his most recent book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006) (cover pictured left) examines the Nazi regime’s anti-semitism and its public defense of a policy of “exterminating” Europe’s Jews.




Further details are available from Prof John Horne, Department of History, TCD; Dr Zuleika Rodgers, Herzog Centre, TCD; and Lynn Jackson, (HETI).

Kevin Jon Heller cuts right to the heart of what will happen now that the EU Criminalizes Racist and Xenophobic Speech:

The real problem with the Framework’s approach to racist and xenophobic speech is the profoundly chilling effect it will almost certainly have on such speakers. What rational artist or filmmaker will risk pushing the ideological envelope if she knows that the criminality of her speech depends not on her intent but on the (unpredictable) reactions of others to it?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust will be holding its second annual conference on Monday 30th April at the Town Hall in Leeds, England (conference details pdf here). No doubt there will be much discussion of the merits of legislation against holocaust denial. The German proposal in January to have the EU make holocuast denial a criminal offence as a matter of EU law (blogged here by me, and with great insight by Section 14 and Liberal England) was debated in the Parliament in March, and was adopted by the Council of Ministers yesterday Read the rest of this entry »

The Irish Times today carries a report by Jamie Smyth that Germany has proposed an EU ban on holocaust denial and – perhaps – the dissemination of xenophobic statements that could incite violence or hatred. Germany, in common with several other EU states, including France, Belgium and Austria (as David Irving found out), has holocaust denial legislation on its statute books, and legislation against incitement to racial hatred is to be found in countries like Ireland and the UK.

We have been here before (Smyth says that an earlier attempt by Germany in 2004 to get this type of law passed by the Council of Ministers foundered), and this initiative may similarly come to naught. It should. Read the rest of this entry »